Psyche Can Hold Her Jar of Beauty Again
When we opened the crate containing this marble Psyche and the Jar of Beauty (after Thorvaldsen’s original) we also got a bad surprise: both her hands were broken off.
Strangely, although she was crated and braced with foam, the packers decide not to put foam in front of her hands, and that’s exactly where she broke.
The poor girl was supposed to hold a jar between her two hands—arguably the central defining feature of the piece—but this had broken in three places.
Fortunately, the breaks were clean—we think they happened sometime in the distant past and were repaired with inferior glue. Since there were three breaks in an area that doesn’t have any support, the key was to align properly and brace until the epoxy set properly, which involved holding the hands for a while, then using painter’s tape, which provided enough support for the fairly light weight of the hands while also being easily removable. Then it was just a matter of waiting.
A promising alignment
The last step was to disguise the breaks with proper color-matching, and voila—good as new!
Good old painter’s tape
