On 10 March 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson entered the National Gallery in London and attacked Diego Velazquez's Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver. The action followed the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the previous day and was framed by Richardson as a political protest against the treatment of women activists. The painting, Velazquez's only surviving female nude and one of the National Gallery's most famous works, received seven slashes, especially around Venus's shoulders and back. The event turned a canonical Old Master painting into a flashpoint for debates about museum security, political iconoclasm, the female nude, spectatorship, and the press's tendency to describe damage to painted bodies in terms of bodily violence.
The attack became one of the defining examples of modern political vandalism directed at a museum masterpiece.
