Visitors Break Crystal Chair in Sit-and-Run at Italian Museum

Europe|Visitors Break Crystal Chair in Sit-and-Run at Italian Museum

The man and woman wait for the guards to leave the room before posing for their photo: squatting over a chair covered in Swarovski crystals, pretending to sit. She is taking the picture, he’s posing.

But the squatting takes just a few moments too long, and he accidentally sits back into the chair. He tries to hold on to the wall to keep himself up, to no avail.

The fragile chair — a more sparkly version of the seat in a famous Vincent van Gogh painting — cannot hold the man’s weight. The woman quickly helps him up and ushers him out of the room.

These images spread around the internet this week after the Palazzo Maffei, a museum in Verona, Italy, released security footage of the two visitors who inadvertently damaged the artwork this spring.

Museum officials said they had contacted the police, though they consider the mishap an accident. The local authorities have not learned the identities of the people in the video, and Ms. Carlon said the museum hoped that releasing it would encourage the accidental vandals to come forward and apologize.

“It wasn’t such a brilliant thought to sit on an artwork,” Vanessa Carlon, the director of the museum, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. The bigger concern, she said, was how far people were willing to go to get a memorable photo — and in this case, how the pair fled instead of owning up to the damage.