‘Look on my works ye mighty…’: Iconoclasm, education and the fate of statues

In pursuit of an alternative perspective on the so-called ‘statues controversy’, this essay brings recent interpretations enduring ‘power’, ‘gaze’ and ‘magic’ statues into alignment with critical histories iconoclasm, sacred secular, New Materialist accounts our multiple entanglements object inherited monuments. Opening a close reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's renowned 1818 sonnet, ‘Ozymandias’, applies resultant theoretical synthesis to argue for general restraint popular iconoclastic demolitionary acts largely caution against mimetic violence statue removal in favour fresh, educative iconotropic ways ‘making legible’, ‘re-reading’, statues, pedestals, inscriptions their diverse contexts past present.