The Card Players

Just after 1 a.m. on 27 May 1993, a car bomb went off in the Via dei Georgofili beside the Uffizi. Five people were killed and the blast blew in the gallery windows. The window directly in front of this painting shattered, and the canvas was torn into roughly 600 fragments. For years the pieces sat in boxes. A single old photograph of the intact picture became the map for putting it back together, fragment by fragment, and the reassembled Card Players returned to the wall in 2018. Manfredi had made it around 1617, a guardroom scene of soldiers hunched over their cards in hard raking light, the sort of everyday, low-life gathering he built a career on.