Broken. The Power of the Fragment: What Remains Tells More Than We Imagine

At Palazzo Strozzi, from September 25, 2026, to January 24, 2027, an international exhibition brings together more than eighty works to tell the story of sculpture through its breaks, losses, and transformations.

Some exhibitions invite us to look, while others—almost without our realizing it—change the way we look. Broken. The Power of the Fragment belongs to the second category. Because when faced with a headless statue, a mutilated body, or a hand separated from the rest of the sculpture, it’s natural to think about what’s missing. This exhibition, however, suggests that we focus instead on what remains—and that’s a difference that’s anything but small.

In art history, the fragment has often come down to us by chance: time has worn it away, a war has destroyed it, an earthquake has shattered it, or a flood has damaged it. In other cases, someone has deliberately chosen to remove a part of it, because that image represented a power, a religion, or a memory they wished to erase. But there is also a moment when the artist decides to make the fragment a deliberate choice—to leave the form incomplete, to leave a surface interrupted, to transform absence into a possibility.

Broken: The Power of the Fragment, organized by the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., navigates this fine line between loss and invention.

The exhibition brings together over eighty works from major international museums, ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Louvre, from the British Museum to the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and including the National Archaeological Museum in Florence and the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.

The journey is vast. It begins in ancient Egypt, Greece, Etruria, and Rome, traversing diverse cultures and territories to arrive at modern and contemporary sculpture.

Looking at a Face That Is No Longer Whole

The first section of the exhibition has an immediate, magnetic quality. Visitors are greeted by the remains of Giovanni Pisano’s Funeral Monument to Margaret of Brabant, created between 1312 and 1314. You don’t need to know every detail of its history to sense its power: it is precisely the surviving parts that suggest the grandeur of the original composition.

Then come the faces. Among the most recognizable pieces is the fragment featuring Akhenaten’s nose and lips, dated to around 1350 B.C. and on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Next to it are an Etruscan protome from the 6th century B.C., a head of Aphrodite from the 2nd century B.C. from the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and a fragment of an 8th-century Buddhist bronze sculpture from the Guimet Museum in Paris. Looking at them, one naturally wonders how much of a part is enough to restore a presence. Sometimes very little is enough—a mouth, a nose, the profile of a face.

When Destruction Becomes Political

Destruction is not always accidental. One of the most interesting sections of “Broken” is dedicated to iconoclasm and damnatio memoriae—that is, the desire to erase images and symbols considered politically or religiously unacceptable. It is an ancient practice. Among the examples on display are the remains of a bronze equestrian monument from the Agora of Athens, toppled around 200 B.C. Centuries later, during the French Revolution, numerous monuments associated with the monarchy were destroyed or damaged. On display at Palazzo Strozzi are the foot of the large equestrian statue of Louis XIV and the right hand of the monument to Louis XV, both from the Louvre.

The exhibition then moves into the 20th century with a bust of Mussolini by Adolfo Wildt, created in 1923 and bearing the marks of blows inflicted after the Liberation. In cases like these, the fragment is not simply what remains of a work of art. It is tangible evidence of political change.

The Wounds of War

Then there is the destruction that no one had foreseen. War enters the exhibition through works that still bear the marks of conflict. A Neo-Hittite female figure from Tell Halaf, Syria, and the so-called Prague Pietà, a Gothic sculpture from the late 14th century, are among the most significant examples. Two plaster heads by Antonio Canova, from the Gypsotheca in Possagno, also tell the story of the consequences of World War I. Then there is the issue of cultural heritage looted during the colonial period. A Buddha Head, taken by the British in 1814 from the Borobudur temple on the island of Java, introduces another theme: that of works separated from their place of origin and incorporated into Western collections.

Once again, the fragment carries with it a history that goes far beyond its form.

Florence, 1966

For an exhibition held in Florence, it’s impossible not to mention 1966. TheFlorence flood is one of the events that best illustrates the fragile relationship between a city and its heritage. The water flooded churches, museums, libraries, and palaces, leaving scars that in many cases have become part of the city’s very memory.

On display is a Christ Carrying the Cross by a Tuscan sculptor from the late 14th to early 15th century, on loan from the Museum of San Marco. Restored, yet still bearing the marks of the flood, it is a presence that speaks volumes without needing explanation: restoration can restore a work to its original form, but it does not always erase what has happened to it.

From Restoration to Reinvention

At a certain point, however, the exhibition shifts perspective. The fragment is no longer merely something to be saved or reconstructed. It can become the starting point for creating something new. The African Girl from the National Archaeological Museum of Florence is a striking example: a Hellenistic bronze head was integrated during the Renaissance with a body created in the 16th century. It is not a faithful reconstruction of the original but a new work, born from the encounter between different eras.

The same principle recurs in contemporary art. In The Swan, from 2023, Francesco Vezzoli juxtaposes a Roman portrait head from the 2nd century A.D. with a late-Renaissance bust. The past, rather than simply being preserved, is brought back into circulation.

Michelangelo, Rodin, and the Discovery of the Incomplete Figure

This is where one of the most important turning points highlighted by the exhibition comes into play. With Michelangelo, and later with Auguste Rodin and Medardo Rosso, the fragment began to be considered an expressive possibility in its own right. Completion is not always necessary: a partial figure can convey more movement than a perfectly defined one. An interrupted surface can leave room for light, gesture, and imagination.

The fragmented body thus becomes a language that spans the 20th century and extends into the contemporary era, with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Huma Bhabha, Robert Gober, Paul Pfeiffer, Villar Rojas, and Danh Vo. This is one of the reasons why “Broken” does not merely tell the story of damaged works. It also tells the story of how artists have learned to view absence in a different way.

What Remains

In the Renaissance courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, the dialogue with the present continues through a new installation by Mark Manders, created specifically for the exhibition. A fitting conclusion to a journey that, from antiquity to the contemporary era, keeps returning to the same idea: a work does not necessarily cease to speak when it is broken.

Sometimes the opposite happens: the fragment preserves traces of time, of violence, of displacement, and of transformation. But it also preserves the possibility of being viewed anew, outside its original context.

And this is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Broken. The Power of the Fragment: not trying at all costs to reconstruct what is no longer there. Letting, at least for once, the fragment speak for itself.

Broken. The Power of the Fragment
Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
September 25, 2026 – January 24, 2027

The exhibition is organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is curated by C. D. Dickerson III and Andrew Sears of the National Gallery of Art, in collaboration with Arturo Galansino, General Director of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.

After Florence, the exhibition will be on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from March 3 to June 27, 2027.