Idiots at the museum (and more): 10 works damaged by visitors' stupidity

There is not only the Austrian tourist who, last Friday, damaged a foot of Antonio Canova’s Paolina Borghese at the Possagno Gipsoteca. The stupidity of those who want to take pictures of themselves in the most improbable poses, or who have the nice idea of taking home, as souvenirs, fragments of ancient walls, or who deface works of the past, is a disease that is widespread all over the world and never goes out of fashion. Italy is particularly affected, but abroad is no joke either. So let’s take a look at a roundup of people whose idiotic behavior has caused damage to works of art.

1. Milan, 2014. A student destroys one of the works in the Brera courtyard.
The sculpture, located in the courtyard of the Brera Academy in Milan, depicts a drunken Faun, and the student who, in 2014, decides to climb on it in an attempt to take a picture probably shouldn’t have been very sober either. However, the delicate 19th-century plaster statue, a copy of a Greek original, cannot support the idiot’s weight, and his left leg falls to pieces.

The statue in the Brera courtyard after the student’s stunt

2. Cremona, 2015. For a selfie they damage one of the symbols of the city.
The statue of the Two Hercules is one of Cremona’s symbols: the mythological hero is depicted twice, seen frontally and from the back, while holding the city’s coat of arms. The eighteenth-century work, which has stood under the portico of the Loggia dei Militi since 1962, was damaged at night in 2015 by two young men who, around 1:30 a.m., grabbed onto it to take a selfie, causing some pieces to break off. This time, however, the perpetrators did not escape and were therefore easily identified by law enforcement.

The two Hercules after the damage

3. Lisbon, 2016. Yet another selfie destroys an 18th-century St. Michael’s.
Selfie maniacs have no nationality, especially those who have to take them together with a work of art. So it happens that in 2016, in Lisbon, at the Museu nacional de arte antiga (one of the most important and visited museums in the Portuguese capital), a Brazilian visitor wants to portray himself together with an 18th-century wooden Saint Michael. In doing so, however, the tourist loses his balance and bumps into the statue, which falls to the ground in fragments. Jose Alberto Seabra Carvalho, the museum’s director, comments dejectedly, “in my many years of career, nothing like this had ever happened to me.”

The broken St. Michael

4. Los Angeles, 2017. A $200,000 selfie
A particularly expensive selfie for a young woman at the 14th Factory gallery in Los Angeles: the girl crouches down to portray herself in a selfie, but inadvertently hits the base of an installation. Bad luck would have it that the installation consists of so many bases with sculptures close together, and a domino effect ensues that devastates a third of the work. A two-hundred-thousand-dollar damage, and the video nailing the clumsy visitor gets as many as seven million views on YouTube. Figure in mondovision: who knows if the girl will still feel like taking selfies in front of the artwork?

The moment when the foundation collapses like dominoes

5. Washington, 2017. Damage to million-dollar installation.
Same script in 2017 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, where a solo exhibition of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors is underway. In one of the rooms is an installation entitled All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins: it so happens that a visitor takes a selfie but loses his balance and lands on one of the pumpkins in the million-dollar work. In the U.S. people are already talking ironically about “smashing pumpkins,” but this time the ending is happy because the damage is contained and the exhibition moreover is a great success.

Yayoi Kusama’s pumpkins.

6. Southend (England), 2017. They put the baby inside the sarcophagus to take a picture, and damage it (the sarcophagus, not the baby)
What can go wrong while taking your baby’s picture? If you’re a smart parent, nothing, but if you’re a jerk, it can happen that you damage a work of art.This is exactly what happened at the Prittlewell Priory Museum in Southend, Essex, England, where two idiot parents had the nice idea of putting their little boy inside a medieval, 13th-century sarcophagus to take a photograph of him lying in the tomb, probably horror lovers or perhaps guilty of having given birth to a pesky child and therefore wanting to give form to an unfulfillable desire of theirs with the medium of photography. During the operations, however, a piece of the sarcophagus, made of sandstone, falls off: the grim little family pretends not to but is pinched by surveillance cameras. More extra work for the restorers.

The damaged sarcophagus in the center

7. Yekaterinburg (Russia), 2018. Dali print damaged for a selfie.
It happens at the Glavny Prospekt Cultural Institute in Yekaterinburg, Russia, where an exhibition of Spanish multiples is underway. So nothing particularly valuable, but still should inspire a modicum of attention anyway: not so a small group of female visitors who, in order to take a selfie, collapse a temporary wall where one of the prints, a Dalí multiple, hangs. The shattered glass in the frame scratches it, damaging it. The tourists, however, do not get away with it because the noise of the collapse is such that everyone notices. Also bearing imperishable testimony to the fact is a YouTube video.

The moment before the collapse of the wall

8. Florence, 2018. He writes his initials on Ponte Vecchio
The “I’ve been here” craze is one of the most irresistible for idiots everywhere. A 56-year-old tourist in Florence in 2018 would not do without it, as she attempted to write her initials with a permanent marker on the Ponte Vecchio, on the wall to the left of the Benvenuto Cellini monument. For the lady, caught by traffic police just as she was fiddling with the marker, a complaint for defacing the property. Florence is marred by similar stupidity: a few months later, another tourist, aged 69, had been stopped by carabinieri while writing on one of the columns of the Vasari Corridor. She, too, was charged with defacement.

Florence, Ponte Vecchio

9. Pompeii, 2019. She detaches mosaic tiles to take them home.
She couldn’t resist the allure of Pompeii, so much so that she wanted to take a piece of it home. So an idiot tourist in her 20s, on vacation in Campania, decided to detach some mosaic tiles from a floor of the Domus dell’Ancora to take them home. However, the janitors noticed (also because, in order to carry out her operation, the girl had to climb over some protective curbs). Result of the vacation? A complaint for aggravated damage and extra work for the restorers who had to reassemble the mosaic. The same thing had happened the summer before at the Colosseum, when a 17-year-old boy had attempted to detach some brick fragments from the Roman era: for him, too, a vacation with charges on the loose for unlawful taking of cultural property.

The mosaics of the anchor domus in Pompeii.

10. Florence, 2019. He grabs onto a column in Orsanmichele and damages it.
He probably wanted to make like Tarzan, but he was not in the jungle, but in Florence, and what he wanted to cling to was not a liana, but the frame of the niche that houses the copy of Giambologna’s St. Luke in the outer wall of the Orsanmichele church. Thus, a 13-year-old boy on vacation with his family in the Tuscan capital damaged the frame causing several fragments to break off, two of about ten centimeters and one of twenty-five. The little family walked away pretending that nothing had happened, but it did not escape the surveillance cameras, let alone passers-by who alerted the police: for the parents 160 euro fine and probably also the costs of repairing the damage.

Florence, the church of Orsanmichele

Idiots at the museum (and more): 10 works damaged by visitors' stupidity

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