News from the art world
The case of the broken toes
An Austrian tourist who snapped off the toes of a 200-year-old Italian sculpture while posing for a photo has come clean after being caught on CCTV, said Tom Kington in The Times. David Huber, 50, was visiting the Museo Canova in Possagno, Italy, when he damaged a plaster study for a marble version of Venus Victrix, by the neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova. Intending to mimic the pose of the reclining female figure, Huber sat on the plinth, in the process snapping off the statue’s toes. CCTV footage shows him “standing up and apparently noticing the damage”; he then leans down to touch the crumbled toes, and tries to block another visitor’s view of it, before fleeing the room. “It looks like he got scared,” a Carabinieri officer who studied the footage said. “He didn’t have the courage to tell the guard.” But under new Covid-19 rules all visitors to the museum were registered, and when an official rang up the woman who led Huber’s group, she burst into tears and confessed that he was her husband. Vittorio Sgarbi, an art critic and MP who is president of the museum, says that he is prepared to pardon Huber if he pays for the restoration – but that Italian magistrates presiding over the case might not “be so forgiving”.
George Michael, nine metres tall
“Turn a different corner in the London borough of Brent from September and you’ll be confronted with the strangest thing: a nine-metre mural of local hero George Michael,” said Tim Jonze in The Guardian. British artist Dawn Mellor, known for celebrity paintings that skewer the cult of fame, has been commissioned to paint the vast permanent public artwork in Kingsbury, the northwest London suburb where the 1980s star grew up. The mural will be unveiled in September as part of Brent’s Borough of Culture 2020 initiative, and will coincide with a programme of free activities and learning programmes taking place in local schools that Michael – born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou – attended. Fans of the singer, who died on Christmas Day 2016, will hope that the mural fares better than another one of Michael that was painted in Sydney by the artist Scott Marsh in 2017. Marsh’s work, depicting the former Wham! star as a saint, was covered in black paint by a 23-year-old man who claimed to be “defending his religion”. The following year, a “shrine” to the singer created by bereaved fans outside his north London home following his death was removed at the behest of local residents.