Albrecht Durer “Mary as Grieving Mother,” “Mourning of Christ,” and “The Paumgartner Altar” / sulfuric acid

(In 1988, a 51-year-old homeless man walked into the Alte Pinakothek Museum in Munich and sprayed these works with sulfuric acid contained in a champagne bottle. He wasn’t caught until a group of school children came into the gallery and one of the students cried out for him to stop. He did, setting down the bottle and then finding a guard to explain what happened.

The man later said he’d attacked the painting “out of revenge,” because of deductions that had been made from his pension to pay for similar attacks he had made on paintings in Düsseldorf and Hamburg. The man also described himself as “psychologically disturbed.”)