Ahu Tongariki — the row of fifteen moai on every photograph of Easter Island — was lying in pieces thirty years ago, scattered across the slope by the 1960 tsunami. What put them back was a Japanese crane company. Tadano shipped a crane to the other side of the world and did the work at…
A few metres from this sculpture, in a glass case on the landing, sits her right hand. It was found on Samothrace in 1950, eighty-seven years after the statue itself. The fingers are open. That single detail settled an argument that had run for a century: Nike was not holding a wreath, or a trumpet,…