Art: The Flowers of Florence

From the Italian front last week a BBC reporter broadcast a statement that was enough to set the art connoisseurs of the world mopping their brows with relief. Said he, as the Allies moved into Florence:

“In an Italian house two thousand yards behind the front line, I discovered the world’s most famous paintings stacked in tiers against the walls, which were still echoing with the thunder of German guns.”

More specific and even better news followed. The BBC reporter had stumbled on a golden horde of paintings from Florence’s famed Uffizi Gallery, including works by Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio, Filipino Lippi, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto. Said the BBC man:

“I had gone into this semi-deserted mansion to obtain a better view of the battle. As we entered the hall, covered with dust and broken glass, we were amazed to see a magnificent early Florentine crucifix hanging among the smashed mirrors and torn paper.

“We hurried through into the main room, and alongside the straw mattresses laid out by Italian refugees … I gave a shout … as I realized I was looking at Botticelli’s Primavera.”

News from the city of Florence itself was more doubtful. It was uncertain whether the fountainhead of the Renaissance was still lifting all its loveliest jets toward the sky—Giotto’s tinted and delicate campanile; Brunelleschi’s great cathedral dome which, looming above the huge round windows of its supporting tower, has risen against the horizon as the city’s most prominent symbol. Also unaccounted for were Florence’s masterly sculptures, including Michelangelo’s celebrated marble David, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise bronze doors to the Baptistery, the Bargello collection of pieces by Michelangelo, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Benvenuto Cellini. However, while the retreating Germans had destroyed five of the six bridges over the Arno, they had left the oldest and most valued of all, the legendary Ponte Vecchio (see cut). Built in 1345, its roofed street was a promenade for Dante, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci; in modern times, jewelry shops have succeeded its Renaissance goldsmiths. Over the bridge runs a covered passageway connecting the Uffizi Gallery with the Pitti Palace Museum.

But the Germans had apparently kept their hand in. Perhaps the most famous of all Florence’s paintings—Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—was reported missing. The Germans had carried it off. said a cable last week, “in payment for winter coal.” Florence had apparently lost a supreme product of the period which, wrote Walter Pater, represented “the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination.”