Art can ‘break’ your heart

‘Where there is only the whole, there is violence, which claims to be everything. Where there is only the fragment, there is loneliness and indifference. Where, on the other hand, the whole marries the Fragment, there the ray of beauty shines.’ So wrote the great Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in a monumental work of philosophy and mysticism with the evocative title: Il tutto nel frammento. “Where should we direct our gaze? Every tiny shard immediately evokes in us the idea of the intact vessel; if we see a torso, we interpret it on the basis of a mental image of the intact statue. Will our own existence be any different?”
The fragment, the image of what is no longer there, of what we have lost: what would it be if it did not refer us back to a whole, to a work of art, to civilisations and their contradictory histories? And, at the same time, to the perception we have of ourselves and of our fragmentary present?

The creators and curators of the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi – ‘Broken – Il potere del frammento’, on display in Florence until 24 January 2027 – certainly had no intention of venturing into the realms of theology or even Catholic mysticism (they were far more interested in iconoclasm, as we shall see: which is a misapplication of the idea of God). Yet it is striking that the idea of the ‘fragment’ lies at the heart of many philosophical and aesthetic questions of our time, and that reflection on the absolute Whole – the principle of unity – also persists. In a century as shattered as the twentieth, and in a new millennium that seems impossible to restore to a unified design. ‘Shall we allow ourselves to be persuaded that fragmentation itself is the whole? Or is it not rather the case that, if we were to succumb and allow ourselves to be persuaded, we would have lost the meaning of the fragment and opted for nonsense?’

One might well set aside Von Balthasar’s challenging questions and simply indulge in the visual delights – of which there is an abundance. Yet one need only step into the first room of the exhibition, and behind the magnificent remains of Giovanni Pisano’s 13th-century Funerary Monument to Margaret of Brabant – already dismantled during the Renaissance: those were times when anything no longer needed was simply torn down – the perhaps most significant and thought-provoking fragment of the exhibition is revealed. It is "The Nose and Lips of Akhenaten", measuring just a few centimetres, a remnant of a 14th-century BC Egyptian funerary mask: a splinter of hardened limestone, two full lips that still seem to be smiling, now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Its story speaks of something profound and unsettling; it goes to the heart of a fragmented and undivided discourse. It refers to the religious dimension of fragmentation and its violent, iconoclastic counterpart: ‘shattering’. The fragmentary portrait of Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt, comes from the new capital he founded (now Amarna). Akhenaten introduced a new cult there centred on Aten, the sun disc. He promoted a naturalistic and refined art form unlike anything previously seen in Egypt, but after his death his religious reform was abandoned and the statues destroyed. The aim was to erase the memory of the pharaoh in order to restore the ancient religion and its symbols. This has happened many times; wars and religious wars are among the most frequent causes of the ‘transformation’ of so many works from the past into fragments, into remains that have been destroyed, desecrated or stripped of their original meaning.

But it is not just about iconoclasm at Strozzi – although this is a highly topical theme underpinning the ‘Broken’ project; we will return to this. Exploring the fragments “brings into play our relationship with what is no longer there”, which is, after all, a part of us, says Arturo Galansino, who is Strozzi’s director and also the creator and one of the three curators – alongside C.D. Dickerson III and Andrew Sears, of the National Gallery of Art in Washington – of this wide-ranging exhibition: five millennia, five continents, five years of preparation and fifty lenders for almost ninety works on display. “Many have survived longer as fragments than in their original form,” notes Galansino. It is not just human adversity: the vestiges of the past are more often the result of physical phenomena, such as an earthquake or a flood. In a month’s time, on 4 November, it will be sixty years since the flood that devastated Florence: this is commemorated by what remains of the wooden statue of Christ Carrying the Cross, now in the Museum of San Marco, which was fished out of the Arno. These fragments become gestures of survival that challenge archaeology, the history of cultures and even our reflection on the consumption of art and colonial exploitation. But first and foremost is their ‘power’.

As C.D. Dickerson III, an expert on the Renaissance and Baroque periods and director of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington – who co-produced the exhibition and will be hosting the American version in the coming months – recounts with a fascinating insight (in the Marsilio Arte catalogue). The scholar writes: “Anyone arriving on the Greek island of Rhodes between around 230 BC and 670 AD was greeted by an extraordinary sight: on the beach opposite the harbour stood the remains of the gigantic bronze statue of Helios, the sun god, the famous Colossus of Rhodes”. Among the travellers who were left awestruck was Pliny the Elder. An earthquake had toppled the Colossus, but “even lying on the ground, it is nonetheless a marvellous sight”, he wrote. “Breakage is not necessarily a destructive force. In the fragments it creates, it retains the power to convey its unique magic. Observing a broken statue can be just as moving as seeing it intact.”

The works on display are all anthropomorphic sculptures. Arms, hands and monumental feet torn from pretentious statues (such as that of Louis XIV, severed during the Revolution and now in the Louvre); the famous right hand of a colossal statue, traditionally attributed to Constantine, from the Capitoline Museums; and an extraordinary, enormous bust of Mussolini by Adolfo Wildt, riddled with bullet holes by the partisans after the Liberation. But above all, heads and faces: of young women, of Etruscan, Egyptian and Khmer deities (a precious 10th-century statue of Rama looted during the Khmer Rouge war, sold on the international market and only recently identified); a Buddha head taken by the British in 1814 from the Borobudur temple on the island of Java.

Right from the first room, behind Akhenaten’s nose, the superb exhibition design and the interplay of references between the display cases allow visitors to exchange glances, to encounter presences that speak to one another across the millennia, the Head of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, a work of Vietnamese Champa art, engages in dialogue with a fragment of a medieval Deposition from the Tomb and with the precious Head of a Young Man (Ephebe) that once belonged to Winckelmann. Dickerson writes that the exhibition’s concept arose “from the conviction that fragments possess something that has always struck a deep chord within humanity. Furthermore, the recent tools offered by the cognitive sciences allow us to understand why fragments deserve to be treated as a sculptural category in their own right’. This also applies to bodies – always broken bodies, such as the Warrior with Shield from Mont’e Prama, a masterpiece of Nuragic art, or the Fragment of a Kneeling Figure from the archaeological site of Jenné-Jeno in Mali.

Whether washed up from the seas or unearthed from the earth, these fragments soon became objects of collection and contemplation. Ever since the time of the theologian Ildeberto di Lavardin, who visited Rome in the year 1100 and fell in love with it. “O Rome, there is nothing like you, even though you are now almost entirely in ruins: even in your destroyed state, you teach us how great you would have been had you remained intact.” All that remains of a Roman Hermes is his foot and the hand with which he fastens his sandal. The Livorno Torso, a Greek bronze now in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, was discovered on a beach during the Renaissance and immediately entered the Medici collections, without any modern additions or ‘reconstructions’, as was the artistic fashion of the time: a new passion for ruins and the transience of time was born. The cult of the sublime was born: ‘Since it is in buildings and ruins themselves that one can most rightly contemplate the fragility of human affairs,’ wrote the humanist Pope Pius II Piccolomini in a papal bull. A new sensibility emerged for the unfinished, works that come into being as fragments from the outset – as Michelangelo taught.

Because “ruins hold together presence and absence”, as Galansino points out, “they compel the viewer to imagine what is missing”. Remnants of history. Survival amidst the shifting tides of human history and the violence they entail. This is one of the conceptual and cultural perspectives underlying ‘Broken. Il potere del frammento’, which, as the curators explain, draws on the allure of the past to address a theme of dramatic contemporary relevance. Galansino sums it up: “The conception of ‘Broken’ began at the start of this decade, just as monuments (which, incidentally, were far from beautiful) linked to slavery were being toppled in the United States”, as part of identity-based and racial protest movements. Those events, as well as the defacement of works of art and calls for their removal from museums, “demonstrated that even in our times, the destruction of a statue could affect collective memory and the transformation of its meaning and use. So we began to reflect on ‘what remains’ after historical events of this kind”.

Alongside the fragmentation of our knowledge, our psychology, culture and emotions… there is therefore the highly topical issue of a new and different form of iconoclasm, which manifests itself in either claiming or challenging the public sphere. This occurred with Christians who ‘baptised’ pagan statues and with Protestants who defaced Catholic ones. It also happened with the Aztec goddess Coatlicue (from the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City), destroyed by the Spanish conquistadors; yet centuries earlier, the Aztecs themselves had reused and appropriated Toltec art. The same logic applies to an intentionally contemporary reinterpretation of the act of toppling statues, such as the large wooden sculpture The Elephant in the Room (Otto von Bismarck) by the German artist Julius von Bismarck – an equestrian statue that is dismantled and reassembled in a loop via a sophisticated mechanism.

There is also a mysterious coincidence in the preservation and reappearance of the fragments. Like the trunk of a wooden Christ from the French Middle Ages found in a field: they used it as a scarecrow (he would not have minded: ‘Even the lilies of the field the Lord clothes’). There is an intentional playfulness in their reassembly, in taking care of them in some way. Just as Francesco Vezzoli did with The Swan (2023), combining a 2nd-century AD Roman male head with a Renaissance female bust. Every reference, every discovery, engages our contemporary sensibility – the fragmentation of emotions, notions and perspectives that characterises our daily lives. It is by no means a coincidence that one of the most widely read and discussed books on love in recent decades is entitled “Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse”, Roland Barthes’s famous essay organised into alphabetical entries – a lucid testimony to our difficulty in recognising a whole that has scattered into a thousand rivulets (“they are like those children who take an alarm clock apart to find out what time is”).

Thus, in the final galleries, we approach the modern and the contemporary, where the aesthetics of the fragment become part of art itself; the partial, unfinished figures of Rodin, Medardo Rosso or Giacometti. After all, as Arturo Martini wrote as early as 1945: “Modern sculpture now lives only in fragments, in details, in the small pieces in which the artist has managed to preserve a divine warmth. The whole monument is almost always a corpse; the fragment, on the other hand, still breathes.”

There is also a further manifestation of this contemporary sensibility, which takes a fresh look (though it must be said, one that has existed for at least a century) at artefacts and finds from other continents, and which attempts – at least in theory – to make amends for the sleight-of-hand thefts perpetrated by collectors or colonialists, just as we in these parts try to do with the desecrations caused by grave robbers. On display are works of African art, Japanese propitiatory statues, and Toltec and Syrian artefacts. Today, these are subject to processes of re-evaluation and restitution, as well as to sometimes controversial debate. In a small room, the Vietnamese-Danish artist Dahn Vo has placed a half-open Rimowa suitcase, crammed with fragments of sixteenth-century Cupids – a metonymy for cultural theft.

The penultimate room is entirely dedicated to the ‘fragmentation’ of the figure of Justin Bieber, the focus of a work in progress by the artist Paul Pfeiffer (Honolulu) entitled Incarnator and entrusted to artists and craftspeople from post-colonial countries who reinterpret – or tear apart – the myth of a global pop star. Much of the exhibition’s appeal – the staging of which is no simple task, in a fascinating space such as Palazzo Strozzi with its unchanging geometry – lies in creating a dialogue between the works and in the freedom of movement afforded to the viewer: the ability to attract – and even flatter – diverse perspectives and sensibilities, spanning a millennium and across continents, is essential in any exhibition, all the more so if it is a composite one.

There are many ways to approach this, perhaps by asking why only ‘human’ fragments. Or what psychological paths guided the curators’ choices. One can come away having understood those interplay of gazes, thanks in part to the excellent narrative captions curated by Ludovica Sebregondi. One emerges with a reflection on our era, composed of fragments that cannot be reassembled, of memories that cannot be reconstructed. Yet they retain the power to point back to the ‘whole’.