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Newly released footage showed a tourist destroying a piece of art in an Italian museum by sitting on it before fleeing the scene.
Last week, the Palazzo Maffei — a museum located in Verona — posted surveillance footage of the incident. Captured in April, the footage showed a man and a woman posing next to a chair in the museum. The glass chair, created by Italian artist Nicola Bolla, is known as the “van Gogh” chair because it’s a tribute to Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting “Van Gogh’s Chair.” It is adorned with Swarovski crystals.
First, a woman squatted next to the chair as if she was going to sit on it. While she was in that pose, a man took a photo of her. Moments later, they switched places.
After remaining in the pose for several seconds, the man then tried to sit in the chair. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the glass chair immediately gave in to the weight and broke. The woman quickly helped the man up.
After taking a moment to realize what
Museum director Vanessa Carlon told BBC the incident was a “nightmare.”
“Of course it was an accident, but these two people left without speaking to us — that isn’t an accident,” Carlon said. “This is a nightmare for any museum.”
At the time of writing, the people in the video had not been identified. The museum declined to provide an estimated value for the chair.