The exhibition opens with faces and bodies, showing how the loss of peripheral parts draws attention to the surviving features. This is the case with the remains of the moving funerary monument to Margaret of Brabant, carved by Giovanni Pisano in the early fourteenth century, where the fractured marble does not diminish its expressiveness but defines its measure. The same principle, albeit with entirely different intentions, governs ancient objects such as the limestone fragment depicting Akhenaten’s lips: it is the exhibition’s signature image, yet it measures just 8 centimetres. Thanks in part to the remarkable exhibition design at Palazzo Strozzi, it is among the unforgettable pieces in a show full of surprises. Beyond a room filled with “severed heads” from the Greek, Roman and Etruscan worlds, where each break brings a detail into focus, we encounter a “Nuragic warrior” from Mont’e Prama, the Sardinian site near Cabras that has yielded heroes who are mutilated yet powerful. Equally mutilated, yet beautiful, is the so-called “Livorno Torso”: recovered from the sea off the Tuscan city during the Medici era, this Greek statue, eroded by the waves and missing several parts, was never repaired because no one felt the need—it was already beautiful as it was.

A substantial section of the exhibition examines the historical causes of destruction, grouping them into iconoclasm, conflict and environmental forces. Among the testimonies to politically motivated destruction are bronze fragments from the Agora of Athens and the foot of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV, which escaped the foundries of the French Revolution. But the real gem is the black bust of Benito Mussolini made by Adolfo Wildt in 1923, scarred by bullets fired in 1945. Once displayed at the local Fascist Party headquarters and later riddled with gunfire, this sculpture becomes a fragment of history. Wartime damage is also documented in Antonio Canova’s plaster sculptures, struck by shells at Possagno during the First World War, while the impact of the elements on art is strikingly evident in the extraordinary wooden figure of Christ on loan from the Museo di San Marco: recovered after the devastating flood of the Arno in November sixty years ago, its arms are worn away. It is a powerful embodiment of art’s resilience.

The second half of the exhibition traces the shift from fragmentation as something suffered to fragmentation deliberately pursued as a formal choice: while in Michelangelo’s drawings the unfinished still belonged to the working process, with Auguste Rodin the omission of the head or arms becomes a principle of graphic and sculptural distillation, exemplified by “The Walking Man”. As if to say: the unfinished is better than the finished; the imperfect deserves more than the perfect. Contemporary art inherits this lesson and reinterprets it through a critical lens. Francesco Vezzoli joins an ancient Roman likeness of Marcus Aurelius to a female Renaissance bust (thus creating a “fluid fragment”), while Robert Gober isolates a wax leg to explore vulnerability. Danh Vo and Paul Pfeiffer, meanwhile, dismantle ancient reliefs and devotional statues respectively, turning the fragment into a commentary on the dispersal of memory. Vo, the Vietnamese art star who personally experienced the trauma of forced migration, confines fragments of a sixteenth-century Cupid inside a luxury suitcase, reflecting on the forced displacement of objects and people. Pfeiffer, whose work has long explored our relationship with pop stars, commissioned encarnadores—craftspeople specialising in remarkably lifelike sacred images carved in wood—to depict parts of Justin Bieber’s body: the room occupied by these fragments closes the exhibition, inviting us, perhaps, to reflect on the relics of our mass culture.

The entire exhibition—a journey that deserves time to take in the references carefully explained on the gallery panels—is, in a sense, foreshadowed in Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard by Mark Manders’s installation Silent Studio (Reduced to 88%), in which a fragment of gigantic proportions prompts us to question the significance of the measure of all things.