[CPProt.net] David's foot vandal returns to attack Florentine plaque

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

David's foot vandal returns to attack Florentine plaque 

John Hooper in Rome
Monday October 17, 2005
The Guardian 


Curators and guardians of Italy's artistic heritage, much of it on open
display, will be on high alert this week following the discovery that the
country's most persistent art vandal is back in action.
Piero Cannata, who earned worldwide notoriety by taking a hammer to
Michelangelo's David, confessed to local newspapers in Tuscany that he had
struck again in the very centre of Florence. It was discovered that somebody
had sprayed a thick black "x" on a plaque, set into the paving of Piazza
della Signoria, commemorating the burning to death of the 15th-century
preacher and reformer Girolamo Savonarola.
Mr Cannata said that he had tried to cover it up "because it has a sentence
that doesn't make any sense".
The plaque has no intrinsic artistic merit and the damage was speedily put
right by local authority contractors. But the incident has highlighted the
vulnerability of more valuable works and reignited a debate over how best to
protect them from thieves, vandals and people who are mentally disturbed.

As the head of the Carabiniere's art theft unit said earlier this year,
Italy is an "open-air museum ... many of its most celebrated and valuable
works of art stand on streets and in squares, and nowhere is this more true
than in Florence".

Mina Gregori, a retired lecturer in art history at the city's university,
said the latest episode showed that treasures in and around Florence's most
famous square did not have 24-hour protection. "Otherwise the security
guards would have seen what was going on."

This is the second instance of vandalism in Piazza della Signoria in just
over two months. In August, a man climbed on the towering statue of Neptune
by Bartolomeo Ammannati and snapped off the sea god's right hand.

Ms Gregori has been pressing for the removal of another masterpiece,
Benevenuto Cellini's bronze of Perseus beheading Medusa, which stands in the
adjacent Loggia del Lanzi.

"Either the council deploys security guards around the clock, or the statue
should be taken into a museum," she said yesterday. However, being taken
inside proved no safeguard for Michelangelo's David, which stood in the
Piazza della Signoria until it was moved to the Galleria dell'Accademia in
1873. In 1991 Mr Cannata managed to smuggle a hammer into the museum with
which he smashed off the second toe of the biblical hero's left foot.

Sicilian-born Mr Cannata, a former student of aesthetics, was ruled mentally
ill during his trial and put in a psychiatric hospital. However, he has
since repeatedly been set free to wreak more havoc.

In 1993, a Carabiniere patrol found him defacing a fresco by the Renaissance
master Filippo Lippi in Prato cathedral. Later the same year, he took a
knife to another of the Tuscan city's treasures, the Adoration of the
Shepherds Before Baby Jesus by the 16th-century artist Michele di Raffaello
della Colombe in the basilica of Santa Maria delle Carceri. Mr Cannata was
reported to have told police that "a force inside me urged me to do it".

In 1999, he was again sent to a psychiatric hospital after scribbling with a
marker pen on a Jackson Pollock painting in the national museum of modern
art in Rome. He explained he had been looking for a work by the Italian
abstract artist Piero Manzoni, "but I found an equally ugly one and damaged
that instead".

The reappearance of the 58-year-old Mr Cannata was the last thing art
custodians needed after a spate of recent attacks. In Rome, in July, the
head of a bee was chopped off a Bernini fountain that stands at the entrance
to the Via Veneto. Two months later part of another celebrated fountain, the
Fontana della Navicella near the Colosseum, went missing.

Police said that in both cases they suspected the motive was robbery.

The chance of extra funds for the protection of art in Italy look bleak.
Next year's budget includes deep cuts to local authority budgets.

 


http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1593729,00.html