Florence exhibition celebrates the beauty of art that has been broken into pieces
The show at Palazzo Strozzi—a collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC—focuses on damaged works spanning 4,500 years
In a unique exhibition currently on display in Florence, the beauty of art that has been broken into pieces is celebrated. Curated by Claude Douglas Dickerson, former curator at the National Gallery of Art, and Andrew Sears, the gallery's assistant curator of northern European paintings, "Broken" spans over 4,500 years of global history.
The 80 works featured in the exhibition include ancient artifacts, modern sculptures, and contemporary pieces. Some of the pieces were destroyed due to iconoclasm, vandalism, wars, or natural disasters, while others were created to appear fragmented. The exhibition serves as a lens to examine larger historical and cultural questions, such as the reasons behind the destruction of images and monuments, and the inspiration that fragmentation has provided to artists.
Major loans from institutions around the world are on display, including a fragment of a right hand from Rome’s Capitoline Museums, associated with Constantine the Great, and a Mesoamerican figure believed to have been deliberately broken during a ritual killing. Other highlights include Michelangelo’s terracotta Model of a Nude Woman, which new research suggests may have been intentionally created incomplete.
The curators faced the challenge of deciding which objects to display, but the Florence presentation includes a section dedicated to the city’s devastating 1966 flood, which killed 35 people and damaged countless works of art. The exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in March 2027.
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