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

The show, on view in Florence and coming to D.C. next year, examines the history and impact of destroyed sculptures throughout time and across cultures

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

October 2, 2026 8:00 a.m.

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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. D. 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. 

“One of the unique qualities of fragments is that they focus your attention on details,” Dickerson, a Renaissance and Baroque art expert, tells the Guardian’s Philip Oltermann. 

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. 

“You wouldn’t have considered the subtle way that the lip has been crisply carved in this stone if it had been part of a bigger statue with a bunch of other features,” Dickerson tells the Guardian. “Fragments make you think about objects in a different way.” 

The piece, created around 1350 B.C.E., was found in an ancient rubbish deposit east of the Nile. 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. “in one of the earliest cases of politically motivated destruction,” per the statement. 

“Across the ancient world, it was a common practice during regime changes or religious transformations to destroy images of the previous one,” Sears tells the Guardian, “because it was believed that the images contained some kind of life force of the ruler.” 

A more recent example of this is a 1923 modernist bust of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini—with a bullet hole in its forehead. 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. 

“In the 60th anniversary [year] of the floods, we wanted to explore how sculptures are challenged by climate problems,” Arturo Galansino, the director of the Palazzo Strozzi, tells the Art Newspaper’s James Imam. 

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. Roman emperor Constantine the Great, which Dickerson described to the Art Newspaper as a “canonical fragment.” Another is a 1533 clay model by the Renaissance master Michelangelo: a woman sculpted without a head or arms. The Guardian calls it “the Renaissance’s answer to a pair of pre-distressed grunge-wash jeans.” Michelangelo may have been inspired by broken Classical statues, such as the Belvedere Torso. 

The National Gallery of Art and the Palazzo Strozzi collaborated to create this show, as they have with past exhibitions. After its run in Florence, “Broken” will travel to Washington, D.C. for a March 2027 premiere.

“For very often, the fragment has lasted much longer than its original sculpture,” Dickerson said at a press preview in Florence, per La Voce di New York’s Lucy Gordan. “Usually, art exhibitions concern a single artist or place … ‘Broken,’ offering an unusual and unique concept, is groundbreaking.” 

“Broken: The Power of the Fragment” is on display at the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, until January 24, 2027. It will be on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. between March 13 and June 27, 2027. 

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.