The Effect of the War on Renaissance and Baroque Art in Italy

Abstract

On A blackboard in one of the rooms in the Pretura at Terracina, an American officer saw written in what appeared to him the angular hand of one accustomed to writing German script: “Chi entra dopo di noi non troverà nulla” (whoever enters after us will find nothing). The contents of the Museo Civico, housed in the Pretura, were in disorder and damage to the building had exposed to the weather a library of old books on the second floor. Although not one of the worst scarred towns itself, Terracina lies on the coast in that general section of country between Cassino and Rome that was perhaps more badly battered and looted than any other by the Germans in their retreat from Cassino to the Gothic line. Many towns long or near the ancient Appian Way, the “regina viarum”—Gaeta, Fondi, Cori, Velletri and others—suffered, amid the wide extent of general ruin, terrible damage to their historic palaces and churches. This is true as well of the ancient Via Latina, farther inland, the route taken by Hannibal (Livy XXVI, 8) north from Cassino to Tusculum. Here among other places, Palestrina near the northern end and farther south, Aquino, birthplace of St. Thomas Aquinas and Juvenal, suffered heavily. This wide damage in Latium, in which Renaissance and Baroque buildings took their share of punishment, has had its less severe parallel, as the armies moved north, in the region of the Abruzzi, where, however, Aquila and Sulmona, the most important cities, have emerged unscathed. Farther north in the three provinces that are all important for the history of Renaissance art, Umbria, the Marches, and Tuscany (especially, it would appear, in the last) there has been extensive damage, although the major artistic centers have, despite losses, generally fared pretty well.