Attacked ... Portrait of Samuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Photograph: PA/NPG
Sir Joshua Reynolds has finally made it into the super-league of artists. The 18th-century painter of portraits and histories, founder president of the Royal Academy and author of the Seven Discourses on Art has never been my idea of an artist to either love or hate. Yet now he has joined a more select company, for a grotesque reason.
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Velazquez ... all the greatest geniuses have at some time fallen prey to that strange minority of museum visitors who come armed not with a guidebook but acid, knife or gun. Now, a man has been charged with taking a hammer to Reynolds's painting of Samuel Johnson in London's National Portrait Gallery.
Art vandalism's psychoanalytical origins are often sadly explicit. In the attacks on works by Leonardo and Michelangelo, men conducted brutal assaults on two of European art's supreme images of motherhood, in Leonardo's Burlington Cartoon and Michelangelo's Pieta. But Joshua Reynolds? Samuel Johnson? Where's the source of obsession here? Are we talking a nutcase with a PhD in 18th-century cultural studies? An embittered dictionary compiler? Perhaps, come to think of it, the severe moral figure of Johnson might be someone's father figure. Or perhaps this was a completely arbitrary assault, which had no meaning and no direction - in the end all such attacks on art are pathetic episodes.
Forgive any levity. Reynolds may not be Michelangelo but he is part of the flow of culture - one of those artists who sustain civilisation by communicating ideas: EH Gombrich captured the deeply civilised nature of Reynolds in an essay on his painting Three Ladies Adoring a Term of Hymen. Attacking art, destroying culture, is barbarism, it doesn't matter if it is motivated by religion or mental illness, and no work of art is less deserving of protection than others. I profoundly hope the Reynolds can be restored.
