What is the meaning of the guillotine? The question crossed my mind as I read through the material that makes up this heterogeneous yet fascinating volume, along with some others: What is the ethical weight of dismemberment? How much of pain and loss survives in the remains of broken things, how much of a thrilling sense of freedom? The Fragment: An Incomplete History, which contains ten essays written by scholars of art history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, numismatics, topography, and film, with one contribution by the artist Cornelia Parker, provokes such questions. Of course to not finish something because one never planned to is quite different from breaking something, or, more to the point, from finding something broken and using it as the basis for reconstructing the lost whole. In recognition of this difference, the volume is divided into two parts, “Received” and “Created.” Still, reflecting its origin as a symposium held at the Getty Center in 2006, there is no central governing principle connecting the essays, so much as a set of unexpected continuities and intriguing contrasts.

The damaged human body has provided an inexhaustible repository of cultural emblems, and it does so in this collection in ways surprising and subtle, predictable and disturbing. In an excellent essay about attempts to reimagine and de-(or re-)restore the Laocoön in the revolutionary period, Brigitte Bourgeois cites Linda Nochlin (whose work is an important influence in the collection) on the pulverization of tradition represented by the fragment: “Whether a matter of human being, subjected to the reign of the guillotine, or artistic monuments, destroyed or mutilated by revolutionary vandalism, the theme of amputation, which could make the errors and infamies of the past disappear, is omnipresent” (64). At several junctures I found myself wishing that there had been more hesitation before relating the “reign of the guillotine” (an odd euphemism for revolutionary murder) to the destruction or mutilation of monuments.

This kind of paralleling of human destruction and vandalism, along with a rather too-quick enthusiasm for the promise of violence, is evident in William Tronzo’s introduction, where an illustration of Henry Fuseli’s well-known The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins (1778–79) faces Villeneuve’s 1793 engraving showing the amputated head of Louis XVI lifted by its hair, while drops of royal blood drip down to words (themselves suggesting a fantasy of sanguinary fecundity) taken from the recently composed Marseillaise, “May a tainted blood drench our furrows.” Tronzo finds in the two images contrasting modalities of the fragment: “received and created, oppressive and liberating, past and future” (1). A medievalist may be forgiven for a certain comfort with the abstracting of symbolic meanings from blood and body parts, but it may be worth hesitating before this celebration of gory murder, this erasure of the abject horror involved in displaying a human head as an object.

The French Revolution is a recurrent topic in the collection, as is the memory of decapitation. In the middle of a selection of photographs of brilliant and evocative works by Parker is an image of a doll cut in half by the guillotine said to have beheaded Marie Antoinette (currently in the collection of Madame Tussauds’s London “Chamber of Horrors”). In her brief introductory remarks, the artist suggests that her interest resides in the things that are missed or ignored (the chalk marks Einstein left on a chalk board, the wear and tear on the seat Freud sat in as he listened to his patients). But the ethical dimension involved in all of her cutting, crushing, and blowing up of objects could use further exploration. The mutilated doll is a figure for the human bodies the guillotine destroyed, a reminder of the ways in which murder makes objects of its victims. And, after all, we admire fragments today in part because we fear the aspirations for totality that utopian visions such as those often identified with the French Revolution loosed upon the world. On the other hand, what the study of fragments reveals is not so much that human bodies are objects like any others, but that objects can take on poignant relations to desires and fears that are human and of the body.

Among the rich disagreements that run through the volume is a fundamental one concerning the history of fascination with the fragment. To say an object has a history can be understood to mean that it arose at a particular historical moment, that it has developed over time, or that its nature has varied depending on historical circumstances. The last is the most straightforward meaning, but unfortunately the one most difficult about which to make any conceptual claims. In any case, The Fragment offers all three quite distinct versions of the historical question. Classicist Glenn W. Most indicates a point of beginning. The role of Renaissance humanism in fostering a poignant fascination with the broken remains of an admired past is not news, of course; but Most’s argument is very interesting when it comes to the paradoxical disappointment evident when complete texts are recovered. He also describes ways in which longing fundamentally drives reception: “For every culture that studies fragments tries to get the fragments it wishes it deserved” (15).

The history of reception limned in Paolo Liverani’s “The Fragment in Late Antiquity” tends in quite a different direction from Most’s analysis. Going back to the classical moment that was the source of Renaissance fantasies of recovery, Liverani addresses himself to the Arch of Constantine in Rome, a monument that has fascinated commentators as an “archetypal example of reuse” of fragments because of its appropriation of elements from earlier eras. But his goal is not to show how a particular instance of reuse might indicate a particular relationship to some earlier era, but rather to illustrate ways in which “any reused element referred, more or less implicitly, to a greater whole” (23). Liverani argues that the programs of antiquity comfortably adapted fragments of the past as broad and fairly imprecise gestures toward particular themes, without bearing any associations from their sources or—much less—from their transitional state as fragments.

Liverani’s approach, while offering a salutary resistance to paradoxically underhistoricized accounts of the relationship to the fragment characteristic of our fragment-obsessed day, emphasizes original intention to a striking degree. Still, the distorting lens of modernity may well offer insights into antique practices that would have surprised their makers, but which are not for that reason wrong. This is the kind of sensibility outlined in Ian Balfour’s account of Theodor Adorno’s celebration of the fragment as particularly modern. “The prominence of the modern fragment allows one . . . to see how there was a sort of fragmentation always already in any and every period” (88).

Tronzo’s evocative account of the varied identities ascribed to the same classical works in the early sixteenth century—“Dido or Cleopatra,” “Herakles or Commodus"—avoids the stark contrast of a modern drive to fragmentation as opposed to a classical commitment to wholes. His “The Cortile delle Statue: Collecting Fragments, Inducing Images” has at its core a bold analysis of the theological project of Julius II’s Belvedere Court. Like Liverani, Most argues that the precision of reference to an earlier era was often less significant than the broad theme or even the gesture to antique “protean building blocks” (46). But Tronzo is far more open to the ways in which the present reshapes the meaning of the past, in which the more recent fascination with the poetics of broken things has necessarily led to the creation of wholes, which themselves in turn shape our experience of the fragment. “In the Renaissance, antiquity—and especially ancient sculpture—came to hold the present in its grip, but the present was also the means by which antiquity itself was imagined” (53). Every form of display adapts (or adopts) the object into a greater whole. Tronzo suggests that the collection of Julius II contains “the ghost of a Christian future that was now the Christian past” (54). In this view the objects in the Cortile become an ensemble shaping a drama of human suffering and divine redemption, loss, and resurrection.

The strongest challenge to historical accounts that trace the importance of the fragment only as far back as the French Revolution or its Romantic aftermath or merely to the Renaissance comes in John Chapman and Bisserva Gaydarska’s “The Fragmentation Premise in Archeology.” The project of this essay is to identify the earliest moments in human prehistory at which objects were created with the intent of breaking them and distributing them for various sacramental or symbolic reasons. It is tantalizing stuff, though of necessity all fairly speculative, given the millennial time frames involved (“From the Paleolithic to More Recent Times,” as their subtitle suggests, with no hint of irony), the paucity of evidence, and its uncertain form. The failure of the essay to be written with the compelling force demanded by its premise only brings out the lucidity and generosity that characterize the rest of the collection.

A more convincing form of argument is to be found in Lucia Travaini’s “Fragments and Coins,” which illuminates the touching uses to which metal money has been put—made into relics, left in tombs as offerings to gods or the dead, used as markers of a possible return (cf., the Trevi Fountain). The essay’s description of offerings is nicely nuanced and salutary in its avoidance of cheap cynicism: “For the clerics in charge of gathering the offerings . . . all coins were good income. For the devout pilgrims who offered them, each coin represented a part of them left behind” (165). Also insightful and thought-provoking is the essay’s related treatment of the paradox inherent in that notoriously fungible phenomena, money, coming to be separated into individual units full of unique aura (cf., any “lucky penny”).

Thomas Crow’s “Composition and Decomposition in Girodet’s Revolt of Cairo” returns readers to the Revolutionary period and offers yet another lost head held up by the hair. But this time the human fragment has been hacked from a Christ-like French officer whose silky tresses are violated by the hands of a dark-skinned figure who has slit his throat and is threatening to strike another officer, himself intent on revenge. Crow is interested in the ways in which Girodet’s painting—“a composition of unresolved fragments” (175)—marks the culmination, and therefore end, of a long phase of complex richness in the painter’s style. In the context of the collection as a whole, this picture, with its central fragment, is a reminder that human body parts are moving because of the losses entailed in their production. More than this, inspired by Tronzo’s argument about the sacramental implications of the Cortile in the Vatican, suggestions might be found in this painting of that central act of fragmentation in Western culture: the moment when the figure of absolute completion, the divine, breaks itself into parts for salvific ends.

On the other hand, the head of the beautiful officer, and its exciting violation by “barbaric” hands, also bring to mind more secular matters. Not only are the erotics of the broken thing clearly demonstrated in Girodet’s symphony of lovely male bodies, but also the ways in which some fragments are unavoidably synecdochic. The final essay, Fernando Vidal’s perversely erudite survey of the B-movie genre, in which brains end up in vats or are otherwise displaced, allows the collection to conclude in the modern era, but it also opens up the question of the hierarchy of fragments, and especially the poignancy of beheading. Vampires are beheaded in order to stop their cycle of death and life. Kings are beheaded as an emblem of a new political dispensation. The movies Vidal surveys remind the viewer that the head, or at least the brain it contains, is the one fragment that is also a whole. Yet as this volume ably illustrates, for centuries, if not longer, the human mind has as often yearned for broken pieces as it has created new fragments in its search for wholeness.