The man and woman wait for the guards to leave the room before posing for their photo: squatting over a chair covered in Swarovski crystals, pretending to sit. She is taking the picture, he’s posing.
But the squatting takes just a few moments too long, and he accidentally sits back into the chair. He tries to hold on to the wall to keep himself up, to no avail.
The fragile chair — a more sparkly version of the seat in a famous Vincent van Gogh painting — cannot hold the man’s weight. The woman quickly helps him up and ushers him out of the room.
These images spread around the internet this week after the Palazzo Maffei, a museum in Verona, Italy, released security footage of the two visitors who inadvertently damaged the artwork this spring.
Museum officials said they had contacted the police, though they consider the mishap an accident. The local authorities have not learned the identities of the people in the video, and Ms. Carlon said the museum hoped that releasing it would encourage the accidental vandals to come forward and apologize.
“It wasn’t such a brilliant thought to sit on an artwork,” Vanessa Carlon, the director of the museum, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. The bigger concern, she said, was how far people were willing to go to get a memorable photo — and in this case, how the pair fled instead of owning up to the damage.
“These two people decided to escape. That was the behavior that really offended us,” she said.
Ms. Carlon noted that they “walked out slowly, not rushing.” One of the museum’s security guards saw the pair leaving the museum via the building’s large baroque staircase, she added. But right outside the museum is Piazza Erbe, a bustling plaza, where the couple easily disappeared into the crowd.
The chair was by the Italian artist Nicola Bolla, whose art includes a range of everyday objects studded with Swarovski crystals. Inside the museum, which opened in 2020, it sits alongside works by artists such as Picasso, Magritte and Modigliani.
The museum would not specify how much the artwork was worth, but said its value had diminished because of the damage. The chair took weeks to restore, at the museum’s expense, Ms. Carlon added.
“It looks the same, but once an artwork is damaged it’s not really the same,” Ms. Carlon said. But she acknowledged that whatever it lost in value, it may have gained in fame.
The artist, Mr. Ballo, could not immediately be reached for comment. He told an Italian magazine that he was not offended, but found the incident “ridiculous.”
It wasn’t the first time that his art had been accidentally vandalized, he said, telling the magazine: “Probably my works seem so true and so real that people think they can appropriate them.”
The museum said that it hoped the video would encourage people to be more respectful around art in public places, including museums and churches.
If the pair who damaged the chair came forward, Ms. Carlon said, she would appreciate an apology. “That would be a nice gesture,” she said. “A noble gesture.”
The restored chair is back in the museum, but from now on, she said, it will be protected by plexiglass.
Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news.
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