Art: Europe’s Loss

The human detritus was buried or carted away. The rubble had been heaped into piles, like unmelting snow, or trucked out of town and dumped. Slowly the skeletons of Europe’s wrecked palaces, cathedrals and cities had emerged. The cultural bill for Europe’s latest berserk spree was on the table. A comprehensive picture book, out this week (Lost Treasures of Europe, Pantheon; $5), tots up that bill.

In painting and sculpture, the price had been comparatively small. The Germans had destroyed or stolen some $2,000,000,000 worth of art, but most of the movable stuff eventually turned up in cellars and salt mines and in the private collections of top Nazis. One first-rank painting had been destroyed by bombing: Mantegna’s frescoes painted on plaster in the Eremi-tani church at Padua.

The heaviest losses in Europe’s art museum had been architectural. Considering the hail of shot & shell, bomb and superbomb that pocked the face of Europe for six years, the treasures still surviving were a lot to be thankful for. But much of the best in Western civilization had been blown apart, and what was gone was irreplaceable.

Spared: Paris, Rome. Some 4,000 British churches were hit. Canterbury suffered glancing blows: the adjoining priory was badly smashed; Exeter Cathedral took a heavy pounding. At Coventry, scene of Germany’s first spiteful “Baedeker raid,” the cathedral spire stood alone—a stone tree in a stone desert.

In Italy, 2,500 historic buildings got in the line of fire. The abbey atop Monte Cassino, which St. Benedict founded in 529, was a cellar drowned in rubble. But Rome escaped whole—except for the Church of San Lorenzo-outside-the-Walls, founded by Emperor Constantine (see cut). The ruins of ancient Greece (made genuine ruins by Turkish shells in 1827) had not been disturbed.

In France, the worst damage had been done in the Cherbourg-Calais-Rouen triangle, during the slow, crunching offensives that set up the U.S. breakthrough. Caen had felt Montgomery’s massed artillery, but its nth Century Abbaye-aux-Hommes survived. Rouen Cathedral was the only major French church in partial ruin, but it had not been “nearly so hard-hit as Reims was in World War I. From Saint-Lõ forward, U.S. guns had chopped down church steeples to blast out snipers.

On the Eastern Front, the Germans had been devastatingly thorough. The old, walled Polish city of Cracow remained, in a sea of flattened middle-European towns. Kiev went the way of Warsaw, and with it the onion-domed Pechersk Lavra (cave monastery) which was the first fountainhead of Russian Christianity (see cut).

Germany had reaped the whirlwind: Cologne Cathedral, nicked and shaken, stood like a mother without children, in the dead city. Dresden’s baroque beauty lay shattered from an aerial bombardment in the last weeks of the war. It was as though such medieval beauties as Darmstadt, Niirnberg and Hildesheim, with its steep-gabled Butchers’ Guildhouse, had never been.