The very qualities that made sculpture such an essential and progressive artistic medium in Quattrocento Italy were also responsible for its vulnerability to deliberate acts of defacement and physical transformation during the period: its monumentality, public display, and dynamic integration into the built environment; the evocative life-like effects and apparent animacy of figuration; the sophisticated engagement with classical culture; and the alluring virtuosity of the more accomplished masters in their fashioning of sculptural materials, supported by an emergent theoretical discourse on the visual arts. Through intentional acts that were sometimes referred to in the period as the “unmaking” of sculpture, statues composed of diverse materials and representing a variety of subjects were disfigured and modified. Portraits were damaged when their subjects went out of favor, in the classical tradition of damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory). As we shall see, a statue of Virgil was condemned as an inappropriate form of commemoration and destroyed. Christian religious sculptures were defaced in acts interpreted as blasphemy, sometimes triggering a surge of cultic veneration. An increasingly common circumstance in which sculpture came under attack was war and civil strife, with diarists and chroniclers describing destruction during the sacking of cities and individual sculptures exhibiting breakage like battle wounds. Giorgio Vasari would later designate war “the principle enemy” of the arts.1 Sculptural transformations could also result from constructive interventions that affirmed the value of the works. Devotional touching of marble and bronze sacred images could wear down or enhance select features with a sheen. There was a long-standing practice of spoliation and the repurposing of stone fragments, with a new interest in restoration through provisioning classical sculpture with missing body parts and accessories.