Herewith, a strange intersection of art, history, science, sociology, and politics. . .

The Fontana del Bacchino, located in Florence’s Boboli Gardens, has long been understood to be Valerio Cioli’s 1560 sculpture of Pietro Barbino (aka Nano Morgante), a court dwarf of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Recently, however, a team of highly-respected Florentine art historians using DNA and EMP (electro magnetic photography) of the above male figure, refuted the sculpture’s Cinquecentro provenance. Unexpectedly, they established that the work can be definitively traced to the early 1950’s New York City and little-known sculptor, Larry Braunstein!

Before he died in 2007, Braunstein claimed that his landlord, a Mr. Fred Trump, commissioned him to capture the essence in stone of his ten-year-old son, Donald, immortalizing him as Donald Riding His Pet Turtle Tony. Some years later, when young Trump was tricked into actually visiting a museum — the Museum of Modern Art, which housed his image. The docent informed him that the sculpture he found abhorrent was actually him as a boy. Trump recoiled in horror, especially at the size of the boy’s cazzo. He called the sculpture “a fraud” and the sculptor a “loser.” He demanded the work be auctioned off at Christie’s as the work of some overrated immigrant. The work was apparently purchased by the Boboli Museum and re-titled and re-attributed. Nano the dwarf replaced Trump as the subject.

As fate would have it, Braunstein’s and Trump’s paths would cross again. After completing Donald Riding His Pet Turtle Tony, starving artist Braunstein quit working with stone. He found his joy now in a different medium — the human foot.

Before long Larry developed a lively practice as a shady podiatrist who wrote bogus diagnoses for cash; as such, it was only a matter of time before he would meet Trump, a shady draft dodger with cash and a bogus request. No healing words were required for the now wealthy Larry to chisel “bone spurs” on Trump’s medical chart.

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