Fragments at Colnaghi
An Online Exhibition from 15 July to 15 August 2026
When Percy Bysshe Shelley imagined the ruined statue of Ozymandias, its “colossal wreck” surrounded by the endless desert, he captured something that has fascinated artists, collectors and historians for centuries: the peculiar power of the fragment. Broken objects possess an extraordinary ability to outlive the worlds that created them. Detached from their original settings, stripped of their original functions and often divorced from their makers’ intentions, fragments become more than the remains of lost wholes. They acquire new lives, new meanings and new audiences, each generation finding in them a different way of understanding the past.
There is a paradox at the heart of every fragment. It is defined by absence, yet it survives. Its incompleteness demands imagination, inviting us to reconstruct what has disappeared whilst simultaneously encouraging us to appreciate what remains. As Walter Benjamin observed, every surviving work of culture also bears witness to destruction. Fragments are therefore not simply documents of artistic achievement but of history itself, carrying the traces of conquest, devotion, restoration, neglect and time.
Far from being regarded merely as damaged objects, fragments have occupied a central place in the history of collecting. Renaissance humanists prized the broken marbles emerging from the soil of Rome, displaying ancient torsos, heads and reliefs in gardens and studioli where they were admired alongside complete sculptures. Artists drew them obsessively. Michelangelo is said to have believed that a single antique torso could teach more than a finished statue, while Raphael measured the ruins of ancient Rome in an effort to recover the principles of classical architecture.
The eighteenth century transformed fragments into the foundation of a new discipline. The excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii fuelled Europe’s fascination with antiquity, whilst Johann Joachim Winckelmann constructed the earliest history of Greek art largely through surviving fragments, finding in broken sculpture what he famously described as “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” At the same time, Piranesi’s dramatic engravings of Roman ruins spread an image of antiquity defined as much by survival as by loss, inspiring generations of Grand Tour travellers and collectors.
Yet fragments have never belonged exclusively to antiquity. Throughout the Middle Ages, the smallest relics of saints were preserved with extraordinary reverence, their authority resting precisely in their partial survival. Centuries later, Romantic writers would find in ruins and fragments powerful symbols of memory, transience and imagination. John Ruskin argued passionately against restoration, insisting that every weathered surface and missing stone formed part of an object's authentic history, urging readers to "watch an old building with anxious care" and to value its stones "as you would the jewels of a crown."
Our online exhibition Fragments continues this long history. Spanning antiquity to the twentieth century, the exhibition brings together sculptures, drawings, photographs and devotional objects to explore how incomplete works of art have continually been collected, studied and reimagined.
Sarcophagus Fragments of a Lion Hunt; a Rider on Horseback; and an Amazon, marble. Respectively: 54 × 36 cm; 34 × 52 cm; 42 × 27 cm.
Among the earliest works in the exhibition are three Roman marble sarcophagus reliefs dating to the second century A.D., each surviving from what would once have been richly carved funerary monuments. During the High Roman Empire, marble sarcophagi increasingly replaced cremation urns among the imperial elite, their four sides adorned with elaborate relief cycles depicting mythology, hunting scenes and military exploits. Amazonomachies, lion hunts and heroic battles transformed death into an allegory of courage, virtue and triumph over chaos, allowing the deceased to be associated with the moral ideals of the classical past.
Baule artist (Côte d'Ivoire), late nineteenth–early twentieth century, Seated Figure (bolo-bian), wood.
Among the Baule peoples of present-day Côte d'Ivoire, bolo bian ("spirit husband") figures occupied an important place within systems of divination and healing. Commissioned as receptacles for benevolent nature spirits, they were cared for through offerings and ritual attention, enabling diviners to establish and maintain a harmonious relationship between the spiritual and human worlds. Their idealised features, carefully ordered scarification and composed seated posture do not represent individual likenesses but embody cultural ideals of beauty, dignity and spiritual authority. Beyond its cultural significance, the present sculpture possesses an exceptional collecting history. It passed through the hands of several of the twentieth century's most distinguished Parisian collectors and dealers of African art, including Pierre Vérité, whose pioneering scholarship and collecting helped establish African sculpture within the canon of modern art, before entering the collections of Olivier Le Corneur and Jean Roudillon.
Joseph van Aken (Antwerp, 1699–London, 1749), A Statue of Venus, black chalk with touches of white chalk on blue paper, 42 × 22.9 cm.
Born in Antwerp but active for most of his career in London, Joseph van Aken belonged to a generation of artists for whom the study of antiquity remained fundamental to artistic training. This elegant chalk drawing records the celebrated Venus Genetrix, a Roman sculptural type ultimately derived from a lost Greek original, illustrating the complex chain through which classical models survived across the centuries. Drawings such as this were far more than exercises in observation. Before photography and plaster cast collections became widespread, they formed an essential means by which artists studied, preserved and disseminated the forms of ancient sculpture. Van Aken's sensitive handling of black and white chalk demonstrates the continued authority of the antique within eighteenth-century artistic practice, when fragments and Roman copies frequently served as the principal means through which the art of Greece was encountered.
Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), Female Torso, 1978, silver gelatin photograph, 50.8 × 40.6 cm.
Few twentieth-century photographers engaged with the legacy of classical sculpture as consistently as Robert Mapplethorpe. Produced in 1978, Female Torso isolates an ancient marble fragment against a deep black ground, transforming an archaeological survival into an autonomous sculptural image. By treating the weathered torso with the same precision and controlled lighting that characterise his portraits and studies of the human body, Mapplethorpe deliberately dissolved the distinction between ancient marble and living flesh. The photograph belongs to a wider body of work in which classical sculpture served as both subject and ideal. Rather than presenting the fragment as evidence of loss, Mapplethorpe celebrated its formal completeness, demonstrating how the language of antiquity continued to shape artistic practice well into the twentieth century.
Old soul, young eye.
Old Masters made modern.
Colnaghi continues to celebrate the dialogue between past and present.
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