Tourist posing for pictures rips through priceless masterpiece painting
Security footage from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, shows the unidentified visitor posing for a photo in front of a 1712 artwork by Anton Domenico Gabbiani.
As he tries to mimic the pose in the painting, the tourist suddenly loses balance and falls back against the canvas — tearing a hole near the bottom where the subject's foot is.
The painting, which is normally kept at Palazzo Pitti, a separate art gallery, was only temporarily in the Uffizi for an exhibition when disaster struck on Saturday, Corriere Fiorentino reported.
The bumbling tourist tripped over a step installed specifically to keep visitors at a safe distance.
The tourist was quickly apprehended and formally reported to police, management at the Uffizi told Italian media.
He faced charges of damaging cultural heritage, according to the Wanted in Rome outlet.
The painting — of Ferdinando de' Medici, the grand prince of Tuscany — has been removed for repairs, a museum spokesperson said.
A new crackdown on badly behaved tourists at the world-famous art gallery is being imposed in the wake of the stunt.
'We will set very precise limits, preventing behaviour that is not compatible with the sense of our institutions and respect for cultural heritage,' Uffizi director Simone Verde said in a statement following the incident.
'The problem of visitors who come to museums to make memes or take selfies for social media is rampant,' he added.
Saturday's incident is the latest in a recent string of examples of tourists damaging priceless artworks in Italy, causing many in the country to accuse visitors of disrespecting their heritage.
Earlier this month, an idiot tourist was filmed damaging a precious work of art after he sat on it to take a picture.
The tourist had sat on the delicate chair, adorned with thousands of Swarovski crystals, causing it to crumble beneath his weight.
Both the man and his female companion fled, leaving the 'van Gogh' chair art piece by artist Nicola Bolla warped and mangled.
'They ignored every rule of respect for art and cultural heritage,' management at Verona's Palazzo Maffei said on social media, noting that the visitors waited for security to leave the room before the ill-fated photo op.
The pair were branded 'superficial' and 'disrespectful' by the museum.
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