The implication was clear: Italy was a backward country, incapable of protecting its cultural treasures. To be fair, the tourist was not the first person to make this accusation. In his history “The Italians,” Luigi Barzini writes that one of the basic pleasures Italy reliably provides for visitors is “that of feeling morally superior to the natives.” I sometimes felt this pleasure myself. The inefficiency of the Italian bureaucracy, whether selling you a postage stamp or fixing a street, was often marvelous to behold. And indeed, the statue the man was pointing at had obviously suffered from standing outside: The marble was striped with dirt.
But the tourist was, in one very important respect, wrong.
He was pointing not at the actual David but at a full-scale marble replica. Michelangelo’s real statue did once stand in this spot, but it was moved, for its own protection, 143 years ago. The original is now in a museum across town, shielded from the elements, perfectly safe.
Or at least that’s how we like to think of it. We are conditioned to believe that art is safe, beyond the reach of the grimy world. We don’t hang the Mona Lisa next to an archery range. We put her in a fortress: walls, checkpoints, lasers, guards, bulletproof glass. There are scholars, textbooks, posters — a whole collective mythology suggesting that the work will live forever. But safety is largely an illusion, and permanence a fiction. Empires hemorrhage wealth, bombs fall on cities, religious radicals decimate ancient temples. Destruction happens in any number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any number of speeds — and it will happen, and no amount of reverence will stop it.
Few humans on earth know this melancholy truth better than the citizens of Florence. They are born into a profound intimacy with decay. The city was the epicenter of the Renaissance — home to such art-history superheroes as Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Cellini and Leonardo da Vinci — and the relics of that period have been under siege, more or less constantly, ever since. In 1497, the fanatical monk Savonarola sent his followers door to door to gather the city’s nonreligious art, books, clothing, musical instruments, then piled it all 50 feet high in the central square and set it on fire: the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities. (The spectacle was such a success that he repeated it the following year.) In 1895, earthquakes shook Florence so hard that citizens, fearing aftershocks, spent the night sleeping out in the streets. The 20th century brought Nazis and Mafia car bombs. This November will mark the 50th anniversary of the great Florentine flood of 1966, an inundation that overtook much of the city center, killing dozens of people and destroying old masterpieces. [...]
The trouble is the David’s ankles. They are cracked. Italians first discovered this weakness back in the 19th century, and modern scientists have mapped the cracks extensively, but until recently no one claimed to know just how enfeebled the ankles might be. This changed in 2014, when a team of Italian geoscientists published a paper called “Modeling the Failure Mechanisms of Michelangelo’s David Through Small-Scale Centrifuge Experiments.” That dry title concealed a terrifying story. The paper describes an experiment designed to measure, in a novel way, the weakness in the David’s ankles: by creating a small army of tiny David replicas and spinning them in a centrifuge, at various angles, to simulate different levels of real-world stress. What the researchers found was grim. If the David were to be tilted 15 degrees, his ankles would fail.
