The recent assault on the Mona Lisa with the unlikely weapon of a teacup raises an intriguing question: Why do people attack art? It happens more frequently than you might imagine. There’s a long list of masterpieces by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Picasso and others that have been molested.
Mona Lisa Teacup Attack Joins Loony Tradition of Defiling Art - Bloomberg.com
Here’s my favorite part of the article, a bit further down:
“Admittedly, the man who threw acid over Rubens’s “Fall of the Rebel Angels” at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, in 1959 specifically denied that he was insane. On the contrary, he felt he had an extremely important message for mankind…However, the nebulousness of his philosophical revelation - - that “variety continuously produces variety” — and the other means he considered for publicizing it (committing suicide, and/or coloring Lake Constance with dye) strongly suggest that, rather than being a “misunderstood genius” as he claimed, he was in reality as mad as a biscuit.”
Source: bloomberg.com
