A museum in Italy has urged visitors to “respect art” after a pair of tourists fled when they shattered a priceless sculpture of a chair by posing for a picture on top of it. The so-called “Van Gogh chair,” created by Italian artist Nicola Bolla as a tribute to the Dutch master’s 1888 painting of the same name,” is adorned with Swarovski crystals and on public display in the Palazzo Maffei, a museum in Verona. Surveillance footage released by the gallery shows a woman squatting next to the chair and pretending to sit on it while her male companion took a picture of her. They then swapped places, but rather than pose next to the chair, the man tried to sit on it, causing the crystal-encrusted glass chair to shatter and sending the man tumbling to the ground. The unidentified tourists then quickly fled the scene. “This is a nightmare for any museum,” director Vanessa Carlon told the BBC. “Of course it was an accident, but these two people left without speaking to us—that isn’t an accident.” Miraculously, the museum revealed it had since managed to repair the sculpture but declined to reveal the costs. Carlon said by releasing the CCTV footage she hoped to highlight that “anyone should enter art places, or museums or churches, wherever art is displayed, in a more respectful way. Art must be respected and loved because it is very fragile,” she added.
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