A New Exhibition Spotlights 4,500 Years of Broken, Shot-Up and Degraded Artworks to Explore the ‘Power of the Fragment’

Detached hands, split lips and headless bodies are on display in Florence. They’re the fractured artworks of “Broken: The Power of the Fragment,” an exhibition showing at the Palazzo Strozzi before it travels to the National Gallery of Art next year. The exhibition includes more than 80 artifacts from the world over, spanning 4,500 years—all of them incomplete.

Its curators, the National Gallery of Art’s C. Dickerson III and Andrew Sears, wished to examine the circumstances of the pieces’ destruction or fragmentary creation, per a statement. They also focused on the observable beauty of a piece separate from the whole.

The Palazzo Strozzi and the National Gallery of Art previously collaborated on a 2015 exhibition of Hellenistic bronzes and a 2019 show dedicated to the Italian sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. A featured artifact is the Nose and Lips of Akhenaten, a limestone fragment from a bust of an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled in the 14th century B.C.E. The small work features only Akhenaten’s straight, thin nose and lips, which are “at once both stern and sensuous, almost uncomfortably kissable,” per the Guardian.

It’s featured in the exhibition’s “evocative power of the fragment” section, which also contains heads from statues more than 2,000 years old, on loan from museums in Italy and Greece, and part of an eighth-century bronze Buddhist sculpture from Vietnam. The exhibition goes on to highlight historical reasons for the damage of art, both purposeful and accidental: politics and religion, war and colonialism, natural disasters. At the center of the gallery is a leg from a bronze equestrian statue of a Greek king, which once stood in Athens’ Agora.

The statue was toppled and discarded in 200 B.C.E. Italian partisans shot the statue after their country was liberated from Mussolini’s tyranny in 1945. Some of the exhibition’s pieces were damaged by colonists and looters looking for things to sell, like a piece of an Egyptian sarcophagus’s carved face, which tomb raiders may have stolen during Antiquity.

Others, like a 3,000-year-old neo-Hittite sculpture of a woman excavated in Syria, were destroyed by bombs during World War II. (The neo-Hittite statue was pieced back together in the 2000s: Visitors can see the mortar between her hundreds of fragments.) Finally, many of the artifacts were damaged by the elements: The ocean had its way with a first-century-B.C.E. sculpture that sank inside an ancient Greek trading vessel, and a 14th-century Tuscan sculpture of Christ was marred in Florence’s 1966 floods. The exhibition finishes with an ode to the cultural power of “missing” pieces, highlighting sculptures whose fragmentation is essential to their character—either by design or by accident. One example is a hand with a pointing finger, associated with the fourth-century-C.E.