From ancient Egypt to Michelangelo and Rodin, over 80 works that tell their story through what’s missing
A nose and a pair of lips carved in stone more than 3,000 years ago are all that remain of a portrait of the pharaoh Akhenaton. That fragment, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the image chosen to introduce Broken. The Power of the Fragment, the autumn exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, open from September 25, 2026 to January 24, 2027.
The idea behind the show is simple and surprisingly moving: a broken sculpture is not just what’s left of something lost. It can become a work in its own right, carrying memories of what happened to it and taking on new meanings along the way.
A journey across cultures and centuries
With more than 80 works from some of the world’s major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre, the British Museum and the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, the exhibition moves across places and eras. It starts with the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Etruria, Greece and Rome, and reaches the premodern cultures of what are now Mexico, Mali, Peru and Cambodia.
Masters such as Giovanni Pisano, Michelangelo and Auguste Rodin appear alongside contemporary artists who have made the fragment their starting point: Louise Bourgeois, Huma Bhabha, Robert Gober, Francesco Vezzoli and Danh Vo. In the Renaissance courtyard, Dutch-Belgian artist Mark Manders presents a new installation created for the occasion.
Why things break
Some fragments are the result of a deliberate choice. Others carry the marks of history: ancient and modern iconoclasm, wars, revolutions, vandalism and natural disasters. Florence has its own chapter in that story, the 1966 flood, which damaged countless works of art across the city.
The result is an exhibition about how a sculpture’s value, whether artistic, political or symbolic, changes once it breaks. What’s missing becomes as important as what remains.
An international project
Broken is organized by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it will travel in a new version from March 3 to June 27, 2027. It is curated by C.D. Dickerson III and Andrew Sears of the National Gallery of Art, together with Arturo Galansino, Director General of Palazzo Strozzi.
