Today's Word "Iconoclast"
Published in Vocabulary
iconoclast \eye-KAHN-eh-klaest\ (noun) - Someone who attacks or violates cherished beliefs and institutions; someone who destroys sacred images.
"Igor Stravinsky was an iconoclastic composer and Pablo Picasso, an artistic iconoclast, as both broke cherished ideals of what art and music were supposed to be in order to blaze new trails."
From Medieval Greek "eikonoklasts" based on eikon, "image, picture," and klasts, "breaker" from klan "to break." The original iconoclast was Byzantine Emperor Leo III, who prohibited religious images (icons) in Greece from 726 on the grounds they had become idols, worshipped for their magical powers. Empress Theodora lifted the ban in 843. Countless works of religious art were destroyed in the intervening century. Iconoclasm reared its head again during the Protestant Reformation when images were again taken to be idolatrous and were once again destroyed
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