Thanks to the increasing narrowness of search results produced by Google and friends, i have had to resort to Wikipedia (most other websites were excluded including superior historical resources.) The original article is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeldenstorm

I despise Wikipedia for various reasons (amateurish writing, tendentiousness, being badly run, pretending to be something it is not and so on)... However I think this is worth reproducing here. Relevance? The LDS has long hero worshiped this part of Protestant heritage. The lines indicate where I have removed content. I provide a link to the original above. Those removing these images would have often seen them as corrupt, pagan, Satanic or representing an undesirable past.

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Beeldenstorm in Dutch (roughly "image storm" or "statue storm"), and Bildersturm in German ("image/statue storm") are terms used for outbreaks of destruction of religious images that occurred in Europe in the 16th century, known in English as the Great Iconoclasm or Iconoclastic Fury. During these spates of iconoclasm, Catholic art and many forms of church fittings and decoration were destroyed in unofficial or mob actions by Calvinist Protestant crowds as part of the Protestant Reformation.[2][3] Most of the destruction was of art in churches and public places.[4]

The Dutch term usually specifically refers to the wave of disorderly attacks in the summer of 1566 that spread rapidly through the Low Countries from south to north. Similar outbreaks of iconoclasm took place in other parts of Europe, especially in Switzerland and the Holy Roman Empire in the period between 1522 and 1566, notably Zürich (in 1523), Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), and Augsburg (1537).[5]

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Over 400 churches were attacked in Flanders alone.[19]

The eye-witness Richard Clough, a Welsh Protestant merchant then in Antwerp, saw: "all the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of thing left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed, being done after such order and by so few folks that it is to be marvelled at."

The Church of Our Lady in Antwerp, later made the cathedral (illustrated at top): "looked like a hell, with above 10,000 torches burning, and such a noise as if heaven and earth had got together, with falling of images and beating down of costly works, such sort that the spoil was so great that a man could not well pass through the church. So that in fine [short], I cannot write you in x sheets of paper the strange sight I saw there, organs and all destroyed."[20][21]

Nicolas Sander, an English Catholic exile who was a professor of theology at Louvain, described the destruction in the same church:

... "these fresh followers of this new preaching threw down the graven [sculpted] and defaced the painted images, not only of Our Lady but of all others in the town. They tore the curtains, dashed in pieces the carved work of brass and stone, brake the altars, spoilt the clothes and corporesses, wrested the irons, conveyed away or brake the chalices and vestiments, pulled up the brass of the gravestones, not sparing the glass and seats which were made about the pillars of the church for men to sit in. ... the Blessed Sacrament of the altar ... they trod under their feet and (horrible it is to say!) shed their stinking piss upon it ... these false bretheren burned and rent not only all kind of Church books, but, moreover, destroyed whole libraries of books of all sciences and tongues, yea the Holy Scriptures and the ancient fathers, and tore in pieces the maps and charts of the descriptions of countries"

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The most important works of several painters, especially those like Pieter Aertsen who worked in Antwerp,[44] were all destroyed, leading to a somewhat distorted view of the art history of the period

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