Akhenaten’s Faceless Nose: Florence Exhibits 4,500 Years of Broken Art

In one of the halls of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, a small stone fragment displays only the nose of Pharaoh Akhenaten and part of his face. Carved around 1350 BCE and discovered in an ancient dump east of the Nile, it now serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition “The Broken: Power of the Shard.”

Opened on September 25 and running until January 24, 2027, the exhibition features more than 80 incomplete artifacts spanning 4,500 years of civilizations, loaned by major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre, and the British Museum. It was curated by the Palazzo Strozzi in partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Each fragment carries its own story of destruction. In the center of the hall stands a bronze leg of a Greek king statue toppled in Athens in 200 BCE, and nearby is a bust of Mussolini with a bullet hole in its forehead, inflicted by Italian fighters after the liberation in 1945.

The 1966 flood of Florence also has its place in the exhibition: a 14th-century Tuscan sculpture, ruined by floodwaters, is on display as the city commemorates the 60th anniversary of the disaster. The exhibition will travel to Washington in March 2027.