№ 82
Before Restoration

The Tower's Cracked Wall, Before Restoration

A view straight upward, on the same side of the tower already seen in exhibits No. 77, 80 and 81 — only here the damage looks the most serious in the whole series. Starting right above the two lower arches, a wide, branching crack runs through the entire colonnade with its leaf-carved capitals, all the way up to the cornice. On the left, between two columns, a broken decorative fragment hangs, held to the wall only partially.

This frame is a reminder that graceful, painstakingly laid brick decoration can also be a sign of serious structural weakness — a crack running the full width of a wall usually means the wall itself is shifting, not just its surface. It is precisely damage like this, not merely crumbled leaves on a capital, that is the reason the tower was fenced off before restoration — entering the building, or even standing too close to the wall, had become dangerous.

As in the other exhibits in this series, the animation only shifts the camera barely perceptibly — a real, already-coloured frame needs no colouring, and the image speaks for itself.

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