Broken art, enduring beauty

Up close, art history is one giant accident. Lost arms, snapped noses, headless bodies, bodiless heads, statues bombed, sunken, vandalised, censored, recycled. Far from classical perfection, we have survived thanks to the pieces. The power of the fragment Enter Broken. The Power of the Fragment, at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence until 24 January 2027— featuring over eighty works spanning from ancient Egypt to contemporary art, organised in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where the exhibition will travel from 3 March to 27 June 2027. The premise, simple yet far from harmless, is that a broken artwork is not necessarily a diminished one. Sometimes, loss adds meaning. Akhenaten’s nose and lips The Japanese have understood this for centuries through kintsugi, the technique of repairing broken ceramics by accentuating their fractures with lacquer and gold dust rather than hiding them. The crack is not erased; it becomes the object's most precious element. It is a philosophy that Broken seams to bring into the realm of art history. One need look no further than the nose and lips of Akhenaten, circa 1350 BC, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: eight centimetres of limestone are enough to evoke a pharaoh better than many intact colossi. The crack is not erased; it becomes the object's most precious element. It is a philosophy that Broken seams to bring into the realm of art history. A little further along, the Livorno Torso, a bronze from the 1st century BC, demonstrates that the absence of head and arms can paradoxically become a presence. And the remains of Giovanni Pisano’s Funerary Monument to Margaret of Brabant (1312–14) open the exhibition, reminding us that fragments compel viewers to do something increasingly rare today: imagine what is missing. Wildt’s bust of Mussolini Then things turn political. Because not everything that breaks does so by accident. The foot of the equestrian statue of Louis XIV and the hand of Louis XV survived the vandalism of the French Revolution; a monumental Aztec Coatlicue was smashed to pieces following the Spanish conquest. Most striking of all is Adolfo Wildt’s Dux, a 1923 bust of Mussolini riddled with bullet holes from partisan fire following Liberation. Here, damage ceases to be an unfortunate consequence of an artwork’s history and becomes part of the artwork itself: restoring it to the point of erasure would mean, in a sense, erasing history as well. Even nature can be a rather aggressive critic. The Crouching Youth, recovered from the Antikythera shipwreck in 1900, was sculpted twice: first by man, then by two millennia of seawater. Meanwhile, the 1966 Florence flood left its own scars on a Christ Carrying the Cross housed in the Museo di San Marco. Michelangelo’s language The most compelling shift happens when artists stop suffering rupture and start seeking it. Michelangelo grasped that the unfinished (non finito) could become a language; Rodin discarded without remorse. His Walking Man (L'Homme qui marche) is a headless, armless figure that—a detail by no means secondary—continues to walk perfectly. From there, the incomplete body passes through Medardo Rosso, Giacometti, and Louise Bourgeois, all the way to Robert Gober. Francesco Vezzoli, with The Swan (2023), further complicates the game: he takes a 2nd-century Roman male head and grafts it onto a late-Renaissance female bust. Archaeology, gender, appropriation, and a taste for historical fakery all come together in a single body body. Finally, in the Renaissance courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, Mark Manders unveils a new site-specific installation created especially for the show. Turning destruction into memory Yet the true "fracture" — pun intended — of Broken lies elsewhere: the fragment changes meaning depending on who looks at it and when. What one generation considers a mutilation, the next may view as a testament; what stems from destruction can transform into memory, and a void can ultimately inspire more imagination than a perfectly finished form. The exhibition thus suggests that conservation does not necessarily mean turning back the clock. Sometimes, the wound must remain visible, because that is precisely where history decided to write its caption. Ultimately, Broken recounts five thousand years of art through what is missing. A curiously contemporary concept in an age obsessed with restoration, retouching, filters, and the eternal promise of returning "as good as new." Artworks, fortunately, understood long before we did that being whole is overrated. This article was reviewed by an external translation partner