Grants and residencies

Research and art

Martellata. A publication about the attack to the David of Michelangelo, explained from all the involved actants

Application summary

The research project 'Martellata_14.09.91' happens in several outputs, from which the publication is the most important one. It is for this reason that its title is almost homonym. 'Martellata' presents a selection of all documents and information compiled during the investigation period, building up a chrono-material and dialectical reflection of the hammer blow to the second toe of the left food of the David. Escaping the accumulative logic of the archive, the book gathers, reviews and activates the different voices and perspectives of the agents and actants involved directly or indirectly in/by “the attack”. In the book the notions of multivocality, multifocality and dys-poiesis have their maximum expression, within a conversational narration navigating between art history, psychiatry, restoration, geology, documentation and new materialisms. The publication aims to contribute to the theories on artistic reception, and vandalism, with an object-oriented perspective, considering the material quality/ies (and behaviours) of the masterpiece. This specific approach is motivated by the fact that significant scientific information for the conservation of the sculpture was obtained after the chemical and petrographic analyses of two of the fragments detached from the sculpture. ‘Martellata_14.09.91’ is a major component of the ongoing doctoral thesis 'Behaving Unconventionally in Gallery Settings’.

‘Martellata’ is a book that revisits the dramatic event of 14 September 1991, when Piero Cannata struck Michelangelo’s ‘David’ with a hammer inside the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. The blow, which broke the second toe of the left foot, shocked the art world and raised questions of heritage, security, conservation, and iconoclasm.

The publication is the result of years research, gathering judicial and police documents, press cuts, and scientific analyses of marble fragments, and restoration reports. At its centre is a long interview with Cannata, where he describes his act. His testimony is paired with a psychiatric text countered by a researcher whose anti-psychiatry stance challenges pathologising views of iconoclasm. This triangulation establishes the tone of the book: no single voice dominates, and every narrative is destabilised by another.

Around this core orbit a constellation of voices: Franca Falletti (then director of the Galleria dell’Accademia), Cinzia Parnigoni (restorer), Annamaria Giusti (art historian and OPD director of restoration), Luigi Davitti (cast technician who produced the moulds of the broken toe), Fabio Fratini (CNR geologist), Katja Bohm and Annu Kaakinen (Geosciences, University of Helsinki), Dario Gamboni (art historian), Giovanna del Giudice (member of the Accademia della Follia), Andrea Abati and Vittoria Ciolini (Dryphoto Arte Contemporanea), curator Alba Braza, and Radio Papesse.

The book also incorporates new images of the sculpture marble crystals, triggered the last remaining fragment of ‘David’’s toe.

Rejecting the linear logic of the archive ‘Martellata’, activates a multivocal and multifocal perspective, acknowledging that cultural events are never singular but composed through the interaction of heterogeneous agents, both human and non-human.

More than a chronicle of iconoclasm, ‘Martellata’ is a dense exploration of how a single gesture reverberates through matter, institutions, disciplines, and time.

Back to Grants listing