To feel the the violence of the Protestant Reformation, one has to look at the scarred and broken statuary in Europe's medieval churches. Determined to destroy Roman Catholic imagery, iconoclasts in England went on a frenzy of destruction that lasted from 1536 to the death of Oliver Cromwell more than a century later.

“Their vandalism,” the art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote in The History of British Art, “was evangelism.” They hacked off the faces, heads and noses of saints. They smashed stained glass, built bonfires of statues of the Virgin and slashed paintings. The scholar Lawrence Stone once said that the art historian of Britain's medieval period was a “palaeontologist, who from a jawbone, two vertebrae, a rib and a femur contrives to reconstruct the skeleton of some long- extinct creature and endow it with flesh”.

A campaign, launched this week, seeks to memorialise the destruction of such lost treasures. The Art and Reconciliation Trust (ART), a group devoted to raising awareness of the dangers of iconoclasm, is planning a bronze statue commemorating the medieval shrines attacked during the English Reformation.

The group was born of a prayer pilgrimage that began five years ago. A group of Anglicans and Catholics offered prayers at the sites of the 84 shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary, destroyed in 1538. A member, Frances Scarr, suggested a commemorative statue of the Virgin, which ART hopes to erect in Chelsea, site of a huge bonfire of statues of the Virgin in 1538. Scarr enlisted the artist Paul Day, whose works include the 2002 Battle of Britain monument and The Meeting Place at St Pancras station, London.

Day's design - for which ART has launched a fundraising appeal of £1,250,000 - is a triptych, with the Virgin and Child on a ruined modern street. The side panels show scenes of iconoclasts mocking an image of Christ on the Cross, and destroying statues. They are thuggish - one wears skinhead-style boots and sneers as he heaves a mallet - but there is a nod to possible reconciliation: one contrite iconoclast cradles a decapitated head of the Virgin.

The monument, says Day, should not merely commemorate the schisms of Britain's Christian past, but should also evoke the horrors of modern iconoclasm. “Even today, notably in Iraq, Afghanistan and Tibet, images and sacred places are defiled and destroyed, not in a programme of reform, but to intimidate and break the spirit of communities for political dominance,” he said at the launch of the ART appeal.

The iconoclastic impulse runs deep in the three major faiths. Jewish traditions heed the Old Testament's cautions against idolatry: Moses destroyed the Golden Calf and received the Ten Commandments, the second of which bans making graven images. Islam's discouragement of figurative art stems from the Koran's criticism of idolators as those who would assign partners to God.

The destruction of symbolic objects of ancient regimes is a linchpin of revolutions. The felling of statues of Stalin signalled the Hungarian revolution in 1956; statues of Lenin were destroyed across post-Soviet Russia; the famous shots of the fall of Saddam Hussein monuments in 2003 - all were passion plays of political iconoclasm, popular acknowledgements of changes in political orders.

Sustained campaigns of iconoclasm, such as China's destruction of more than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries during its Cultural Revolution, are attempts to foment revolution through destruction. The most infamous instance of 21st-century iconoclasm, the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taleban in 2001, sprang from a strict interpretation of Islamic tenets. But it was also used to make a political point, both to Bamiyan's Hazaras, whom the Taleban hoped to repress, and to the international community. The world was quick to rally to restore the statues but, Taleban spokesmen noted, less so to give funds for starving Afghan children. “All we are breaking,” said the Taleban leader, Mullah Muhammed Omar, “are stones.”

That was disingenuous. Iconoclasts well know the power of religious symbols. Otherwise, why bother to ban or destroy? As Day says, trashing sacred art can foreshadow attempts to wipe out the community it helps to create: “It is a very short step between acts of iconoclasm and genocide,” he says. “The Nazis started by burning books and destroying art, and ended up by killing people.”

The current wave of iconoclastic fervour in Saudi Arabia coincides with the kingdom's cautious opening to global economic forces and the Islamic world's struggle between progressives and traditionalists. The US magazine The New Republic recently reported on the destruction of early Islamic sites in Mecca. A house owned by the Prophet Muhammad was recently flattened to make way for, among other things, a public lavatory. A cash machine stands on the site of an ancient mosque. Much of the destruction was sanctioned by Wahhabi theologians. A 1994 fatwa from Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, then Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority, ruled against worshipping buildings on the ground that it leads to polytheism. The New Republic cites a pamphlet published last year by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, announcing that the green dome on the Prophet's Mosque, burial site of Muhammad and two caliphs, “shall be demolished, and the three graves flattened”.

The campaign to raze Meccan monuments and the drive to destroy people in US skyscrapers or European trains may have different motives, but they share intolerance, a sentiment that terrorists and iconoclasts have in common. The ART campaign is starting with an attempt to repair historic vandalism but it will surely confront contemporary vandals as well.

www.artandreconciliation.org