Word: pietas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Artisans of Florence and Rome, I beg you, do not restore the Pieta...
Since Michelangelo intended his work to invoke pity in the mind of the beholder, let his damaged Pieta convey in its brokenness an added dimension of pity...
Nobody will ever know what went through the scrambled circuits of Laszlo Toth's brain when he climbed over the guardrail of the chapel of the Pieta in St. Peter's Basilica and started battering with his hammer at the Madonna's resigned stone arm, the folded veil, the nose, the translucent shell of her left eyelid. But one may guess: Toth had lost all power to distinguish between an image and the reality it denotes...
...sense, his motives no longer matter. The damage is done, and, according to the Vatican's optimistic experts, it can be repaired. No tourist looking at the Pieta in the future-through a prophylactic wall of reinforced glass -will be able to see the traces of restoration. But another supreme product of man's spirit will have become more distant, less intelligible...
...cultural heritage of Italy (or that part of it embodied in architecture, painting and sculpture, urban planning and landscape design) has been deteriorating-rotting or stolen or bulldozed, concreted over in the name of progress, or just strangled in red tape. Last week's attack on the Pieta may direct the world's attention to the urgency of this problem. It is not a matter of one Michelangelo the less but the gradual death of the most complex and exquisite cultural ecology that Europe or the world has ever seen...