Robert Edsel's
The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History is a book for young adults and older children focusing on a group of eleven men and one woman who were part of the Monuments Men, a group of soldiers from American and Great Britain whose goal was to preserve the art treasures of Western Europe during World War II.
Adolf Hitler saw himself as a gifted artist, one whose genius was denied when he was refused admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, back in 1907. He believed this unjust decision was made by Jewish jurors. He considered the only real art to be of German origin while art created by masters like Picasso was "degenerate." When Hitler came to power in Germany in the 1930's he had the works of many modern masters including Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas and Henri Matisse to be removed from German galleries. The art was either traded, sold or destroyed.
During a visit to Italy in 1938, a tour of the art-filled rooms of the Pitti Palace and Uffizi Gallery inspired Hitler to build a museum filled with Europe's art treasures. The museum, would be located in his hometown of Linz, Austria and the art would come from the countries he planned to conquer.
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The theft of art began almost immediately with the beginning of hostilities. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Nazis raided the private collections of Austrian Jews, facilitated by new laws that prohibited Jews from owning private property. With the invasion of Poland in September, 1939, the Nazi's continued their theft of art treasures. They stole the Veit Stoss Altarpiece a Gothic altarpiece from Saint Mary's Basilica, and a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci from the Czartoryski Museum. As the Nazis overran the Netherlands, France and Belgium, the looting intensified, again aided byIt was facilitated by the Nazis enacting laws that stripped the Jewish population of their rights to own property, meaning any art treasures could be confiscated.
The Monuments Men was a new unit that was tasked with saving the art treasures of Europe as the Allies drove the Nazis out of cities and towns. It was the inspiration of art conservator, George Stout who had spent years working on how to protect works of art and other cultural treasures during war. Stout's idea was to have teams of "cultural preservation officers" who would follow troops as areas were liberated. The Monuments Men made up the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section (MFAA) of the Civil Affairs division of the Western Allied armies and were chosen by the Roberts Commission. George Stout was eventually recruited to lead the Monuments Men in northern Europe but in fact, the first Monuments Man was Captain Mason Hammond who was sent to Italy when the Allied invasion began.
Serving in Italy for the MFAA were Captain Deane Keller a portrait painter and professor at Yale and Second Lieutenant Fred Hartt, an art historian. In Northern Europe, George L. Stout an art conservator at Harvard, Captain Robert Posey an architect and military man, Captain Walker Hancock a sculptor, Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein, Major Ronald Edmund Balfour a lecturer at Cambridge University, Private Harry Ettlinger a German Jew who emigrated to the U.S., Captain Walter Hauchthausen an architect, Second Lieutenant James J. Rorimer curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,and Rose Valland Custodian of the Jeu d Paume Museum in Paris.
By late September 1943, Benito Mussolini, leader of Fascist Italy had been removed and the war now shifted to driving the Germans out of Italy. "The war was now going to be fought in a country that contained millions of works of art, monuments and churches, placing some of the greatest masterpieces of Western civilization at risk of being destroyed." The Monuments Men would have an unbelievably difficult job of tracking and recovering any missing treasures.
When Deane Keller arrived in Italy, a country he had visited years before he was shocked at the devastation and what the Italian people had suffered. The Allies were working their way north through Italy and a first objective was Naples. The way north to Naples was through the Liri Valley which the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino overlooked. Heavy bombing by the Allies had pulverized the abbey but it was possible to rebuild it.
In June, 1944, Monuments Men Lieutenant Perry Cott, British Captain Humphrey Brooke and Lieutenant Fred Hartt arrived in Rome. Their inspections determined that the art in the Vatican was safe, as "were the treasures of Brera Picture Gallery in Milan, the Accademia in Venice, the Borghese Gallery in Rome, and those from many of the nation's most important churches, which Pope Pius XII had allowed to be stored for safekeeping within the Vatican's walls."
Joined by Lieutenant Colonel Ernest DeWald, director of the MFAA in Italy, they began investigating the status of art belonging to museums in Naples which were supposedly delivered to Rome by the Hermann Goring Tank Division. However, two trucks worth of art disappeared and Cott and DeWald soon determined that "seventeen works of art from Naples and the ancient site of Pompeii were missing", including "The Blind Leading the Blind" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. There was no doubt that this was a planned theft and Dewald and Cott were certain the art had been moved to Germany.
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| Maesta |
On July 4, 1944, Deane Keller arrived in Siena Italy a day after its liberation by the Fifth Army.German commander Generalfeldmarschal Albert Kesselting had declared Siena an open city, meaning that during the German retreat from the city, the Allies would not attack. On July 8, Keller visited the Bishop's Palace in Mensanello, eighteen miles outside Siena. There in the Bishop's Palace, which was being used as a makeshift first aid station, Keller was directed to two large wooden crates. Inside one he found Duccio di Buoninsegna's Madonna and Child, a panel of the Maesta that formed the high altarpiece of the Siena Cathedral. Forty other paintings had also been hidden in the palace chapel.
Meanwhile as the German's retreated to the Gothic Line, they withdrew to Florence, the capital of Tuscany and a city renowned for its rich artistic and cultural history. Second Lieutenant Fred Hartt arrived in Florence in late July, 1944 to assess the damage to the city's "magnificent churches, beautiful bridges and irreplaceable works of art." He wanted to know the location of the city's art treasures; had they been moved back into the city or were they still in the villas hidden. Several days later Hartt learned that the British had found an art repository containing masterpieces from two of the city's museums, the Uffizi Gallery and the Palatine Gallery, in a major battlezone just outside of Florence. Hartt travelled to the art repository, the Castle of Montegufoni. On August 1, Hartt accompanied by BBC Radio correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Major Eric Linklater of the British Royal Engineeers arrived at Montegufoni. There he found an astonishing collection of works from Raphael, Ruben, Giotto, Botticelli and many others. At Montegufoni, Cesare Fasola, the librarian of the Uffizi Gallery revealed that the Germans had stolen hundreds of masterpieces from the Uffizi and Pitti Palace museums.
Hartt arrived in Florence on August 13. There he met Giovanni Poggi, the Florentine superintendent and Dr. Ugo Procacci, an official of the Tuscan museums. They provided Hartt a list of thirty-eight villas acting as art repositories. Procacci recounted to Hartt how the German's destroyed all of Florence's famous bridges except the Ponte Vecchio. Although the bridge was spared, the Germans demolished the medieval towers and buildings surrounding the bridge, many dating back to Dante's time. Hartt's investigations in Florence of the thirty-eight repositories in Tuscany revealed that on orders of Colonel Metzner the German military commander of Florence, and SS Colonel Alexander Langsdorff, head of the Kunstschutz operation in Italy, hundreds of art treasures had been stolen. He listed 529 paintings, 162 works of sculpture including those from the Bargello Museum which had housed "the most important collection of Gothic and Renaissance sculpture in the world, including masterpieces by Michelangelo and Donatello" as missing.
In Paris Monuments Man Jim Rorimer arrived on August 25 to find the Louvre Museum empty. The Mona Lisa and the Louvre's signature piece, The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a 2 B.C. Greek sculpture were gone as was everything else. Jacques Jaujard, Director of the National Museums of France explained to Rorimer that all of the art treasures were taken to countryside chateaux in thirty-seven convoys. However, the private Jewish-owned collections such as those from Rothschild, Rosenberg, and David-Weill were systematically looted, with as many as twenty-thousand pieces moved to Germany. These collections included works by Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Van Gogh and Picasso.
The city of Pisa is located fifty miles west of Florence on the Arno River which divides it. Unlike Florence, Pisa had been heavily bombed. On September 2, Deane Keller entered the rubble-filled city. The heart of the city is the Piazza dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles) which was comprised of
"...the piazza and its duomo (cathedral), battistero (baptistery), campanile (bell tower - known as the Leaning Tower of Pisa), and camposanto (cemetery)". Although the duoma and battistero had sustained some damage, the Camposanto Monumentale, the city's famed cemetery was destroyed. Constructed in 1278, the Camposanto's walls were covered with vibrant frescoes painted by 14th and 15th century artists. Due to shelling, the Camposanto's wooden A-frame, lead-covered roof and burned and collapsed, breaking the frescoes into millions of pieces. A call to Brigadier General Edgar Hume's office resulted in the general and the archbishop of Pisa visiting the Camposanto. A temporary roof made of tarpaulin and tar paper protected the damaged building and the remaining frescoes and allowed for repair work to begin.
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| Michelangelo's Madonna |
On September 16, 1944, British Major Ronald Balfour entered the town of Bruges in Belgium with the First Canadian Army. Missing from The Church of Our Lady was its centerpiece, Michelangelo's Madonna, a
"...nearly life-sized masterpiece, carved out of white marble in 1504, when the Florentine master was twenty-nine years old." The sculpture was removed from the church where it had been for the past 440 years. Reverend Rene Deschepper told Balfour how the Germans removed the statue along with "eleven valuable paintings that had hung inside the church for centuries." The theft of the Michelangelo Bruges Madonna was planned but Deschepper had no idea where it was taken.
Even as the Germans were driven back they continued to loot. In November, 1944, Monuments Man Captain Walker Hancock, in Aachen Germany learned that
"the Gothic silver-gilt bust of Charlemagne and the eleventh-century jewel-encrusted processional Cross of Lothair" had been taken further into Germany.
As the Allies drove the Germans north, across Western Europe and back towards Berlin, the Germans continued to loot, hiding their art treasures in salt mines and caves. However, the Monuments Men had little to go on, only rumours and hearsay. Would they ever recover the thousands of pieces of art stolen from private Jewish-owned collections? Would they ever locate Michelangelo's Madonna or the missing treasures from the Uffizi and Pitti museums? Their tips would come from the most unlikely of sources in the most unexpected ways.
Discussion The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History tells the story of a select few members of the Monuments Men who worked to find and return some of the Western world's greatest art treasures after they had been stolen and hidden by the Nazis during their occupation of Europe. In fact, as Edsel points out in his Epilogue, there were over 350 Monuments Men from fourteen nations including America, France, Holland, Belgium and the British Commonwealth who served from 1943 to 1951, to recover the thousands of pieces of art stolen during the war.
Edsel begins his account by providing readers with some of the backstory of Adolf Hitler and how his obsession with art led to the theft of hundreds of thousands of art treasures not only from the national art collections of various European countries they conquered but also from private art collections, especially those of Jewish collectors in Europe.
Readers are introduced over a few chapters to the Monuments Men, artists, conservators and lecturers from America and Britain, who took time out of their lives to undertake the risky task of tracking down the stolen art treasures of Western Europe. Although they believed that men's lives were more important than the artwork, they felt strongly in their mission. The Monuments Men believed they were fighting to save their cultural heritage. As Edsel writes,
"They could not imagine living in a dark and ugly world without these things of importance and beauty that have for centuries defined who we are as a civilization."The story of the Monuments Men is told through the alternating narratives of the various Monuments Men in chronological order beginning with the Italian campaign in 1943. Edsel sets the stage initially by focusing on the Monuments Men and their arrival in Europe and Italy. Unsure of what to expect, they find some art repositories and collections safe and others raided or missing. The Monuments Men begin with the obvious, checking on collections in the Vatican (they are safe) and in the Louvre Museum (hidden due to the amazing foresight of Jacques Jaujard). As the Monuments Men race to discover where the Germans have hidden the stolen art, readers come to comprehend not only the incredible devastation brought about by the war (for example in the destruction of the City of Lo or the bridges of Florence) but the potential for the destruction of European culture as well. Edsel focuses on several significant pieces of art, Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna, the Ghent Altarpiece, and the Florentine art treasures, to name a few. At first the story is difficult to follow as the narrative jumps from location to location, but the chronology begins to fit together, providing readers with some understanding of the incredible task facing the Monuments Men.
Edsel includes many black and white photographs of the important artwork stolen by the Germans, such as the Bruges Madonna, the Ghent Altarpiece and the Maesta. As well there are numerous historical photographs of the Monuments Men, the Nazi art repositories, the Nazis admiring stolen art, the caves where the art treasures were hidden, and many many more scenes. Edsel provides his readers with a few photographs showing the devastation of some of the cities such as Florence, the gutted streets of Aachen, and the destroyed town of Saint Lo. There are several detailed maps showing the paths of the Monuments Men and the location of the Nazi Art Repositories.
Although these photographs add much to the book, the format simply doesn't do justice to the subject matter. It's unfortunate this work couldn't have been published with larger pages, on better quality paper with colour photographs of some of the works of art. Younger readers should be encouraged to research pictures of the various art works from their local library and through the internet.
Nevertheless, Edsel's
The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History is a must read for those interested in World War II history. Edsel presents what is a complex story in a way that is relatively easy to understand and imparts to his readers both the immensity of the task facing the Monuments Men and the reasons why their mission was so important. The book drives home the message that these priceless art treasures belong to everyone and are part of both our cultural past but also our future.
The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History contains a Glossary, and Bibliography, extensive Source Notes, Photograph and Map credits and an Index.
Book Details:The Greatest Treasure Hunt In History by Robert Edsel
New York: Scholastic Focus 2019
333 pp.
Image credits:
Maesta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maest%C3%A0_(Duccio)#/media/File:Duccio_maesta1021.jpg
Michelangelo's Madonna and child: http://visit-bruges.be/see/churches/church-our-lady
