Crederrei, se fussi di sasso presents a chrono-material and dialectical reflection on one of the most paradigmatic acts of iconoclasm of the Twentieth Century: the hammer blow that Piero Cannata gave to the second toe of the left foot of the David (1501-1504), the renowned sculptural masterpiece by Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Resulting from five years of thorough study of all the implications surrounding the accident, Crederrei, se fussi di sasso offers a reading of all the events directly or indirectly linked to the iconoclast act. Using an anachronistic or non-lineal approach, this project, thus, presents a multifaceted understanding of Cannata’s gesture, a sound reconstruction of the event encompassing all the voices involved.

The proposal draws from the reception theory in the field of art and from the studies on iconoclasm in particular, adopting a new materialist perspective taking into account the qualities of the masterpiece. This specific approach relies on significant scientific information, which was obtained after the chemical and petrographic analysis of two of the fragments detached from the sculpture.

Crederrei, se fussi di sasso, the exhibition phase of the research project Martellata_14.09.91, consists of five sculptural outputs, two crystallographies and two video essays. The artist carried out the production of the works during a residence at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome (March-November 2022). The project is accompanied by the publication Martellata, edited by Mousse Publishing during 2024.

Throughout the development of the project, the artist counted with the collaboration of the following institutions: CNR – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Fondazione Casa Buonarroti, Galleria dell’Accademia, Gipsoteca dell’Istituto d’Arte di Firenze, Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro, and Palazzo di Giustizia di Firenze (all of them in Florence); Dryphoto Arte Contemporanea (Prato); Arte Rosa Restauro (Milan); Musei Vaticani – Laboratorio Restauro Marmi e Calchi (Vatican City); the Stanford University – Computer Science, The Digital Michelangelo Project, Archive of 3D Models (San Francisco, United States); TorArt, the Cava and Laboratorio di Arte Michelangelo, and the Museo Cava Fantiscritti (Carrara, Italy); the University of Helsinki – Department of Geosciences and Geography Subunit (Helsinki); the Faculty of Geology of the Universitat Autònoma de Bellaterra (Barcelona, Spain).

The project is mainly supported by: AECID, Royal Academy of Spain in Rome, Kone Foundation, Suomen Kultturi Rahasto, Taike, Publics, Uniarts Helsinki and Villa Romana.

Crederrei, se fussi di sasso is a component of the doctoral thesis Behaving Unconventionally in Gallery Settings, which experiments with instigating occasions for misrepresented (human and non-human) behaviours that, within the conceptual (virtual and non-virtual) architecture of display, could be considered non-conventional and traditionally unacceptable.