Museumgoer Posing for Photo Stumbles Into Portrait of Medici Prince, Damaging the Historic Painting
The incident at the Uffizi Galleries is the latest in a series of tourist-related accidents at museums around the world. Now, the Florentine cultural institution plans to start limiting selfies
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A visitor to the Uffizi Galleries, the famed art museum in Florence, Italy, tripped backward this past weekend while imitating the pose of a prince in a centuries-old portrait. The man, whose identity has not been made public, tore the canvas as he fell, becoming the latest in a long line of museumgoers to damage priceless art in pursuit of the perfect photo.
“The problem of visitors who come to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media is widespread,” says the Uffizi’s director, Simone Verde, in a statement.
The painting in question is a portrait of Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, by the Italian Baroque painter Anton Domenico Gabbiani. Widely circulated security footage suggests the man who damaged the portrait was attempting to photograph himself mirroring Ferdinando’s stance when he tripped over a platform meant to keep visitors at a safe distance from the artworks. He fell backward into the painting, ripping a hole near the prince’s right boot, reports Corriere Fiorentino’s Giulio Gori.
The Uffizi has reported the tourist to the authorities for damaging cultural heritage—a criminal offense under Italian law. The portrait was on view in “Florence and Europe: Arts of the 18th Century at the Uffizi,” an exhibition on display through November. The show is temporarily closed as museum staff repair the canvas, which sustained only minor damage. It is slated to reopen on July 2.
Ferdinando was a prominent patron of the arts and an accomplished musician. He supported many artists of his time, including Gabbiani, who painted group portraits of musicians and Medici associates, as well as frescoes that touched on religious, classical and mythological themes. Gabbiani, who died in 1726, continued creating art for Ferdinando’s family after the grand prince’s death in 1713. He wasn’t alone in this patronage: Beginning in the 1400s, the powerful Medici family commissioned portraits, public works and religious art, not only to cement “Florence’s status as the epicenter of the Italian Renaissance” but also to assert their authority and legacy through the visual arts, wrote Smithsonian magazine’s Meilan Solly in 2021.
Fun fact: Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, as a patron of the arts
Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany (not to be confused with his ancestor Ferdinando I de’ Medici, the second Grand Duke of Tuscany), was both a patron of musicians and a talented performer himself. He is known as “the Orpheus of princes.”Moving forward, the Uffizi “will set very precise limits, preventing behavior that is not compatible with the sense of our institutions and respect for cultural heritage,” Verde says in the statement. However, as the New York Times’ Amelia Nierenberg reports, the museum declined to specify what those restrictions might be.
The June 21 accident wasn’t an isolated incident. In February 2017, less than a week after a Yayoi Kusama exhibition opened at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, an attendee trying to take a selfie lost their balance and fell onto one of the artist’s pumpkin sculptures, lightly damaging it. A few months later, a woman knocked over 11 pedestals while taking a selfie at a pop-up gallery in Los Angeles, causing an estimated $200,000 worth of damage.
More recently, a man visiting the Palazzo Maffei in Verona, Italy, pretended to sit on a crystal-covered chair sculpture by artist Nicola Bolla. The chair, which was inspired by an 1888 Vincent van Gogh painting of the same subject, collapsed beneath him as his companion took his photo.
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With selfie-takers increasingly seen as a risk, some art insurers are advocating for stricter protective measures, such as banning selfie sticks and reinforcing barriers around select artworks.
“We’re not going to change the whole way we underwrite, but it’s something that’s becoming concerning for museums and other public spaces as well,” Robert Read, head of fine art and private clients at the Hiscox insurance company, told Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp in 2024.
“This problem, with tourists damaging artwork, is something that is increasingly happening,” Marina Novelli, director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Center at England’s Nottingham University, tells the New York Times.
Many tourists arrive at cultural destinations with a “selfie bucket list” of artworks or landmarks they want to capture on camera, Novelli adds. “It’s more about sharing, not necessarily the experience, but the fact that ‘I was there.’”
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According to the London Times’ Philip Willan, a trade union that represents museum workers had previously warned the Uffizi about the risks posed by the platforms separating visitors from the art. Prior to this incident, a separate museumgoer tripped on one, luckily without causing any damage.
“Visitors are looking at the paintings, not at the ground,” staff representative Silvia Barlacchi tells the Times. “Those platforms are unsuitable and too dark.”
Despite growing concerns about selfie-seeking tourists, some art critics are cautioning museums against rushing to judgment.
“Just because someone adopts a silly pose for a selfie does not mean they are an idiot the rest of the time,” writes the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones. “It would be pure snobbery to assume anyone is failing to appreciate art simply because their enjoyment includes, or is even dominated by, one of the most common ways 21st-century people structure all their experiences.”
