Italy’s Art Vandal Strikes Again

posted Wed. April 28 12:13 pm zoomata staff

Piero Cannata, who broke a toe of Michelangelo’s David, scribbled on a Jackson Pollock painting and took a black marker to a Filippo Lippi fresco, has struck again.

The only consolation is that this time Cannata, a failed artist, did not pick anything particularly valuable but he did try to make a political statement. Cannata took brown spray paint to a monument for WWII heroes in Prato, Tuscany.

Prato, 10 miles north-west of Florence, is the hometown of Maurizio Agliana, one of three Italian hostages in Iraq.

“For me a monument to fallen soldiers represents a suicide,” Cannata told newspapers. “It’s like artwork where Isaac is about to be sacrificed by his father Abraham, it consecrates death and war.”

Cannata probably thought his gesture would get him into the spotlight at a moment when the city is crowded with reporters following the hostage crisis, but his marking up of the marble angel statue failed to get him any attention from passersby. Cannata waited, then turned himself in only to find the police didn’t take him seriously.

He was eventually fined for defacing public property and released.
Why can’t Cannata be stopped? His gesture is bound to fuel more discussion about a bill reforming a 1978 law on psychiatric care in Italy, currently being debated in parliament. The Basaglia law abolished state-run mental hospitals in favor of short-term hospitalization in small general hospitals.

Cannata, who said he had given up defacing art for studying grammar and reproductive rights’ laws, was hospitalized following his other exploits and subsequently released. 1999-2004 zoomata.com

This is an original news story, please play nice.

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