Botticelli's Secret, page 29
Chapter 9: Berlin and Beyond
1.Forster, A Room with a View, 22. For the inspiration for Cuthbert Eager’s view, see John Ruskin on Giotto’s frescoes of Santa Croce from “The First Morning: Santa Croce,” Mornings in Florence: “You have here, developed Gothic, with Giotto in his consummate strength, and nothing lost, in form, of the complete design. [With the frescoes’] restoration . . . there is no saying how much you have lost.”
2.Forster, A Room with a View, 22.
3.Kermode, Forms of Attention, 17.
4.For an earlier—and moving—passing of the scholarly baton among Botticelli’s first rediscoverers, see Horne’s dedication of his biography of Botticelli to “W. H. P.”—Walter Horatio Pater, “to whom,” Horne wrote, “I owe my initiation in these [Renaissance] studies” (Horne, Botticelli, Painter of Florence, v).
5.Alain Locke, The Critical Temper of Alain Locke, ed. Jeffrey Stewart (New York: Garland, 1983), 22. See the discussion in Ernest Julius Mitchell II, “ ‘Black Renaissance’: A Brief History of the Concept,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 641–65, esp. 644.
6.Locke, Critical Temper, 22.
7.See the ugly words of Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard-trained eugenicist, in the ominously titled The Rising Tide of Color (1920), cited and discussed in Mitchell, “Black Renaissance,” 643.
8.See Mitchell, “Black Renaissance,” 646.
9.See Countee Cullen, My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Gerald L. Early (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 104; and Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Knopf, 1995), 129. See also the discussion in Edward Marx, “Forgotten Jungle Songs: Primitivist Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance,” Langston Hughes Review 14, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 1996): 79–93, esp. 88, 90.
10. Hughes, Collected Poems, 129.
11. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Knopf, 1940), 344. See also Mitchell, “Black Renaissance,” 649.
12. For a brilliant fictional reconstruction of the Harlem Renaissance, see Ralph Ellison’s classic from 1952, Invisible Man (2nd ed.; New York: Vintage, 1995), passim.
13. Marion Deshmukh, “Recovering Culture: The Berlin National Gallery and the U.S. Occupation, 1945–1949,” Central European History 27, no. 4 (1994): 413.
14. Deshmukh, “Recovering Culture,” 414–15.
15. For a fictionalized account of the Nazis’ systematic plundering of Jewish household goods and related practices of financial extortion, see W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 180.
16. Deshmukh, “Recovering Culture,” 415.
17. Not all of Florence would emerge unscathed. See R. W. B. Lewis’s description of how the Nazis vengefully—and, from a military standpoint, unnecessarily—destroyed five out of the six bridges spanning the Arno. Only the most celebrated one of all, the Ponte Vecchio, was spared. See The City of Florence: Historical Vista and Personal Sightings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 50–51.
18. See Cohen, Bernard Berenson, 229.
19. Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Diario di un borghese e altri scritti (Milan: Mondadori, 1965), 125.
20. See Cohen, Bernard Berenson, 227.
21. See Craig Hugh Smyth, Repatriation of Art from the Collecting Point in Munich After World War II (Montclair, NJ: Abner Schram, 1988), 21.
22. For a description of Keller and the other Monuments Men, see Robert M. Edsel, Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), passim.
23. Keller died in 1992. In 2000, an urn containing his ashes was interred in Pisa’s Campo Santo. For a biographical sketch of Keller and his legacy, see Theresa Sullivan Barger, “In New Haven, an Exhibition on a Yale Professor Who Helped Rescue Art During World War II,” New York Times, March 6, 2015.
24. See Mason Hammond, “Remembrance of Things Past: The Protection and Preservation of Monuments, Works of Art, Libraries, and Archives during and after World War II,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 92 (1980): 93.
25. Ivan Lindsay, The History of Loot and Stolen Art: From Antiquity until the Present Day (London: Unicorn Press, 2014), 505.
26. Hammond, “The War and Art Treasures in Germany, College Art Journal 5, no. 3 (1946): 213.
27. Thomas Carr Howe, Salt Mines and Castles: The Discovery and Restitution of Looted European Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1946), 49–50.
28. See Clark, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” 7.
29. See Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 86.
30. Clark, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” 7. The sitatuation was not much better in Rome’s Vatican Library, the third site where the drawings were held and where, as Clark writes, they were “not easily accessible” (7).
31. See Clark, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” This otherwise brilliant study contains what I believe are errors in dating (for example, he argues that the painter finished the drawings close to his death in 1510, and not c. 1494–95 as I and others propose; see my discussion above, Chapter 4, n22).
32. The three institutions were the Vatican Library in Rome; the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, in West Berlin; and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, DDR, Kupferstichkabinett und Sammlung der Zeichnungen, in East Berlin. See Clark, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” 6.
33. Korbacher, “ ‘I am very, very happy that we have it,’ ” 22. Meanwhile, a new building for Lippmann’s Kupferstichkabinett was created in Berlin’s Kulturforum, a complex of the nation’s elite cultural institutions and its new artistic symbol, replacing Museum Island and its legacy of schism.
34. See Eric Weiner, “Renaissance Florence Was a Better Model for Innovation than Silicon Valley Is,” Harvard Business Review, January 25, 2016.
35. See Graziella Magherini’s interview with Maria Barnas, Metropolis M 4 (2008), http://metropolism.com/magazine/2008-no4/confrontaties/English; and my discussion in My Two Italies, 185.
Epilogue
1.Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 147.
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