14 DAY TRIAL // A bungling student who was trying to take a selfie at an art museum in Italy destroyed a 200-year-old work of art.
Security guards at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan, Italy, were shocked to find a 19th-century copy of the priceless Greco-Roman statue “The Drunken Satyr” shattered on Tuesday morning.
According to witnesses, the young man climbed onto the statue to take a picture of himself and caused the statue’s left leg to fall off. A CCTV camera captured the moment when the clumsy student posed on the statue's lap for a photo. It seems that the plaster leg cracked and smashed on the floor.
“We think this is an accident. The statue was assembled in pieces and the block was already partly detached: we had planned the restoration,” the director Franco Marrocco said, according to RT.com.
The statue is an ancient Greek sculpture of the Hellenistic era showing a strange humanistic figure with animal features passed out in a drunken stupor. It was was discovered in the ditches of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome around 1624.
The original work of art is thought to date to around 220 BC and it's on display at Glyptothek museum in Munich, Germany.
It seems that the foreign student has not been identified yet.
This could easily be considered as an act of artistic manslaughter via narcissistic selfie.