saving italian art -- 3/12/24

12 Mar 2024

saving italian art -- 3/12/24

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Today's selection -- from Saving Italy by Robert M. Edsel. The massive efforts to save Italian art masterpieces during World War II:

“On July 4, the same day Keller arrived in Siena, Superintendent of Florentine Galleries Giovanni Poggi received a summons to report to the German Military Commander of Tuscany, Colonel Metzner. With barely a greeting, Metzner asked ‘if Villa Bossi-Pucci in Montagnana contained works of art of such importance to require their transportation across the Apennines’ to northern Italy? Poggi, fluent in both German and French, was surprised by Metzner's sudden mention of Montagnana, site of the Villa Bossi-Pucci, which served as one of Tuscany's thirty eight art repositories.

“The constant shifting of the battlefield had prevented Poggi and his team from reaching many of the Tuscan repositories, but the Germans had no such impediment: Metzner's sudden curiosity about the Villa Bossi-Pucci—which housed close to three hundred masterpieces from the Uffizi Gallery and the Palatine Gallery at the Pitti Palace, including Botticelli's Minerva and the Centaur, Giovanni Bellini's Pieta, and Caravaggio's Sleeping Amor—was cause for great concern.

“By July 1944, few men in the world had more hands-on experience protecting works of art than Poggi, a native Florentine described by Hartt as ‘a character who walked out from one of Chirlandaio's frescoes.’ Poggi oversaw a domain that included the provinces of Florence, Arezzo, and Pistoia. At age sixty-four, he had lived long enough to witness war engulf his homeland twice.

“Fate selected Poggi to be a defender of the arts. An illustrious connoisseur and curator, he had been appointed Director of the esteemed Uffizi Gallery in 1912, at the age of thirty-two. The following year, he helped recover the world's most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, stolen from the Louvre in 1911. The painting had been missing for more than two years before surfacing in a Florence motel. After a brief showing at the Uffizi, and a tour through Italy, Poggi accompanied the painting back to Paris in December 1913.

“Just six months later, the outbreak of the Great War consumed Europe. The burning of the library in Louvain galvanized art officials across the continent. Few if any nations had more at risk than Italy, no single city more than Florence. Poggi's quick work protecting the Uffizi's treasures drew the attention of officials in Rome. Soon they enlisted his aid in safeguarding prominent masterpieces in other Italian cities. Now, for the second time in twenty-six years, Poggi found himself responsible for protecting the treasures of Tuscany from a world at war.

Poggi around 1910

“Poggi calmly answered Metzner's question, telling him that there were indeed highly important works from the galleries and museums of the State in Montagnana. But, ‘due to agreements taken with the General Direction of the Arts and with the Office directed by Colonel Langsdorff, it had been decided, as with the other repositories, not to remove anything unless there were some urgent peril, and in that case paintings would have been moved to Florence and not across the Apennines.’ Unfazed, Metzner pressed Poggi further, asking in an ominous tone, ‘So you are rejecting our offer?’ Ten months of dealing with German officers had taught Poggi to appeal to their authority—and ego. He explained: ‘We are not rejecting it, on the contrary, we are grateful. We accept it in the event that it becomes necessary to move these things to Florence.’ The meeting concluded soon thereafter; Poggi assumed his replies had settled the matter.

“The outbreak of war in 1940 had caused Italian superintendents to transfer collections to areas outside the city centers. Acting with ‘frenzied lucidity,’ Poggi and his team had moved almost six hundred major works to privately owned villas and palaces in the Tuscan countryside in less than two weeks. That number had increased more than eighteen fold—to 11,139 various art objects—within six weeks. Those that couldn't be moved, usually due to their size and weight, had to be protected in situ, often by employing the most ingenious of methods. Local artisans built a brick tomb around Michelangelo's towering sculpture of David, and smaller ones for each of his adjacent works, referred to as the Slaves. Poggi hoped that these brick silos would provide protection against bomb fragments or even the collapse of the roof in the event of a direct hit on the building.

“With the dramatic increase in Allied bombing of Italian cities in the fall of 1942, Poggi and other superintendents received orders to make additional evacuations from the cities. This required him to secure more villas for storage. The groupings of art were historic. Villa di Torre a Cana contained not only Michelangelo's statues from the Medici tombs in the Church of San Lorenzo but all of the contents of the master's family home, Casa Buonarroti. This collection contained two of his earliest works and many of his letters and drawings. Never before had so many of Michelangelo's works been gathered in one place. Sitting alongside were masterpieces by Verrocchio, Donatello, Della Robbia, Lorenzo Monaco, and the most important surviving work by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, the Portinari Altarpiece. The quality and rarity of the art was simply staggering.

“The Castle of Montegufoni housed 246 masterpieces from the Uffizi and the Pitti by great masters such as Cimabue, Giotto, Botticelli, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo, and Rubens. The repository at Poppiano sheltered Pontorrno's emotive masterpiece, Deposition from the Cross, from the Capponi Chapel in the Church of Santa Felicita, and Rosso Fiorentino's crowning achievement, Descent from the Cross, from the town of Volterra. The Palazzo Pretoria at Poppi held Hans Memling's Portrait of a Young Man and Michelangelo's Mask of a Faun; the Oratory of Sant'Onofrio at Dicomano contained Roman sculptures and sarcophagi; the villa at Poggio a Caiano housed Donatello's Saint George and Michelangelo's Bacchus. The quality and importance of each villa's contents surpassed the last, each filled with the accomplishments of civilization's most creative minds.”