Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (18 page)

14

SURPRISES

JULY 1944

S
trangely enough, of the hundreds of works of art DeWald and his team catalogued at the Vatican, none had been sent from Tuscany or its capital, Florence. Somewhere in the path of the retreating German Army lay famous paintings and sculpture by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, and others. Although officials in Rome had lists indicating the locations of the Florentine repositories, they considered them outdated. But they did not appear unduly worried. The Florentine Superintendent, Giovanni Poggi, was one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on the protection of cultural property during war. Most likely they had been moved back from the repositories into Florence and safely stored out of harm’s way.

While DeWald, Cott, Hartt, and others from the Naples office were busy in Rome, Keller continued his inspections of newly liberated towns and villages farther north. Six weeks on the job as the Monuments officer for U.S. Fifth Army had already provided him with quite an education, as he explained to Kathy: “In smaller towns there is usually one church which people like better than any others, usually the patron saint of the town. . . . now when I enter a new place I always try to discover the patron saint immediately in order to get on the right side of the people there. It is a sort of Dale Carnegie method for getting along in Italy.”

His jeep had taken on the importance of a cowboy’s horse. “I am getting more careful all the time, look out for my jeep with the care which you exercise in looking out for our beloved Dino. . . . jeeps are stolen and all sorts of things can happen to them. I need it, for it is my life & my job.” The condition of the roads was dismal, usually nothing more than dust ground as fine as talcum powder. “I shook my pants on the window and a cloud arose. I’ve learned to cherish my wash cloth like a child.” Despite being consumed by his work, Keller managed to remember his upcoming sixth wedding anniversary. He made arrangements through letters to his sister-in-law to have flowers delivered to Kathy, making sure that at least one was yellow.

In the early morning hours of July 3, Allied forces liberated the first town in Tuscany—Siena. The city had suffered minimal damage, having been, in Keller’s words, “artistically bypassed” by German forces. A more precise explanation involved Kesselring’s decision to declare Siena an “open city.” This meant that while German defensive efforts were being abandoned, the Allies would not attack the city. The distance between the combatants was almost nil; Allied forces reached Siena just two hours after German troops had evacuated.

Keller arrived the following day to discover protected-monuments signs already posted on most of the fifty buildings and churches on the MFAA list, the work of a conscientious Civil Affairs officer, Captain Edward Valentine. It had the desired effect, as Keller noted in one of his reports: “We were called ‘barbarians, assassins,’ and evildoers of all sorts in the rich Italian vocabulary. Now the Sienese could read in English and Italian, for some of our ‘Off Limits’ and protective signs were in both languages, that the ‘Anglo-Sassoni assassini
’
were not really that at all. In the wake of care for their rich artistic heritage they could also believe that we were to bring them food, law and order, medicines and a return to normal peaceful living.”

Siena’s great moment of artistic flowering had occurred during the fourteenth century. The stunning
Trecento
works from its churches and museums had been sent, along with those from nearby towns, to countryside villas and palaces. On July 8, Keller reached the most important of the three major Sienese repositories, the Bishop’s Palace at nearby Mensanello. Allied forces had just wrenched control from German troops. French artillery batteries hammered at German positions nearby.

Keller entered the palace to discover a makeshift first-aid station, where a French military doctor was treating three wounded French Colonial soldiers. Continual artillery fire drowned out Keller’s introduction. After sizing up the scholarly looking, middle-aged Fifth Army officer standing before him, and establishing why he was there, the French doctor pointed at two large crates leaning against the wall. As Keller walked over for a closer look, he noticed that someone had cut helmet-size holes in the side of each crate and then removed the excelsior and flannel wrapping to see what was inside.

As Keller peered inside the first hole, time stopped. For a moment he was oblivious to the sound of the artillery, the blood on the floor, and even the injured soldiers. Imprisoned inside the crates was an old friend, the
Maestà
—the
Enthroned Madonna
—the high altarpiece from the Siena Cathedral, the city’s most important work of art. Keller had last seen it as a student almost two decades earlier.

The Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna created the exquisitely refined panel of the Madonna and Child, surrounded by angels and saints, between 1308 and 1311. Duccio used vivid colors to paint his figures with a delicacy and tenderness, a style that influenced two centuries of artists who followed. And now Keller had found it, some 633 years later, in the middle of a war zone. The guns continued their percussion in the distance, but the altarpiece appeared safe and, from what he could see, undamaged. “The French Captain in charge was kind enough to give [me] five minutes in which [I] explained [my] understanding of the medical situation and importance of the deposit in the room—in this order. The French Captain was most cooperative and said that his outfit and the Americans there were leaving at 7:00 that night.”

The doctor hurriedly added that because the Germans took the overseer of the estate with them as they fled, the fate of the
Maestà
and forty other smaller masterpieces fell to Don Luciano, the priest in charge of the seminary at the palace. Rattled by the constant pounding of the artillery, Don Luciano had hidden many of the smaller paintings inside the palace chapel—some in a crate, others in the drawers of a bureau. After examining the unprotected paintings with Don Luciano, Keller carefully removed and wrapped each one in blankets and rags to prevent damage from artillery vibrations.

Although the works were scattered and poorly packed, German troops had largely respected a protected-monuments sign posted by order of Kesselring. The situation could have been far worse—and might yet be. Unable to post guards, Keller notified the Siena Superintendent of his discovery and hoped that, until help arrived, Don Luciano’s presence would keep the works safe.

In the month of July alone, Keller had inspected fifty-five cities, approximately two per day. Weariness hadn’t diminished his gratitude for such an important assignment. As he explained to Kathy,

I am really very fortunate and very much honored by my assignment. . . . It has given me an opportunity to see our great Army in action . . . to see what fearful things occur and to see how men face death and destruction. This sounds a little dramatic, but when a tank looms up out of a dense cloud of dust with a serious American face—young and intelligent, reaching out of the turret, earphones on, part of a team of a few men, guns, fore and aft—deafening clatter & grinding of the caterpillar tread—there is nothing much more dramatic. And it is the truth, the fact, not the act of a Hollywood show.

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
Pietà
, 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 Ghirlandaio’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 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 eighteenfold—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 Cona 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 Pontormo’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 Pretorio 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.

The fall of the Badoglio-led government and the occupation of Italy by German forces in September 1943 prompted most Italian art officials, including Lavagnino and Rotondi, to relocate their collections to the Vatican. But Poggi made the decision to keep the Tuscan artworks within his reach at their existing countryside repositories. These villas, he believed, afforded more protection from aerial attack than any fortress in an urban setting. By the time he realized that the Tuscan repositories lay in the path of the coming ground battle, it was too late to return all of the works of art to Florence. And that gave rise to another concern, one he could do nothing about: perhaps overconfident at the time, Poggi had allowed many of the masterpieces to be transported from Florence uncrated.