Vienna in the early 1900s is a kind of paradise of power and beauty, the center of an empire that will seemingly go on forever. Only an eccentric young artist, who sees faces in trees and finds God in the forest, seems to understand the fall that is coming. A loss of innocence that will consume him—and much of the world.

You can see the work of Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffman, and the other artists, designers, writers, and philosophers mentioned in this episode in the new exhibition "Timber! Art and Woodwork at the Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire" at Mia.

Save the date: The next live taping of The Object podcast will be October 30 at 7 p.m. at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, absolutely free. Special guest and ticket info coming soon. Now, enjoy this encore episode about a story as old as life itself: things fall apart. But what really happened to all those ancient statues missing arms, legs, heads, and other appendages? And how have we come to treat them as normal—a normal way of seeing the classical age, like paintings of the Renaissance or black-and-white photos of the 1900s? Have they shaped a perception of the past as more remote, mysterious, and, well, broken than it really was?

See some of the battered artworks mentioned in this episode, including the Tiber muse, a Graeco-Roman torso, an ancient Egyptian figure, and the Venus de Milo.

Truth and fiction collide in two stories of museum life. One of a curator who goes missing in the 1950s. The other of a curator who finds himself in the aftermath of World War I, a life chronicled in diaries recently found inside a forgotten storage space. A life filled with beauty and tragedy and the redemptive power of art.

Save the date: The next live taping of The Object is October 30 at 7 p.m. at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, all about the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the art of the Jazz Age. Guests and details coming soon!