The things that were Temporary exhibition

The Athens Charter (1931) proclaimed, in black and white, the will to conserve and preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, calling on all States to support each other in this mutual task and encouraging the return (or restitution), whenever possible, of cultural assets to their original location. The Venice Charter (1964) recommends that replacements of missing parts, if necessary, always be minimal and distinguishable from the original. In any case, it totally opposed creating visual elements ex novo or making any addition that would affect the appearance of the piece. These statements put an end to a widespread practice in the aesthetic and historical restoration of monuments, based on the theories of Viollet-le-Duc, their main proponent. In the case of objects, it also dispensed with the tradition followed in the early collections of classical sculptures, which scorned any notion of beauty in a piece of marble. It was not until the advent of the poetics of ruins in the 18th century that the fragment began to be seen as a part of the whole. Now, we are so used to seeing a world in a meteorite that we would even find it strange if the Louvre Museum's Nike, an iconic example of an amputated sculpture, should one day recover its head. Would we accept it? Would we feel the same if the missing head of the cathedral's weathervane were to be recovered?

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During the siege of 1809, a French musket ball decapitated the angel atop the cathedral's bell tower. The weathervane remained headless for more than 150 years, until 1968, when it was replaced by a new one, the work of the sculptor Ramon M. Carrera. Today, the old headless angel is one of the Girona History Museum's most emblematic objects.