Italy museum hunts for tourists in viral Van Gogh chair-smashing video

A combination of video grab taken from CCTV footage released by Palazzo Maffei museum on June 16, 2025 shows a tourist breaking a crystal-covered chair on display as he poses for pictures at Palazzo Maffei museum in Verona, before fleeing once the damage became apparent. Agence France-Presse

ROME — An Italian museum has launched a manhunt for the most unlikely of outlaws — two clumsy middle-aged tourists who managed to almost wreck a work of art while posing for photos.

Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla — described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.

While the woman squats but does not seem to touch the work — known as Van Gogh’s Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals — the man is not so careful, sitting and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight.

READ: Museum visitor falls into art exhibit’s 8-foot hole

The pair can then be seen fleeing the room, in a post that went viral over the weekend.

Palazzo Maffei described it as “every museum’s nightmare” and told AFP on Monday it had made a complaint to the police, without specifying when it was filed.

The museum posted an account on social media on Thursday saying the incident had happened fewer than four weeks ago and the chair had since been repaired.

READ: Amorsolo painting stolen from museum

“It was an idiotic thing to do,” Bolla told Italian magazine Fanpage.

But the artist added that he could also see a “positive side” to the incident.

“It’s like a kind of performance. Ordinary people can do it too, not just artists.”