FLORENCE’S ART TREASURES

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 23, 15 January 1945, Page 24

FLORENCE’S ART TREASURES

“There is rather a good story about some gunners from the sth Field Regiment when we were moving up at dusk towards Florence. They arrived at their area, put the guns in, and went off to a nearby caza and bedded down on some handy looking beds which were leaning against the wall. They spent a very comfortable night, but were somewhat surprised when in the morning some old Italian gents arrived and began shouting and waving their arms. It turned out that the “ beds ” were pictures from galleries in Florence taken into the country for safety and deposited in this house. So far as we know, no damage was done to the paintings, but imagine a large Kiwi sticking his bottom through a Botticelli. Just like our fellows—they probably wouldn’t have recognized it for what it was right way up in daylight.”—Letter from a New-Zealander in Italy. rr-iHE first part of the article which I follows was written by Sylvia Sprigge in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on August 18, 1944, when every one who knows Florence well was thinking of it and probably walking its streets and squares, its churches, cloisters, and galleries in ' imagination with a continual hope that the fighting would not develop into more than sniping and that the famous walls would never be shelled. From a popular point of view, she wrote, the precious character of Rome was easier to convey. The first Emperors lived in Rome. The Pope lives in Rome, and Rome is a city with as many early pagan and Christian memories and traditions as Athens, Constantinople, or Jerusalem. In many other ways Rome is a modern city. We should remember, though, that the Renaissance was born in Florence, not Rome. When the Turks overran Eastern Europe in 1453 and scholars and artists fled from Constantinople to the univer-

sities of Europe with precious texts and documents, Florence was already in its golden age of painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and handicrafts of every kind. The taste and culture of Florence under the Medici have spread

all over Europe and still influence the arts wherever they are practised. The Italian genius is Tuscan, and the Tuscans all went to Florence. Boccaccio, to whom Chaucer owed much, Petrarch, from whom we took the sonnet to the

greater richness of English lyric poetry, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, the Della Robbias, Brunelleschi, who built the first great cupola in Europe and set its octagonal wonder on the Cathedral of Florence, Michelangelo, and, above all, Dante, all are Tuscans of 1 uscany and Florence. But so were Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato and Phidias Greeks, and they live on, even though all that is left of their Athens is the Acropolis and a few temples. Scholars, when they go to Athens, must rebuild the city in their imagination and from their knowledge. No such effort is necessary in Florence. This city (population 354,975, compared with Auckland’s 223,700) contains within its walls almost all the milestones of our

modern painting, sculpture, architecture, and handicrafts. Any tourist, learned or not, notices that at once. At every corner he finds something to delight the eye, even if it is but the intricate ironwork of a gate leading to a garden or some lovely ceramics or the fine damask of a hanging curtain in some palace or a piece of furniture, copied again and again all over Europe. When Ruskin had lived beside Giotto’s campanile in Florence for a time he wrote : “I have lived beside it many a day and looked upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight . . . that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline . . . that serene height of mountain alabaster coloured like the morning cloud and chased like a seashell.” The man who built it was, like so many of the great Florentines and like so few artists since, a great painter also and a poet. Michelangelo sculpted, painted, built, and wrote sonnets. Leonardo painted and also wrote and experimented in the science of ballistics. Most of the Tuscan painters both frescoed in tempera and painted in oil on canvas and wood. Many sculpted as well. Ghiberti, who built the wonderful bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence, spent forty years, according to Vasari, working on them and then died. Nothing like them has ever been made by the hand of man since, although Europe is full of bronze relief work of one kind and another. Michelangelo said of them that they* worthy to be the gates of Paradise, For painters the city has always been a place of pilgrimage. Masaccio’s frescoes in the Carmine Church were the first paintings in Europe to master the art of raising the figure from the flat, and the disposition of his light and shadow, the whole colouring, and composition in these paintings are still an inspiration to any one who paints or who likes painting. Over on the other side’’’of the Arno near the main railway-station is the Church of Santa Maria Novella, with its unique frescoes by Paolo Uccello in the

Green Cloister, and its Ghir- I landajo and Cimabue frescoes, | and, indeed, elsewhere in the ? city. In the Convent of St. j Mark’s there are those little x ' frescoes of Fra Angelico’s, j and in the Capella Medici, likewise across the Arno, the | gay walls of Benozzo Gozzoli, I his best work. Beside all these Florentine frescoes modern ( attempts to decorate the i walls of public buildings • here and in Europe are still i in their infancy. Nothing ; like the gaiety and movement and delight of these things has appeared since. Writing from Rome on August 8, a special correspondent of the Manchester Guardian Weekly said that some authoritative account was then possible of the extent to which the art treasures of Florence had been removed from the city. In the early stages of the war the policy of the Italian fine arts authorities was to disperse movable works of art from cities to

avoid risk of damage in air raids. Later, as a result of the Allied invasion of Italy and more particularly following the threat to art treasures that had been deposited at Cassino, this policy was reversed. At Rome, and it is believed also at Venice and elsewhere in Northern Italy, works of art that had been dispersed were collected again and removed to central deposits within the cities themselves. By some oversight this was not done in Florence until rather late in the day, when transport was available only for military purposes. As a result there were still, at the time of writing, about twenty-six deposits of art at scattered points in the ’countryside round Florence. These deposits were divided into four main groups within twenty-five miles of the city. Officers of the Allied Military Government at the head of its Sub-commission for Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives visited one of these groups, which was then the only one in Allied hands. The

main deposit of the group was at Montegufoni, a country house in a picturesque setting, the property of Sir Osbert Sitwell. The pictures stored there were mainly from the Uffizi Gallery, including such famous masterpieces as the “ Primavera ” of Botticelli and the madonnas of Giotto and Cimabue. The pictures were not crated, but were leaning against the walls of various rooms. These priceless works of art at Montegufoni had for three weeks been under the guardianship of Professor Fasola, who had come out from Florence on foot to take charge of these and other treasures of his city deposited in the neighbourhood. As the battle approached the area, the professor — is the director of the Library of Fine Arts in Florenceinduced the German troops to keep their fire away from Montegufoni. When the area became no man’s land the professor stayed on regardless of all danger, and on the arrival of the British

troops was equally insistent that they should avoid directing fire near the house. The conduct of the professor in doing all that one man could possibly do to preserve these works of art from destruction has been truly heroic. Many other Florentine masterpieces are believed still to be in the various deposits that it has not been possible to visit yet, among them the famous bronze doors of the cathedral baptistery by Ghiberti, and Donatello’s sculptures of David, St. John the Baptist, and Saint George. The Michelangelo sculptures from the Medici Chapel, it has been established, had been returned to Florence.

Right, Leonardo Da Vinci. In the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, photographed by Alinari. Da Vinci has been called the Faust of the Italian Renaissance and his fields of interest included painting (he was the most accomplished painter of his generation and one of the most accomplished in the world), sculpture, architecture and music and weapons of war.