Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s popular marble sculpture of an elephant in Rome’s Piazza della Minerva was damaged over the weekend, with a four-inch fragment of the tip of one of its tusks broken off and found on the ground.
Local authorities discovered the damage over the weekend and revealed it on Monday night. It’s at least the second time the statue has sustained damage. The tip of the same tusk was broken off in 2016 by a vandal and later restored.
The Italian capital has seen has seen uncommonly heavy rains in recent weeks, and police are uncertain whether the damage was incidental or a result of vandalism. They are currently consulting security camera footage to see if the cause can be ascertained.
Alessandro Giuli, Italy’s culture minister, isn’t waiting for the police to conduct their investigation.
“It is unacceptable that once again the nation’s artistic and cultural heritage must suffer such serious damage,” he said in a statement. He called it an “absurd act of barbarity.”
Artist Ercole Ferrata fabricated the sculpture in 1667 based on Bernini’s designs, which had been commissioned by Pope Alexander VII. The elephant carries on its back an 18-foot-high red granite Egyptian obelisk that had been discovered by Dominican friars at a convent nearby in 1665.
Police said on Wednesday that the broken segment was not original, but rather added during restoration work in 1977.
The most famous artist associated with the Baroque movement, Bernini is responsible for some of the greatest attractions of the Eternal City, including the 94-foot-high baldacchino for St. Peter’s Basilica (1623–34) and The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1647–52), at the Cornaro Chapel of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
Bernini and Alexander revived what was at the time a city of flagging importance, as Lloyd Grossman wrote in his 2021 bookThe Artist and the Eternal City: Bernini, Pope Alexander VII, and the Making of Rome (Pegasus), in which he argues that the duo shaped the city we know today.
