Saving Italy, by Robert M. Edsel – a review

During the civil war, the Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing recorded with satisfaction his destructive visit in 1644 to the parish church of Sudbury in Suffolk: ‘We brake down a picture of God the Father, 2 crucifixes and pictures of Christ, about an hundred in all.’ The Taleban’s decision in 2001 to blow up two gigantic statues of Buddha in the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan was more spectacular but not different in kind. War gives licence to such subterranean urges. In an order issued exactly three centuries after Dowsing’s expedition, General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean, explained why great art needed to be protected. ‘Works of art are not like diamonds,’ he told the troops. ‘However valuable a diamond may be, you can always get another like it. But the “Mona Lisa” or the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican are unique… no money could ever replace them.’

Yet the furious fighting in Italy inexorably brought other priorities to the fore. Wilson’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, pragmatically recommended that where a choice arose between preserving art and gaining a military objective with minimum loss of life, the art should go. The near-destruction of the incomparable medieval monastery of Monte Cassino under Allied bombardment was one consequence. Nevertheless, to their credit, the Allies did recognise the transcendent importance of the paintings, sculptures and buildings within the Italian peninsula. In 1943 a Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section was established to protect the most significant objects.

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