All the Italians

"Italy," wrote Critic Give Bell last April in The London Studio, "has not produced a great painter since Canaletto" (1697-1768), but before Canaletto Italy produced enough great painters for all time. To set forth the latter fact spectacularly to France and the world seemed to Henry de Jouvenel, brilliant French diplomat, journalist and Italophile, an admirable way for Italy and France to clasp hands more tightly against Adolf Hitler. Last week he had assembled in Paris' Petit Palais a collection of Italian old masters that was in fact "the greatest the world has ever seen."

To do so France had cashed in on its present position of friend to every European power except Germany by borrowing Italian masters from the museums of Russia, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, even Hungary. Germany surprisingly promised a slew of pictures, finally sent just two Tintorettos from the Dresden collection. But of the 490 pictures in last week's Italian Exhibition, Benito Mussolini had supplied 280.

The picture every schoolboy knows, the great Raphael's oval Madonna of the Chair, has hung for centuries on the wall of Florence's Pitti Gallery. The director got a curt notification to take it down and pack it for shipment to Paris. At the same time the director of the Uffizi, having read a similar command from Il Duce, was reluctantly packing Botticelli's masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, Michelangelo's Holy Family, Titian's Flora. At the Bargello it was Verrochio's David. At Milan's Brera it was Raphael's Nuptials of the Virgin and Bellini's Piet`a. From Padua, Giotto's Crucifixion, elaborately and tenderly packed, set out for Paris and from Venice, Giorgione's The Tempest and Mantegna's Saint George. Benito Mussolini accepted but one rebuff, from the Vatican, which held to its policy that the fine museums in Vatican City may not lend their paintings. He even sent Titian's Venus of Urbino from Florence's Uffizi, although a gap had already been left for it on the walls of Venice's great show of Titians (TIME, May 13). A little before the Paris show ends at the end of July the Urbino Venus will go to Venice. By last week the whole astounding collection had arrived in Paris, a few a little scratched, as some European museums had predicted.

It made a total that the worshipful minds of art students could not embrace. Nearly every picture was priceless, not for sale, beyond reach of the millions of a Mellon, Frick, Morgan or Widener. At the opening notables made conventional little speeches of Franco-Italian handholding. Their banalities could not obscure the splendor and magnitude of the event. Last week a tourist in Paris could see in a day in the Petit Palais what in any other year would have taken a summer's zigzagging over the face of Europe.

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