DAMNATIO MEMORIAE, Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory” and referring to the removal of a “corrupt” figure from historical accounts. This method of erasure is typically enacted against those perceived to have brought dishonor to a ruling body. Practices include destroying objects bearing the figure’s likeness, banning their writing or other work, and rewriting history to exclude the offending individual. While damnatio memoriae appears to be motivated by an intent to remove an individual from collective memory, contemporary critics contend that the actual intent is not to erase the individual but to shroud him or her in eternal disgrace.
Despite its Latinity, the term was not coined until 1689, in Germany, but the practice it describes existed throughout the ancient world and continues into the present. Ancient Egyptians conducted damnatio memoriae campaigns against such pharaohs as Akhenaten and Tutankhamun by damaging their tombs and eroding the faces of statues bearing their likenesses. Similar practices have been identified in Mesopotamia and ancient Greece.
In the Roman Empire damnatio memoriae was a serious punishment meted out to emperors who had posthumously fallen out of favor. A subsequent ruler or governing body could have a predecessor’s property seized and everything bearing his name or perpetuating his memory destroyed or disfigured. Heavily damaged imperial portraits and reliefs testify to the prevalence of the practice; in all, more than thirty emperors had their names removed from monuments, among them Caligula, Nero, and Commodus.
During the Middle Ages it was not unusual for heresiarchs—the founders of heretical doctrines—to have their memory condemned. The fourteenth-century dissident Catholic theologian John Wycliffe was posthumously declared a heretic in 1415, for example, and his writings were banned, his remains removed from church grounds and burned, and his followers persecuted.
In the modern era the practice of damnatio memoriae has lived on in politically repressive regimes such as Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and present-day China and North Korea. During his nineteen-year reign Stalin routinely had group photographs and paintings of executed dissenters altered in order to erase any visual representation of the offender, and after having his rival Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico in 1940, Stalin banned his work and had him written out of Soviet history altogether. And in China the name Zhao Ziyang, general secretary of the Communist Party from 1987 to 1989, was removed from official accounts and became taboo after he voiced support for the Tiananmen Square protests while in office and was subsequently placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, since his death in 2005 Zhao has become something of a folk hero in China.
In Arcangelo Sassino’s installation “Damnatio Memoriae” (2016), a male torso made of white marble was slowly ground to dust by a steel machine sander. Sassino showed the work at the Galerie Rolando Anselmi in Berlin, where it took four months for the bust to disappear.