For 355 years it survived exposure to the air and to the vicissitudes of European history. This week, Flowers, an oil painting by the 17th-century Italian master Paolo Porpora, met a chubby, 12-year Taiwanese boy it had no defence against.
In a moment captured in all its agonising inevitability on a security camera, the unnamed boy tripped and plunged forward into the canvas. Luckily, he was unhurt. Unluckily, his fall was broken by the £1 million Baroque masterpiece. The fingers of his left hand pierced the lower right section of the 2m-tall canvas, creating a fist-sized, U-shaped tear.
The painting was displayed at the Huashan 1914 Creative Park in Taipei as part of an exhibition called The Face of Leonardo, Images of a Genius. The boy was taking part in a guided tour with his mother when the mishap occurred on Sunday.
“All 55 paintings in the venue are authentic pieces and they are very rare and precious,” the organisers, TST Art of Discovery, said on their Facebook page. “Once these works are damaged, they are permanently damaged. We hope that everyone can protect these precious artworks with us.”
The organisers said that, since the privately owned painting was insured, they would not seek compensation from the boy’s family. The damage could have been worse: close at hand was the prize piece of the exhibition, a self portrait by Leonardo da Vinci valued at £150 million.
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It is not the worst act of accidental destruction by a museum visitor. In 2006, Nick Flynn tripped over his shoelace at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge and knocked over and smashed three Chinese vases of the Qing dynasty worth £100,000.
In 2010, a woman fell into a Picasso painting, The Actor, inflicting a 15cm tear during an art class at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2006, Steve Wynn, the billionaire casino owner, shoved his elbow through another Picasso, Le Rêve, which he had just sold for a record $139 million. The sale was cancelled, but seven years later, he sold it for $155 million — to the same buyer.