Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis (34 page)

Alessandro Cagiati, who recruited both Don Anelli and Pietro Ferraro, performed heroically in the service of two nations. He was decorated by the United States and by Italy, where he received the Knight Officer of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Before returning to his adopted American homeland, Cagiati interceded to defend his friend and father figure, “Pippo”—Marchese Filippo Serlupi Crescenzi—from accusations that his wartime activities as a diplomat, which placed him in contact with various Fascist leaders, somehow constituted collaboration. In an effort to clear Serlupi’s name, Cagiati wrote to Italian officials, stating that Serlupi’s activity “was aimed at protecting the lives of Allies, of the Italians and of their properties from the Nazi-Fascist attempts to damage them. . . . The successful efforts . . . necessitate the highest gratitude from both the Allies and the Italians.”

THE FIRST MONUMENTS
officer stationed in Italy—Mason Hammond—was transferred to London in early 1944. There he worked with Francis Henry Taylor, Vice-Chairman of the Roberts Commission, to develop a restitution policy for postwar Germany. In August 1945, Hammond established the MFAA office in Berlin, where he struggled to stay ahead of the constant personnel needs posed by the discovery of tens of thousands of works of art and other cultural objects stolen by the Nazis. His service led to decorations from France (Legion of Honor), the Netherlands, and Italy.

Returning to Harvard in 1946, Hammond resumed a teaching career that continued for another twenty-seven years, including nine as master of Kirkland House. From 1936 to 1986, with the exception of his war years and sabbaticals, Hammond’s voice became familiar to graduates and the audience at Commencement. But that record was dwarfed by one even more remarkable: from 1921, as a Harvard freshman, until the mid-1990s, with the exception of his war service, he attended Morning Prayers six days a week. “I am not a holy man,” Hammond once remarked, “but I am a creature of habit, and Morning Prayers is a good habit to cultivate.” In addition to his prodigious career at Harvard, Hammond served as head of classical studies at the American Academy in Rome on three occasions, and twice as Acting Director of Bernard Berenson’s enduring legacy, Villa I Tatti—The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

On October 13, 2002, just four months shy of his one-hundredth birthday (which fell on Valentine’s Day), Mason Hammond died. One of his three daughters summed up her father as “a model of moral integrity,” a sentiment shared by those with whom he served in Italy and northern Europe.

Tubby Sizer, the man who encouraged Deane Keller to apply for service as a Monuments officer, never fully recovered from the illness that had forced him to leave the European Theater in 1944. In 1945, Sizer was named Commendatore of the Order of the Crown of Italy for his service as a Monuments officer. He resumed his duties as director of the Yale University Art Gallery until 1947 and retired from teaching in 1957. He lived another ten years before his death at the age of seventy-five.

John Bryan Ward-Perkins performed the work of a Monuments officer in North Africa before the formal creation of a cultural preservation unit. His leadership proved so instrumental to the success of the operation in Italy that Norman Newton, Monuments officer for British Eighth Army, recommended that he be decorated by the United States. “The work of both MFAA officers with the Armies throughout this campaign was signally aided by this officer,” wrote Newton. “[His] intervention frequently prevented the insistent demands of American, British, and Italian civil sentimentalism from interfering with the practicality of operations in the field.” Ward-Perkins, Deputy Director of the Monuments operation in Italy beginning in March 1944, subsequently received the Medal of Freedom from the United States. He was also appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).

In 1945, Ward-Perkins left the MFAA to become the Director of the British School at Rome, a position he held for twenty-nine years. During that time, he assembled more than fifty thousand prints and negatives amassed during his years of study of archaeology and architecture, in particular that of the Roman world. Also included were photos he and others took of wartime damage to Italian monuments. His contribution to the arts survived his death; in 1981, the Ward-Perkins family generously donated the remainder of this priceless archival resource to the British School, where it remains available to scholars and students alike.

Norman Newton served as Director of the MFAA after the departure of Ward-Perkins. He returned to Harvard in 1946 and resumed his teaching career as a professor of landscape architecture. In 1967, the year after his retirement, he accepted a one-year position as resident landscape architect at his beloved American Academy in Rome. But perhaps Newton’s lasting legacy, and fittingly so, surrounds the base of the Statue of Liberty, where the crosswalks and lawns he designed welcome thousands of visitors each year. Norm Newton died in 1992 at the age of ninety-four.

Perry Cott, one of the first Monuments officers to arrive in Sicily—and the first to see
The
Last Supper
freed of its sandbags, departed Milan for his new assignment in Austria in August 1945. Only he, Teddy Croft-Murray, and Norman Newton had traversed the length of Italy, landing in Sicily shortly after Mason Hammond and then working their way northward to Milan and the Alto Adige area.

Cott resumed his position as Associate Director of the Worcester Art Museum from 1946 until 1949, when he left to become the Assistant Chief Curator, and shortly thereafter Chief Curator, of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His role in the National Gallery’s 1967 acquisition of
Ginevra de’ Benci
, the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci to grace a collection outside of Europe, was the signal achievement of his two decades of service at the National Gallery.
*
Perry Cott died in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1998.

Cott remained lifelong friends with Ward-Perkins, Croft-Murray, and Ernest DeWald, the man who had selected him for service as a Monuments officer. DeWald continued his leadership in Austria, where he commanded some of the same Monuments officers who had served with him in Italy. After returning home in 1946, DeWald became the Director of the Princeton University Art Museum until his retirement in 1960. Even then, his service to Italy continued. Following the epic November 1966 flood in Florence, DeWald served on the Advisory Committee for the Committee for the Rescue of Italian Art. Two years later, at the age of seventy-seven, he collapsed and died after watching Princeton crush Columbia in their annual football rivalry. DeWald received decorations for his leadership from Italy (the Star of Italian Solidarity), England (Order of the British Empire), and the United States (Legion of Merit).

AFTER RECEIVING A
touching farewell note signed by Giovanni Poggi, Filippo Rossi, Ugo Procacci, and other museum officials, a very sad Fred Hartt departed Florence in late August 1945 for reassignment to Austria. Not even the Bronze Star, which he received for his role in “saving for posterity irreplaceable objects of art,” could assuage the disappointment of leaving the city. “Here I am in this sodden hole [Salzburg],” he wrote his idol, Bernard Berenson, “under the eternal rain. It was a terrible wrench leaving Florence after all this time. That last night the moon on the city and the river was past belief wonderful, and the next morning as the car took me inexorably up the long road it was hard to keep from crying as I looked back at the
cupolone
under the shifting, cloudy light.”

Hartt considered the work in Austria “awfully dull after Italy—a waste of time for most of us.” He spent some of the time contemplating writing a book about his wartime experiences. “I feel I must write the thing to get it off my chest,” he informed Berenson. “So much of the heritage of Italian art is bound up in those months of my work.” The winter months would pass before Hartt learned that, after more than two and a half years of military service in Italy and Austria, he was finally headed home.

There was another piece of news, this one quite unexpected. The City of Florence had decided to make Hartt an honorary citizen for his “tireless energy, scrupulous zeal and perfect spirit of sacrifice during and after the war, rescuing, recovering, and restoring countless works of art and monuments of the city and of the region.” After arriving home, Hartt wrote Berenson to tell him that the award “means a great deal to me, as I love that town more than I can say.” He also informed Berenson that his return to the United States had “been attended by great confusion, much trouble & delay in getting out of the Army.” This was one occasion on which Fred Hartt grossly
understated
the situation.

While in Miami, Florida, processing out of military service, Hartt had a one-night stand with a male junior officer. The officer subsequently reported the incident, which led to Hartt’s discharge from military service pursuant to U.S. Army Regulation 605-275, stating that class II homosexual acts on the part of officers may be resolved by providing the officer the option of resignation “for the good of the service in lieu of trial by court-martial.” Hartt failed to recognize—or chose to ignore the risks—that his promiscuous behavior in Italy, which had been ignored during the war, would be judged very differently in the United States. On this occasion, his disregard of U.S. Army rules proved an embarrassing and muted end to an otherwise remarkable and event-filled military career.

Following his discharge, Hartt rejoined his wife, Peggy, in New York City, writing Berenson to report, “The reunion has been wonderful.” Initially, finding a job proved difficult, even for a Bronze Star recipient with impeccable academic credentials. He spent the 1946 academic year as Acting Director of the Art Museum and a lecturer at Smith College, then returned to New York University, where he completed his doctoral work while finishing the book about his experience as a Monuments officer.
Florentine Art Under Fire
was published in 1949, the year Hartt accepted his first full-time teaching position at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Students there remembered him for the portable pink typewriter he used as a teacher. “I don’t know what narcissistic streak in my nature prompts me to bite off twice as much work as I can chew,” he wrote Berenson, “but I seem to be always doing just that.”

In 1960, Hartt accepted a new position as Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, but the sexual divide and the years commuting back and forth to Manhattan to be with Peggy had taken their toll. After eighteen years of marriage, Fred and Peggy divorced. Hartt’s career from 1967 to 1984 included two more academic positions: Chairman of the Department of Art and professor at the University of Pennsylvania and then the University of Virginia, from which he retired as professor emeritus.

In November 1966, Hartt took a leave of absence to aid Florence once again when the rising waters of the Arno threatened the city. Even after the flood waters receded, Hartt traveled throughout the United States to raise money to cover the cost of restoring damaged works of art as a board member of the Committee for the Rescue of Italian Art. The Italian government once again recognized his efforts, awarding him the title of Knight Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Hartt published eighteen books during his career, including four books on his favorite artist, Michelangelo.
The History of Italian Renaissance Art
,
first
published in 1969, remains by far the most successful and enduring among them, still a widely used textbook on the subject. But the great regret of his professional career remained the position he could not secure: director of Harvard’s Villa I Tatti facility. He considered moving to Florence anyway, but Florentine friends dissuaded him. “You’ll always be an outsider,” some warned.

Peggy never remarried; she died on December 7, 1989. She and Fred had remained lifelong friends, certainly his most stable and loving relationship with a woman. For years he had made a point of traveling to New York City each month to visit with her. Each time, he brought her a check for the alimony payment; each time, she tore it up.

Two years after Peggy’s death, Fred Hartt died at the age of seventy-seven, from complications after triple-bypass surgery. His friend and companion of thirty-three years, Eugene Markowski, a student of Hartt’s at Washington University and one of the first resident fellows at the Harvard Villa I Tatti program, later observed: “Fred was a very complicated man, whose gifts were enormous, and his ambition grand beyond what could be accomplished in any one lifetime.”

What eluded Fred Hartt during his life was given to him after his death, but only after Markowski overcame numerous bureaucratic obstacles to honor Fred’s last wish. On a bitterly cold Friday, March 5, 1993, the city of Florence welcomed home Lieutenant Frederick Hartt—“Tenente Hartt,” as he had come to be known. Gene arrived at the eleventh-century San Miniato al Monte Church, carrying an urn containing his friend’s ashes. Among those waiting to greet him were both of Hartt’s wartime drivers, Franco Ruggenini and Alessandro Olschki; the Corsini family, in whose home Hartt lived while stationed in Florence; Gian Carlo Zoli, the Mayor of Florence; and Antonio Paolucci, Superintendent of Fine Arts for Florence.

Hartt always had a special affection for San Miniato, known for its stunning view of the city. He even wrote a book about one of its chapels. For a man whose life was defined by the creators of Florence—its artists, sculptors, and architects—there could have been no more fitting resting place.

After a special Mass, Hartt’s friends followed Gene to the adjacent cemetery, past the family plot of the Lorenzini family and their most famous son, Carlo Collodi, author of
Pinocchio
, and laid down Fred’s ashes.

DEANE KELLER’S GREATEST
assets—reliability, competency, and indigenous knowledge of Italy—proved also to be a curse. General Edgar Hume wanted the Yale professor to move with his headquarters to Austria and write the history of U.S. Fifth Army, Allied Military Government. Kathy wanted him home and did not shy from saying so in her letters. Much as he wanted to return to her and Dino, Keller also felt a strong sense of duty to finish the job, especially after learning in early August 1945 that he was going to be awarded the Legion of Merit. The months passed but the work persisted. Keller became increasingly discouraged about any prospect of returning home during 1945. “As far as I can see there is nothing short of a death in my family that could get me home any sooner than the regular channels will.” The departure of his friend and driver, Charley Bernholz, in late October only added to his sense of gloom.