When Italy entered the war, a commission was immediately appointed by
the Government to consider measures for the protection of the country's
art treasuries. Under the direction of the curators of galleries and
museums, a civil engineer or architect was placed in charge of each
principal building in all the art centers of northern Italy. The
persons so appointed set about devising individual means adapted to the
shielding of walls, towers, statues and pictures from attack by air and
water, from shell and fire. In Venice the chief works and structures
selected for protection were the Doges' (Dukes') Palace, with its rich
arcades, sculptured façade and splendid halls, the superb Church of
St. Mark, the medieval Loggetta, or vestibule, on the east side of the
Campanile, the Church of St. John and St. Paul, the San Rocco School,
the noble equestrian statue known as the Colleoni Monument, and the
Academy of Fine Arts, with its canvases by Bellini, Carpaccio, Palma
Vecchio, Tintoretto and Titian.
At Padua, Donatello's equestrian monument of Gattamelata, erected
in 1453, and the sepulchral church of St. Anthony of Padua received
special care; likewise the Gate of the Scaligeri, Verona; the early
Renaissance Colleoni Chapel and some precious frescoes at Bergamo;
Leonardo da Vinci's immortal canvas, "The Last Supper," in the
refectory of the abbey-church of Santa Maria della Grazie at Milan;
the Fountain of Neptune and the Church of San Petronio at Bologna; the
early Christian edifice of San Vitale, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia
(a queen of the fifth century) and the Tomb of Dante, in the deserted
old city of Ravenna; and at Cremona, in the Church of Sant' Agostino,
the famously beautiful altar-piece of the Madonna and Two Saints, by
Perugino. The most renowned works of art in Rome, including the statue
of Caesar in the Capitoline Museum, were padded and boarded up, and
from Firenze and Naples rare examples of Italian craftsmanship, guarded
through the centuries--manuscripts, statuary, paintings, tapestries,
metalware, mosaics, glass--were carried away to safety, some of them to
the vaults of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Titian's masterpiece, the "Assumption of the Virgin," was laboriously
removed from the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice and transported by
boat and wagon to a place of security against attack by the Vandals.
Tintoretto's "Paradise," the largest oil painting in the world (72
feet by 23 feet) was unframed and removed from the wall of the Hall
of the Great Council in the Palace of the Doges. Ceiling paintings
were taken down, rolled around great sticks thirty inches in diameter,
hermetically sealed in copper cylinders, and stored in crypts to rest
until the joyous day of their unrolling. Altogether, seven thousand
square yards of canvas were thus protected from attack and pillage.
Statues were wrapped in mattresses and covered by brick flooring;
the beloved horses above the doorway of St. Mark's were lowered and
taken away. Domes were roofed at an angle of sixty degrees, so that
aerial bombs would glance harmlessly off. In the defence of Venetian
art treasures alone, sixty men worked for three months to wall in
everything delicate and beautiful.
"Even Rheims and Louvain could not offer such tempting morsels to the
vandal wrecker as Venice and Rome," writes Herbert Vivian in "Italy at
War." "Venice, mistress of medieval art as well as queen of the sea,
girded her armor on,--like the army, donned a vesture of gray-green.
Just as in Holy Week the more signal emblems veil themselves in
respectful mourning for the Passion, so, in war time, the monuments
of Venice hide in their hoods, as though to proclaim sympathy with
the nation's anxiety. At St. Mark's ... the venerated mosaics on the
lunettes are blotted out by modern masonry, the golden cupolas are
shapeless bags, the pillars and arches have become a brick fortress
that goes on to engulf all that fairy portico of the Doges' Palace
hard by. Where are the four famous horses of golden bronze, brought
from Constantinople to defy the world through seven centuries from the
portals of St. Marks? It was a sad scene when on May 27, 1915, a silent
crowd watched their descent for conveyance to a safer stable. In the
interior of the holy house heaps and heaps of heavy sandbags huddle
against the porphyries and malachites and alabasters, throttle the
carved columns, scale walls, bury pulpit, choir, altars and baptistery.
Such are the bulwarks which Italian foresight provided against probable
forays of the Hun."
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST MARK'S, VENICE. BOARDED UP FOR PROTECTION