May 18, 2026 • 37 mins
In 1993, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy was damaged by a car bomb. But this story starts in the 16th century with painter Bartolomeo Manfredi, and reaches all the way to the 2000s with an extraordinary restoration project.
Research:
- “600 fragments and one photograph. The restoration of Bartolomeo Manfredi’s “Card Players.” Scala Archives. May 23, 2023. https://scalarchives.com/600-fragments-and-one-photograph-the-restoration-of-bartolomeo-manfredis-card-players/#:~:text=The%20Georgofili%20bombing%20also%20left,to%20have%20been%20destroyed%20forever.
- Clough, Patricia. “Blast Tears Apart 400 Years of Italy’s Heritage.” The Independent. May 28, 1993. https://www.newspapers.com/image/718976357/?match=1&terms=uffizi
- Cowell, Alan. “Italians Try to Place Blame For Bomb Damage at Uffizi.” New York Times. May 29, 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/29/world/italians-try-to-place-blame-for-bomb-damage-at-uffizi.html
- “Cupid Chastised.” Art Institute of Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/59847/cupid-chastised
- “Documentation of the damage from the 1993 bombing in Via dei Georgofili.” Uffizi Galleries. https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/documentation-damage-1993-bombing-georgofili
- Folkestad, William B. and Mark Miller. “Bomb Damages the Uffizi Gallery.” EBSCO. 2023. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/bomb-damages-uffizi-gallery
- Follain, John. “Push Comes to Shove at Italy’s Uffizi.” Miami Herald. March 21, 1993. https://www.newspapers.com/image/637973344/?match=1&terms=uffizi
- Gage, Frances. “Caravaggio’s Rumore: Fact, Fiction and Authority in Giovanni Baglione’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects.” Past & Present. Volume 257, Issue Supplement_16, November 2022, Pages 111–140. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtac031
- “History of the Uffizi Gallery.” https://www.visituffizi.org/museum/history/
- Kimmelman, Michael. “Bombed Uffizi Begins Recovery.” Berkshire Eagle. June 20, 1993. https://www.newspapers.com/image/533051992/?match=1&terms=uffizi
- Moir, Alfred. “An Examination of Bartolomeo Manfredi's ‘Cupid Chastised.’” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies , Spring, 1985, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Spring, 1985), pp. 156-167. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4108732
- Morselli, Raffaella. “Bartolomeo Manfredi and Pomarancio: Some New Documents.” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 129, No. 1015 (Oct., 1987), pp. 666-668. https://www.jstor.org/stable/883135
- Nicolson, Benedict. “Caravaggesques in Florence.” The Burlington Magazine. Sep., 1970, Vol. 112, No. 810 (Sep., 1970), pp. 636+639- 641. https://www.jstor.org/stable/876434
- Pianigiani, Gaia. “Florence’s Answer to Mafia Violence: A Painting’s Loving Restoration.” New York Times. May 25, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/world/europe/uffizi-florence-mafia-card-player.html
- Robb, Peter. “M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio.” Henry Holt and Co. 2015.
- “Uffizi: on display two masterpieces damaged by the 1993 Georgofili mafia attack.” Uffizi Galleries. https://www.uffizi.it/en/events/georgofili-commemoration-2024
- Wakin, Daniel J. “Prosecutor Joins Italy Bomb Probe.” Florence Morning News. May 16, 1993. https://www.newspapers.com/image/985131856/?match=1&terms=%22Maurizio%20Costanzo%22
- “World: Europe Mafia bosses jailed for life.” BBC. June 6, 1998. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/108127.stm
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, Tracy, I just
got back from Italy. I know you did. You seem
so happy while you were there. I didn't want to
(00:22):
I didn't want to leave. It was a pretty great trip.
And while I did actually bring materials to work on
an episode while I was traveling, because you know, long
flights and stuff, I got sidetracked by something else because
I saw something while I was in Italy that kind
of shifted all my gears and I got really obsessed
with it. So since that was the only thing I
(00:43):
could think about, it became an episode. So for setup,
if you visit the Ufeci Museum in Florence, Italy, and
if you follow the museum's suggested path, which in and
of itself is an adventure, there is this moment where
you turn a corner into a staircase, and and in
the sort of transitional vaulted ceiling that's over the staircase,
(01:04):
just as you're entering it, there is a discolored imprint
of a window like it almost looks like somebody like
drew a window on the staircase. But then to the
right of that staircase, on the wall, there is a
small plaque and the English version of it reads, the
vault bears the mark of a window blown by the
force of the Mafia bomb on May twenty seventh, nineteen
(01:26):
ninety three. So I was instantly riveted and I looked
it up. I had a vague recollection of this event
from when it happened, but I didn't remember a whole
lot of the details around it, and I was not
aware that the UFITZI is continually incorporating that story into
its own story and the way it presents art. So
(01:49):
I was on this long journey. It was quite delicious,
and that became this episode. We are gonna kind of
have this in three parts. We're gonna start by talking
about a particular artist and his work, and then we
are going to talk about the context of that bombing,
and then the work that's been done, some of it
(02:11):
pretty recently, to recover from that attack and memorialize the
tragedy and pieced together a little bit of lost history.
So we are going to start with Bartolomeo Manfredi Bartolomeo
Manfredi was born August twenty fifth, fifteen eighty two, in Ostiano, Italy.
That's in the province of Cremona, in the Lombardi region.
(02:34):
It's adjacent to the Mantua province, and sometimes you will
find his place of birth listed as Manchua. We don't
know a whole lot more about his early life than
that he is said to have become an apprentice or
a student to the Mannerist painter Christoforo Roncalli, also known
as Pomarancho when he was a boy. Pomarancho lived and
(02:57):
worked in Rome and had been chosen to create some
of the decoration for Saint Peter's Basilica. This also is
a fragmentary piece of information. Writing in nineteen eighty seven
for the Burlington magazine, Raphaela Marcelli noted that Pomaracio was
in Mantua in fifteen ninety five. He was actually imprisoned
(03:18):
there briefly, and that might have been where he came
into contact with Bartolomeo, who would have been thirteen. It
is unclear if Manfredi ever studied with Caravaggio, although he
certainly became associated with the older artist's work. In sixteen
oh three, Caravaggio was sued for libel by rival painter
(03:39):
Giovanni Baglione after critical and unflattering poems that Caravaggio wrote
about Baglione had circulated throughout Rome. I had originally been
planning to include some of these poems or an excerpt
from them in their translation. But they are so filthy
that they made even me, a person very comfortable with
(04:02):
salty and filthy language that many other people would find upsetting.
I gasped aloud. I was like, oh my goodness, Like
my husband ran down the stairs to see if I
was okay. They're filthy. But the important thing is that
during this libel trial a servant of Caravaggio's is mentioned
as actually being the one who passed out the copies
(04:24):
of those poems, and that servant is named in the
record as Bartolomeo Christifori. So this has led to some speculation,
and I think a pretty well grounded idea that this
is actually a reference to Bartolomeo Manfredi, and it is
using the first name of his teacher, Pamaranchio as his
last name. But again, this is still a detail that's
(04:47):
very much about piecing together clues rather than something we
can say with certainty. Even if Bartolomeo did study with Caravaggio,
it could not have been for very long because the
renowned painter famously had to leave Rome in sixteen oh
six am in murder accusations after a brawl that left
Branuccio Tomasoni dead. The actual cause of that brawl is
(05:11):
still debated. There are some different versions of it you
may hear, but Caravaggio was found guilty and he was
sentenced to death in absentia. He died in the Tuscany
town of Porto Ercole while he was actually headed back
to Rome, apparently in search of a pardon from Naples,
where he had been living, and that happened in sixteen ten.
(05:33):
Bertolomeo Manfreddi is often described as a Caravaggio follower, which
sort of straddles the fence on the issue of whether
he was his student, and he became the most well
known among the Caravaggisti, that's the painters that emulated both
the style and the techniques of Caravaggio. Manfreddi was so
(05:53):
studied at the style of Caravaggio that there have been
numerous times that his work has been mistaken for Carravaggio's.
I definitely when Holly sent me this outline and I
googled to see what some of this art looked like.
There were a couple of things that immediately made me go, oh,
that looks like Caravaggio. One such example is a painting
known as Cupid Chastised. This is an image of the
(06:16):
naked adolescent Cupid being whipped by Mars, god of war Venus.
Cupid's mother is attempting to intercede and to stop Mars,
so this is a violent image with a dramatic visual
contrast due to the light source being depicted exclusively from
the left side of the painting. According to Alfred Moir,
(06:37):
writing for the Art Institute of Chicago in nineteen eighty five,
when Cupid Chastised first hit the radar of the wider
art world outside of Italy, it was in nineteen thirty seven,
and at that point it was touted as a Caravaggio
that had been newly discovered, and although art experts quickly
determined that it was in fact the work of Manfredi,
(06:58):
that incorrect Carava attribution continued to circulate, people kept saying
it was by him. Today, the provenance of the work,
which is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute
of Chicago, is clearly laid out. From the time the
painting was commissioned in March of sixteen thirteen. That more
detailed account of the painting's history became possible, in part
(07:21):
due to the discovery of two inventory lists that were
in the Vatican Archives that mentioned the painting. They weren't
part of the Vatican collection, they were just pieces the
archives had that were collections of other people in Rome.
That information in those lists was then cross referenced with
other contemporary mentions of the painting in order to create
(07:41):
this reliable timeline. By sixteen thirteen, when that painting was commissioned,
Manfredy was well established. He was clearly influenced by the
work of Caravaggio, but he doesn't appear to have been
at all like him. In temperament. He was quiet. He
didn't socialize very much much. He took mainly private commissions
(08:02):
instead of seeking out important public jobs. Painting mostly multi
character tableau. Some of his work is religious and subject
A lot of it is often referred to as low life,
meaning everyday people doing things like drinking in taverns, playing cards,
or making music. One such work as the painting The
(08:23):
Card Players, sometimes also called Soldiers playing Cards, which Manfreddi
completed sometime between sixteen sixteen and sixteen eighteen. In this image,
a group of men are at a table in a
variety of positions. Some are sitting, some are standing, one
is sitting on the edge of the table. They are
betting on a card game called Sorrow, which was popular
(08:45):
at the end of the sixteenth century. This painting employs
the technique known as cherasciro, that's the creation of depth
and drama through a contrast of light and dark, with
those elements being light and dark within the composition. This
painting will become a central character later on in this episode.
(09:05):
Manfredi died quite young. He was only forty when he passed.
We don't have a lot of information about his death
other than the date, which was December twelfth, sixteen twenty two.
In Rome. Coming up, we are going to shift our
focus to the bombing that took place in Florence in
nineteen ninety three. First, though, we will pause for a
(09:26):
sponsor break at one four am on May twenty seventh,
nineteen ninety three, the city of Florence was rocked by
a massive explosion on Via de Giorgophili. That's a street
(09:46):
that runs mostly north away from the Arno River, right
next to the Offizi gallery complex. On that side of
the complex, in addition to gallery buildings, are the Giorgophilia Academy,
which is a history educational institution. It's housed records and
study of agriculture, forestry and economy, and the Torre de Puchi,
(10:08):
a fourteenth century tower that is used by the Georgophilia
Academy for both offices and residences. A lot of residents
of the city came out of their homes to see
what had happened, and they saw a terrifying devastation. The
academy and the tower were both badly damaged, as were
sections of the art galleries. A theory spread that a
(10:29):
gas tank may have exploded, but as first responders got
to the scene, they found the epicenter. There was a
massive crater in Via de Giorgophili, and they realized that
the cause of this was not a gas explosion but
a car bomb. A Fiat van filled with an estimated
five hundred pounds of explosives had been parked on the
street and then left to detonate. That number was initially
(10:52):
reported as roughly two hundred pounds, but that was revised
upward over the years based on the intensity of the explosion.
While the nighttime museum staff had not been on the
side of the gallery that faced this street, there were
people in the Torre del Pucci. Five people were tragically killed.
(11:13):
One was a student named Dario Capolichio, who died in
a fire that started after the bombing, and the remaining
four were a family who were buried in the collapsed tower.
Angela Ninchoni was the caretaker of the tower and her husband,
Fabrizio Ninchoni, and their two very young daughters, Nadia and
Katerina lived there as well, and the whole family was killed.
(11:36):
The museum damage was extensive. In addition to the building itself,
the Vasari Corridor was badly damaged. It was one of
the most damage pieces of architecture. So that structure is
a seven hundred and fifty meter long elevated enclosed walkway
and it was built in fifteen sixty five by Giorgio Vasari.
So that members of the Medici family could travel from
(11:58):
Palazzo Pitti to Pala so Vecchio on the other side
of the Arno River, crossing alongside the bridge known as
Ponte Vecchio. This provided the Medicis a way to make
that crossing without having to deal with commoners or without
compromising their safety. The Villa Lambartesca, the street that runs
perpendicular to the Via de Giorgofili, was covered in rubble.
(12:22):
There was a lot of damage to works of art.
A handful of their most famous pieces had a bulletproof
glass covering that protect them from projectile debris, but the
vast majority did not. An estimated one quarter of the
Ufizi collection was affected. According to the website, the final
count was one hundred and seventy three paintings and fifty
(12:43):
six sculptures in various states of damage and destruction. In
addition to that, because the building had so much damage,
a lot of works had to be quickly moved to
other parts of the facility. Leaving them where they were
would have exposed them to the elements. The unharmed room
where Bonticelli's Venus and Primavera are housed, became the de
(13:05):
facto landing place for a lot of the art that
needed to be moved. That led reporters to note that
it became the most impressive room of art in the world.
The museum staff and investigators took photos to document everything.
You can see a lot of those photos online at
the Fizzi website as well. Mad page will also be
linked from our show notes. At the time, there were
(13:28):
three paintings that were considered to be permanent losses, Adoration
of the Shepherds by Gerardo del NotI and two by
Bartolomeo Menfredi. They were the Concert and the card Players.
So just like the corridor, Vasari also designed the main
Ufizi building. That name actually just means offices because it
(13:50):
was built to house the various governmental divisions that were
operating under Cosumo, the first to Medici. Cosumo tapped Giorgio
Vasari to design this building in fifteen sixty, but Vasari
died in fifteen seventy four and the building was not
yet finished, and at that point Bernardo Bontalenti took up
the project early on in the building's existence. Once it
(14:12):
had been finished, the top floor of it was used
mostly to house the impressive Medichi art collection. They were,
as has come up on the show many times before,
significant patrons of the arts, and they commissioned a lot
of paintings and sculptures that are very famous today. Over time,
the Medici art collection grew and it took up more space,
(14:34):
and really that became the sole purpose of the Ufizi
was to house that collection. Anna Maria Luisa de Medici
born in sixteen ninety one, became the last of the
Medici line, and in a very famous and important move,
she signed what was known as the Family Packed and
that basically left the Ufizi Museum to the government of Tuscany,
(14:56):
and it provided for the entire art collection to remain
in Offizi in perpetuity and to be made open to
the public. So she basically made it into a public museum.
This cemented the reputation of Florence as a nexus of
great art, and it was also something that was designed
to draw visitors to the city and keep its economy strong.
(15:17):
So the damage that the Afezi sustained in nineteen ninety
three was something that the entire city felt very deeply,
because that museum is a work of art in and
of itself like the building is considered a work of art,
and it is also the heart of the culture and
the identity of Florence. Michael Kemmelman of The New York
Times traveled to Florence to report on the situation several
(15:38):
weeks after the fact, and his description was printed in
papers around the world. One section describes a gallery that
looked over the street where the car had been parked,
and then reads quote through that enormous opening in the wall,
the view is breathtaking and horrific. Set against the backdrop
of the soft Tuscan hills and the great dome that
(15:58):
Bruneliski designed for the cataedl are the shattered red tile
roofs of the buildings across the street from the Ufizi,
and the crumbled shell of an ancient tower in which
a family killed in the explosion used to live. A
few household belongings can still be seen on what remains
of the tower's top floor, reduced to barely more than
(16:18):
a roofless platform. Historical agricultural archives housed in the tower
were destroyed. Initially, there was no real sense of who
the perpetrator or perpetrators might be, why they may have
targeted the museum, and even if the museum was the
actual target, the Ufizi is a squared off U shaped
(16:39):
building with a courtyard, so if someone really wanted to
damage it, that courtyard would have been the optimal place
to park the explosives, but the car bomb was parked
on the exterior part of the U. The incident sparked
both rumors and outrage. The day after the bombing, labor
unions in Florence called a four hour strike, during which
(17:00):
more than twenty thousand people took to the streets in
a demonstration to send the message that the city was
united against violence and intimidation. There were suspicions about the
perpetrator being part of organized crime, or even an inside
job initiated by corrupt government officials. Quote. People might seem calm,
(17:21):
but they're angry. This is not crime, It is politics.
There is a war between people who want change and
people who don't want to lose power, and the only
way is to throw bombs and frighten people away from change.
The prevailing theory from early on among investigators was that
the mafia was involved. Just a few weeks earlier, there
(17:42):
had been an attack in Rome against television talk show
host Marizio Costanzo after he aired anti mafia pieces on
his show. The journalists survived that attack thanks to lucky timing,
but twenty three people were injured, including his driver, and
an estimated one hundred families lost their homes in that blast.
(18:03):
But the most important details of the Rome bombing in
terms of how it related to the Safizi situation were
that the explosive used in that bomb in Rome were
the same as the ones used in Florence, and they
had been packed into a Fiat van just like the
vehicle outside the Afizi. The motive for the attack on
(18:23):
the Aufizi was retaliation. In the months and weeks leading
up to the explosion, Italian authorities had initiated a huge
crackdown on mafia activity and had arrested hundreds of people
in the process, including some very high ranking members of
the criminal organization. Many of those men were made examples
of authorities put them in solitary confinement to show that
(18:45):
they could cut them off from the power structures that
they depended on, and in response, the crime syndicate sent
the message that it could strike at Italy's art and history,
things that could not be replaced, that is, of itself horrific,
but could also recap the Italian economy, which really depends
on the tourism money that museums and historical architecture generate.
(19:09):
It took a year for authorities to conclusively tie the
mafia to the bomb, and finally, in nineteen ninety eight,
several high ranking bosses within the organization were sentenced to
life in prison for it. Stepping away from the horrific bombing,
Eufizi was having some trouble already in the months before
the blast, for reasons that did not have to do
(19:31):
with the criminal underworld. In March nineteen ninety three, an
article from Reuters ran under the title push comes to
shove at Italy's Ufizi. Too many visitors, too little staff
at famed museum, and that write up reported that the
museum had become so popular without the support to run
it that quote. On average, a third of the gallery's
(19:54):
rooms are closed during the tourist season because of a
chronic staff shortage that famous works like those of Bonicelli,
the things that were drawing people to the museum, were
often off limits because that room like others was closed
to manage crowdflow because no one was available to just
keep an eye on the art. This was an issue
(20:16):
that government officials were, according to the article, frustrated by
Antonio Palucci, who was the municipal supervisor over Florence's museums
at the time, gave a statement to journalist John Fullane
that evidenced his frustration at the way people had to
elbow one another just to get a look at the art. Quote,
the pushing and shoving and the galleries is a barbarity.
(20:38):
Visiting a museum today has become a strain for museum
guards and directors. It's like trying to hold a trench
with fewer and fewer soldiers in the face of an
ever bigger offensive. The museum had reached a point where
it would sometimes borrow guards from other museums to try
to keep up with demand, but that meant that those
other museums often had too. There were proposals in discussion
(21:03):
to ban school groups as one way to try to
mitigate this problem. The head of the UFIZI at the time,
Anna Maria petriol Tofani, told the press that the problem
stemmed from the fact that while bureaucrats in Rome were
happy to accept the income that the Ufitzi generated. They
micro managed every move the museum tried to make to
(21:24):
improve the visitor experience and ensure proper running and upkeep
of the facility, and they were not approving any kind
of spending. So at the time, the UFIZI was estimated
to generate about five point five million dollars in income
each year, and yet they were only allowed seven curators
for their massive and historically significant collection. Other branches of
(21:46):
their staff were similarly disproportionately small for what they were
trying to do. The allocated budget for its upkeep was
tight enough that, according to newspaper reports, staff had to
buy their own stamps and office supplies. In the years
just before the attack, the museum proposed a fifty million
dollar project that would expand the museum's space by taking
(22:08):
over a handful of State Archives offices in the building
that had been empty for five years after the operations
in those offices moved to Rome. The government approved it,
but then insisted on hiring their own contractors for the renovation.
Those contractors were not familiar with working on historic buildings
and caused damage by injecting cement into the foundation and
(22:31):
that resulted in cracking. This project stalled. After that, we
are going to talk about how the Ufitzi recovered from
the blast and how that recovery has stretched into the
very recent past. After we hear from the sponsors to
keep stuff you missed in history class going. In the
(22:56):
immediate aftermath of the bombing, the Ufizi was incredible quick
to form a plan of action for recovery. Curators and
other museum staff started clean up the same day as
the blast, mobilizing quickly to protect the art and to
assess the damage. In cases where canvases and sculptures had
been shredded by glass and other debris, staff members carefully
(23:19):
crawled the floors of the galleries to collect every possible piece.
They matched them to their frames and what was left
of the original art, and then they stored them all
together for possible reconstruction. This meant that they were literally
pawing through rubble to identify what debris was from a
painting versus a sculpture versus possibly a piece of the building,
(23:40):
and there was broken glass everywhere, so this was an
act of dedication. As they worked, they sorted those collected
pieces into wooden trays to try to keep the various
works of art separated. It is really hard to imagine
how much determination and teamwork it took to clean up
the museum and reopen it, but he was incredibly organized
(24:01):
in this effort, and other museums in the city also helped.
While the Yufitzi was closed, some of the other museums
extended their hours so that tourists would still have access
to the city's art. Twenty days after the bombing, less
than three weeks, the museum was partially reopened. A lot
of the paintings from the damaged part of the building
(24:22):
were rotated into the reopened galleries so that people could
still see them, and then the remaining galleries were restored
and reopened over the course of the next four years.
Because of the need for the museum to rebuild, the
logistical problems of space it had faced before the tragedy
were able to be addressed in the aftermath of the bombing.
(24:42):
The response to the tragedy was so impressive that it
became a model for how museum recovery should be managed. Yeah,
I feel like that could be its own whole topic.
There have been papers written about how they handled it
and how every other museum should study how they handled
it because they're bias for action was so great while
also maintaining an incredibly high level of care. It's quite cool.
(25:05):
In the years immediately following the attack, Menfrate's painting the
Concert was restored as much as possible. It had been
shredded into fragments, but the recovered fragments were big enough
that restorers were able to piece what they had together,
although it is not a complete picture. Then, in two
thousand and three, Gerardo de la Natti's Adoration of the
(25:27):
Shepherds was also restored, but the card Players remained as
the one piece that was believed to be beyond repair.
It was so damaged that it actually remained untouched for decades.
In the days and weeks following the explosion, the museum
staff had carefully taken what was left of it, which
was just hundreds of tiny, fragmented pieces, and covered it
(25:50):
with rice paper to protect it. Those pieces were placed
in an envelope that was stored along with the original
canvass and frame of the work. That particular painting had
not actually been in the Ufizi for terribly long when
the bombing happened. It had been in Palazzo Peti in
a storeroom until nineteen sixty nine, when it went through
(26:10):
a restoration, and then it was added to the Caravagesque
collection on display at the Eufitzi. Fast forward to twenty fourteen,
when Danielle Lippy happened across the fragments of the card Players.
She had studied painting restorations, starting all the way back
when she was nineteen, and from there she had started
working with Superintendenza that means superintendency, which is an office
(26:34):
within Italy's Ministry of Culture that focuses on conservation and
protection of important works. She described the moment when she
saw the card Players this way in twenty twenty three
in an interview quote, I was at the gallery's storage
rooms for an inspection when I came across the work,
in what was left of it. The work bailed on
the frame had been placed in the entrance hall, and
(26:57):
on the table lay the envelope containing all the paintings
spranggments collected from the floor. Among them, the fragment with
the playing cards stood out somehow, The identifying element of
the represented subject had survived, but the fragments of painted
canvas would become dust if left in that envelope. I
thought that through my work I could contribute in a
(27:17):
small way to saving a record of that dramatic event.
Lippi put together a detailed proposal describing her plan to
at least partially restore the badly damaged painting, and she
got approval. But then the next hurdle was money. In
June twenty seventeen, the UFIZI, along with partners from the
Florence community, launched a fundraiser for the project, which was
(27:41):
called Culture against Terror through Crowdfunding and more than twenty
six thousand euros were raised, so at that point the
financials were in place and then began the actual work.
So keep in mind the six hundred and fifteen pieces
that Leapy and her team had to work with were tiny,
some of them just a centimeter or two in width
(28:03):
and height. So she was tasked with a very precious
jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces were so damaged
and you could not try to match them edge to
edge to find their locations. She needed a good visual
reference to try to match the colors and the shadings
of the fragments too. The Ufitzi Archive had photographs of
(28:24):
it that had been taken after the nineteen sixty nine
to nineteen seventy restoration, but those were in black and white.
But then Leby started searching the Scala archives. This is
a Florentine archive dating back to nineteen fifty three that
collects images of cultural history, including art, and then creates
very high quality digital versions that can be licensed, so
(28:47):
sort of like Getty Images, but for art and film.
And they had a high resolution photograph of the card
players from nineteen eighty eight, so five years before the
attack and well after the prior restoration. Scala donated this
image to the project, and the resulting project is this
really cool marriage of technology and art because each tiny
(29:11):
piece was scanned and then the image of the original
painting was projected onto the canvas to enable the restorers
to visualize placement and kind of match up pieces to
their positions. Keep in mind, this painting was in the
style of Caravaggio, which meant that a lot of these
recovered pieces were just incredibly dark shades of brown and
(29:32):
plums verging on black. So discerning which tiny fragment was
gonna fit where required incredible concentration and care. As Leape
and her fellow restoration experts started carefully comparing what they
had in hand to that high resolution photo, they realized
that not all of the pieces were going to be usable.
(29:54):
Even with all six hundred and fifteen pieces, this would
have been a partial restoration, but some of those fragments
were so small or so damaged that they could not
be reincorporated into the piece. In the end, almost two
hundred pieces were deemed unusable. Each of the usable fragments
had to be very carefully cleaned. They were painstakingly stitched
(30:15):
together and affixed to a new backing canvas with special adhesive.
The ones that could not be used were affixed to
panels that are placed in a custom folder on the
back of the painting, so they will be available for
future analysis. In the end, right around thirty percent of
the original painting has been pieced back together. It's both
(30:36):
beautiful and heartbreaking to see the vast blank areas in
this frame. In a twenty twenty three interview with Scala Archives,
Leap you stated, quote the work thus recovered is not
brought back to an intact state, but has become a
document a memory and warning of that terrible affront. If
you were watching this on our Netflix channel and you're wondering,
(30:58):
why are you not showing us what this looks like?
It is that artwork that is part of Italy's cultural
heritage has special protections through the Italian government. So you
can use pictures of these works for like personal use,
but not for something like what we are doing where
we are putting a show on Netflix. But you can
(31:18):
see them on the Ufizzi's website. Yeah, if you do
an Internet search for Ufizi Manfredi, it's gonna come up
like I did that right before we recorded, and three
of the top five results were images of this restored painting.
It's a very famous effort. When the partially restored painting
(31:39):
was set to make its debut in twenty eighteen, the
Ufizi's director Iika Schmidt told The New York Times that
this whole project was really about much more than art.
Quote for Florence, Italy in the world, it was such
an important event of terror. We can't bring back to
life the people left dead or the heavily damaged paintings,
but we can build a memori for culture against violence
(32:02):
and terror. In addition to the Manfredie painting. When this
debut happened, the museum also showed a documentary in the
gallery that showed the work that Leapy's team had done,
and it also included interviews with rescue workers who had
been on the scene following the blast in nineteen ninety three.
Since then, the partially restored the card players as well
(32:24):
as the concert, have been displayed on subsequent years as
temporary exhibits marking the anniversary of the bombing. Yeah, I'm
not clear whether they do it every year. One thing
that I read while I was in Florence made it
sound like this is an annual thing they do now,
But I couldn't find any clear evidence where they were
(32:44):
like now and you know, twenty twenty, and I don't
know what happened during like the really harsh period of
the pandemic where they were they had just shut down
and weren't doing it or not. So probably they're you know,
I'm sure they will show it again and again. It's
so cool. I have a listener mail that's also kind
(33:04):
of about art. Yeah, it's about greeting cards all good,
which I was delighted that people enjoyed our weird greeting
card episode because that's one of those ones that I
was like, I'm into this. I don't know if anybody else,
but this is an email from our listener Kelsey, who writes, hello, ladies.
I've been listening to the show for many years through
(33:26):
many hosts. I started when I got my first iPod Nano,
when I was in college around two thousand and eight.
I love your banter and hearing about your crafty pursuits.
The recent podcast about greeting cards was particularly interesting. Over
last summer, I got into watercolor painting through a project
where I illustrated a short story I wrote. I'm working
on self publishing it on Amazon. Since then, i've been
(33:49):
painting cards. They're a great small unit of art. As
a teacher, I'm tired after work. Thank you for being
an educator, and then Kelsey mentions the plan to get
back into crochet when there's more time available over summer,
and conclude, thank you for your hard work. I love
this email one because I always want to thank all
of our teachers because they deserve it, and especially in
(34:12):
this episode where we talked about museum staff needed to
buy supplies. I'm like just like teachers was how I
felt when I was doing the research. But also I
also have gotten into water color painting recently in the
last year. When I was in Japan last year, my
best friend is an artist. She's also who I went
to Italy with, and there was this one art supply
store in Japan she wanted to go to and we went,
(34:34):
and I, on a whim bought art supplies. I bought
watercolor sets. I had not watercolor painted since I was
a kid, and that wasn't real watercolor, that's just goofing off.
But these sets were so beautiful that I was entranced
and I was like, must buy. And then earlier this
year I was like, I'm going to start using these
a little bit, and so I've been doing my own
(34:56):
little self directed watercolor study for the same reasons Kelsey mentions,
you can spend fifteen twenty minutes and produce something kind
of cute. And also I've been using it in fabric design.
Oh nice. We all do a watercolor and then scan
it in and incorporated into a fabric print. So I love.
I want everybody to make art in whatever way makes
sense to them, because I honestly think it is some
(35:18):
of the best therapy you can do outside of actually
having a therapist. I just think it's good for your
soul to make things. It makes your brain work in
a new way that we're not given the opportunity to
do all the time, where you're just kind of playing
low stakes. Art is the best for your mind in
my opinion. Anyway, that's just me proselytizing that I want
(35:41):
everybody to please make art in whatever way they like,
because I think it's really good for your soul. Kelsey,
thank you so much for this email, because you made
me delighted and gave me an excuse to talk about
the importance of art. There are also photographs of some
of the art that Kelsey's still and one says be
a good plant, water yourself, and I just think that's
(36:03):
charming as heck. And is a painting of a sunflower,
which I also love. And then there is another that
has some beautiful colored dragonflies in it, and another that
I am not one hundred percent commonent. I believe it
is a lion and that its main is the rainbow. Yeah,
(36:26):
I think it's a lion with the rainbow main and
not My first thought was is this a kitty that
is just surrounded by a halo, like a kitty kitty,
not like a lion. A little lions are kitties anyway,
These are very beautiful. Thank you for sharing your art
with us. I love art. There's no surprise there, uh,
but I'm always delighted when people share their work with us.
(36:48):
So that's another thing. If you don't want to do
pet tacks, you can share your art. It's great. You
can send us whatever you want. If you want to
do that, you can do that at History podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. If you would like to check out
our source lists and our show notes, which we've mentioned
a couple times in this episode, you can do that
at mistinhistory dot com. If you would like to subscribe
(37:10):
to the podcast and you haven't done that yet, you
can do that on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(37:31):
to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Oh, Tracy, I just
got back from Italy. I know you did. You seem
so happy while you were there. I didn't want to
(00:22):
I didn't want to leave. It was a pretty great trip.
And while I did actually bring materials to work on
an episode while I was traveling, because you know, long
flights and stuff, I got sidetracked by something else because
I saw something while I was in Italy that kind
of shifted all my gears and I got really obsessed
with it. So since that was the only thing I
(00:43):
could think about, it became an episode. So for setup,
if you visit the Ufeci Museum in Florence, Italy, and
if you follow the museum's suggested path, which in and
of itself is an adventure, there is this moment where
you turn a corner into a staircase, and and in
the sort of transitional vaulted ceiling that's over the staircase,
(01:04):
just as you're entering it, there is a discolored imprint
of a window like it almost looks like somebody like
drew a window on the staircase. But then to the
right of that staircase, on the wall, there is a
small plaque and the English version of it reads, the
vault bears the mark of a window blown by the
force of the Mafia bomb on May twenty seventh, nineteen
(01:26):
ninety three. So I was instantly riveted and I looked
it up. I had a vague recollection of this event
from when it happened, but I didn't remember a whole
lot of the details around it, and I was not
aware that the UFITZI is continually incorporating that story into
its own story and the way it presents art. So
(01:49):
I was on this long journey. It was quite delicious,
and that became this episode. We are gonna kind of
have this in three parts. We're gonna start by talking
about a particular artist and his work, and then we
are going to talk about the context of that bombing,
and then the work that's been done, some of it
(02:11):
pretty recently, to recover from that attack and memorialize the
tragedy and pieced together a little bit of lost history.
So we are going to start with Bartolomeo Manfredi Bartolomeo
Manfredi was born August twenty fifth, fifteen eighty two, in Ostiano, Italy.
That's in the province of Cremona, in the Lombardi region.
(02:34):
It's adjacent to the Mantua province, and sometimes you will
find his place of birth listed as Manchua. We don't
know a whole lot more about his early life than
that he is said to have become an apprentice or
a student to the Mannerist painter Christoforo Roncalli, also known
as Pomarancho when he was a boy. Pomarancho lived and
(02:57):
worked in Rome and had been chosen to create some
of the decoration for Saint Peter's Basilica. This also is
a fragmentary piece of information. Writing in nineteen eighty seven
for the Burlington magazine, Raphaela Marcelli noted that Pomaracio was
in Mantua in fifteen ninety five. He was actually imprisoned
(03:18):
there briefly, and that might have been where he came
into contact with Bartolomeo, who would have been thirteen. It
is unclear if Manfredi ever studied with Caravaggio, although he
certainly became associated with the older artist's work. In sixteen
oh three, Caravaggio was sued for libel by rival painter
(03:39):
Giovanni Baglione after critical and unflattering poems that Caravaggio wrote
about Baglione had circulated throughout Rome. I had originally been
planning to include some of these poems or an excerpt
from them in their translation. But they are so filthy
that they made even me, a person very comfortable with
(04:02):
salty and filthy language that many other people would find upsetting.
I gasped aloud. I was like, oh my goodness, Like
my husband ran down the stairs to see if I
was okay. They're filthy. But the important thing is that
during this libel trial a servant of Caravaggio's is mentioned
as actually being the one who passed out the copies
(04:24):
of those poems, and that servant is named in the
record as Bartolomeo Christifori. So this has led to some speculation,
and I think a pretty well grounded idea that this
is actually a reference to Bartolomeo Manfredi, and it is
using the first name of his teacher, Pamaranchio as his
last name. But again, this is still a detail that's
(04:47):
very much about piecing together clues rather than something we
can say with certainty. Even if Bartolomeo did study with Caravaggio,
it could not have been for very long because the
renowned painter famously had to leave Rome in sixteen oh
six am in murder accusations after a brawl that left
Branuccio Tomasoni dead. The actual cause of that brawl is
(05:11):
still debated. There are some different versions of it you
may hear, but Caravaggio was found guilty and he was
sentenced to death in absentia. He died in the Tuscany
town of Porto Ercole while he was actually headed back
to Rome, apparently in search of a pardon from Naples,
where he had been living, and that happened in sixteen ten.
(05:33):
Bertolomeo Manfreddi is often described as a Caravaggio follower, which
sort of straddles the fence on the issue of whether
he was his student, and he became the most well
known among the Caravaggisti, that's the painters that emulated both
the style and the techniques of Caravaggio. Manfreddi was so
(05:53):
studied at the style of Caravaggio that there have been
numerous times that his work has been mistaken for Carravaggio's.
I definitely when Holly sent me this outline and I
googled to see what some of this art looked like.
There were a couple of things that immediately made me go, oh,
that looks like Caravaggio. One such example is a painting
known as Cupid Chastised. This is an image of the
(06:16):
naked adolescent Cupid being whipped by Mars, god of war Venus.
Cupid's mother is attempting to intercede and to stop Mars,
so this is a violent image with a dramatic visual
contrast due to the light source being depicted exclusively from
the left side of the painting. According to Alfred Moir,
(06:37):
writing for the Art Institute of Chicago in nineteen eighty five,
when Cupid Chastised first hit the radar of the wider
art world outside of Italy, it was in nineteen thirty seven,
and at that point it was touted as a Caravaggio
that had been newly discovered, and although art experts quickly
determined that it was in fact the work of Manfredi,
(06:58):
that incorrect Carava attribution continued to circulate, people kept saying
it was by him. Today, the provenance of the work,
which is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute
of Chicago, is clearly laid out. From the time the
painting was commissioned in March of sixteen thirteen. That more
detailed account of the painting's history became possible, in part
(07:21):
due to the discovery of two inventory lists that were
in the Vatican Archives that mentioned the painting. They weren't
part of the Vatican collection, they were just pieces the
archives had that were collections of other people in Rome.
That information in those lists was then cross referenced with
other contemporary mentions of the painting in order to create
(07:41):
this reliable timeline. By sixteen thirteen, when that painting was commissioned,
Manfredy was well established. He was clearly influenced by the
work of Caravaggio, but he doesn't appear to have been
at all like him. In temperament. He was quiet. He
didn't socialize very much much. He took mainly private commissions
(08:02):
instead of seeking out important public jobs. Painting mostly multi
character tableau. Some of his work is religious and subject
A lot of it is often referred to as low life,
meaning everyday people doing things like drinking in taverns, playing cards,
or making music. One such work as the painting The
(08:23):
Card Players, sometimes also called Soldiers playing Cards, which Manfreddi
completed sometime between sixteen sixteen and sixteen eighteen. In this image,
a group of men are at a table in a
variety of positions. Some are sitting, some are standing, one
is sitting on the edge of the table. They are
betting on a card game called Sorrow, which was popular
(08:45):
at the end of the sixteenth century. This painting employs
the technique known as cherasciro, that's the creation of depth
and drama through a contrast of light and dark, with
those elements being light and dark within the composition. This
painting will become a central character later on in this episode.
(09:05):
Manfredi died quite young. He was only forty when he passed.
We don't have a lot of information about his death
other than the date, which was December twelfth, sixteen twenty two.
In Rome. Coming up, we are going to shift our
focus to the bombing that took place in Florence in
nineteen ninety three. First, though, we will pause for a
(09:26):
sponsor break at one four am on May twenty seventh,
nineteen ninety three, the city of Florence was rocked by
a massive explosion on Via de Giorgophili. That's a street
(09:46):
that runs mostly north away from the Arno River, right
next to the Offizi gallery complex. On that side of
the complex, in addition to gallery buildings, are the Giorgophilia Academy,
which is a history educational institution. It's housed records and
study of agriculture, forestry and economy, and the Torre de Puchi,
(10:08):
a fourteenth century tower that is used by the Georgophilia
Academy for both offices and residences. A lot of residents
of the city came out of their homes to see
what had happened, and they saw a terrifying devastation. The
academy and the tower were both badly damaged, as were
sections of the art galleries. A theory spread that a
(10:29):
gas tank may have exploded, but as first responders got
to the scene, they found the epicenter. There was a
massive crater in Via de Giorgophili, and they realized that
the cause of this was not a gas explosion but
a car bomb. A Fiat van filled with an estimated
five hundred pounds of explosives had been parked on the
street and then left to detonate. That number was initially
(10:52):
reported as roughly two hundred pounds, but that was revised
upward over the years based on the intensity of the explosion.
While the nighttime museum staff had not been on the
side of the gallery that faced this street, there were
people in the Torre del Pucci. Five people were tragically killed.
(11:13):
One was a student named Dario Capolichio, who died in
a fire that started after the bombing, and the remaining
four were a family who were buried in the collapsed tower.
Angela Ninchoni was the caretaker of the tower and her husband,
Fabrizio Ninchoni, and their two very young daughters, Nadia and
Katerina lived there as well, and the whole family was killed.
(11:36):
The museum damage was extensive. In addition to the building itself,
the Vasari Corridor was badly damaged. It was one of
the most damage pieces of architecture. So that structure is
a seven hundred and fifty meter long elevated enclosed walkway
and it was built in fifteen sixty five by Giorgio Vasari.
So that members of the Medici family could travel from
(11:58):
Palazzo Pitti to Pala so Vecchio on the other side
of the Arno River, crossing alongside the bridge known as
Ponte Vecchio. This provided the Medicis a way to make
that crossing without having to deal with commoners or without
compromising their safety. The Villa Lambartesca, the street that runs
perpendicular to the Via de Giorgofili, was covered in rubble.
(12:22):
There was a lot of damage to works of art.
A handful of their most famous pieces had a bulletproof
glass covering that protect them from projectile debris, but the
vast majority did not. An estimated one quarter of the
Ufizi collection was affected. According to the website, the final
count was one hundred and seventy three paintings and fifty
(12:43):
six sculptures in various states of damage and destruction. In
addition to that, because the building had so much damage,
a lot of works had to be quickly moved to
other parts of the facility. Leaving them where they were
would have exposed them to the elements. The unharmed room
where Bonticelli's Venus and Primavera are housed, became the de
(13:05):
facto landing place for a lot of the art that
needed to be moved. That led reporters to note that
it became the most impressive room of art in the world.
The museum staff and investigators took photos to document everything.
You can see a lot of those photos online at
the Fizzi website as well. Mad page will also be
linked from our show notes. At the time, there were
(13:28):
three paintings that were considered to be permanent losses, Adoration
of the Shepherds by Gerardo del NotI and two by
Bartolomeo Menfredi. They were the Concert and the card Players.
So just like the corridor, Vasari also designed the main
Ufizi building. That name actually just means offices because it
(13:50):
was built to house the various governmental divisions that were
operating under Cosumo, the first to Medici. Cosumo tapped Giorgio
Vasari to design this building in fifteen sixty, but Vasari
died in fifteen seventy four and the building was not
yet finished, and at that point Bernardo Bontalenti took up
the project early on in the building's existence. Once it
(14:12):
had been finished, the top floor of it was used
mostly to house the impressive Medichi art collection. They were,
as has come up on the show many times before,
significant patrons of the arts, and they commissioned a lot
of paintings and sculptures that are very famous today. Over time,
the Medici art collection grew and it took up more space,
(14:34):
and really that became the sole purpose of the Ufizi
was to house that collection. Anna Maria Luisa de Medici
born in sixteen ninety one, became the last of the
Medici line, and in a very famous and important move,
she signed what was known as the Family Packed and
that basically left the Ufizi Museum to the government of Tuscany,
(14:56):
and it provided for the entire art collection to remain
in Offizi in perpetuity and to be made open to
the public. So she basically made it into a public museum.
This cemented the reputation of Florence as a nexus of
great art, and it was also something that was designed
to draw visitors to the city and keep its economy strong.
(15:17):
So the damage that the Afezi sustained in nineteen ninety
three was something that the entire city felt very deeply,
because that museum is a work of art in and
of itself like the building is considered a work of art,
and it is also the heart of the culture and
the identity of Florence. Michael Kemmelman of The New York
Times traveled to Florence to report on the situation several
(15:38):
weeks after the fact, and his description was printed in
papers around the world. One section describes a gallery that
looked over the street where the car had been parked,
and then reads quote through that enormous opening in the wall,
the view is breathtaking and horrific. Set against the backdrop
of the soft Tuscan hills and the great dome that
(15:58):
Bruneliski designed for the cataedl are the shattered red tile
roofs of the buildings across the street from the Ufizi,
and the crumbled shell of an ancient tower in which
a family killed in the explosion used to live. A
few household belongings can still be seen on what remains
of the tower's top floor, reduced to barely more than
(16:18):
a roofless platform. Historical agricultural archives housed in the tower
were destroyed. Initially, there was no real sense of who
the perpetrator or perpetrators might be, why they may have
targeted the museum, and even if the museum was the
actual target, the Ufizi is a squared off U shaped
(16:39):
building with a courtyard, so if someone really wanted to
damage it, that courtyard would have been the optimal place
to park the explosives, but the car bomb was parked
on the exterior part of the U. The incident sparked
both rumors and outrage. The day after the bombing, labor
unions in Florence called a four hour strike, during which
(17:00):
more than twenty thousand people took to the streets in
a demonstration to send the message that the city was
united against violence and intimidation. There were suspicions about the
perpetrator being part of organized crime, or even an inside
job initiated by corrupt government officials. Quote. People might seem calm,
(17:21):
but they're angry. This is not crime, It is politics.
There is a war between people who want change and
people who don't want to lose power, and the only
way is to throw bombs and frighten people away from change.
The prevailing theory from early on among investigators was that
the mafia was involved. Just a few weeks earlier, there
(17:42):
had been an attack in Rome against television talk show
host Marizio Costanzo after he aired anti mafia pieces on
his show. The journalists survived that attack thanks to lucky timing,
but twenty three people were injured, including his driver, and
an estimated one hundred families lost their homes in that blast.
(18:03):
But the most important details of the Rome bombing in
terms of how it related to the Safizi situation were
that the explosive used in that bomb in Rome were
the same as the ones used in Florence, and they
had been packed into a Fiat van just like the
vehicle outside the Afizi. The motive for the attack on
(18:23):
the Aufizi was retaliation. In the months and weeks leading
up to the explosion, Italian authorities had initiated a huge
crackdown on mafia activity and had arrested hundreds of people
in the process, including some very high ranking members of
the criminal organization. Many of those men were made examples
of authorities put them in solitary confinement to show that
(18:45):
they could cut them off from the power structures that
they depended on, and in response, the crime syndicate sent
the message that it could strike at Italy's art and history,
things that could not be replaced, that is, of itself horrific,
but could also recap the Italian economy, which really depends
on the tourism money that museums and historical architecture generate.
(19:09):
It took a year for authorities to conclusively tie the
mafia to the bomb, and finally, in nineteen ninety eight,
several high ranking bosses within the organization were sentenced to
life in prison for it. Stepping away from the horrific bombing,
Eufizi was having some trouble already in the months before
the blast, for reasons that did not have to do
(19:31):
with the criminal underworld. In March nineteen ninety three, an
article from Reuters ran under the title push comes to
shove at Italy's Ufizi. Too many visitors, too little staff
at famed museum, and that write up reported that the
museum had become so popular without the support to run
it that quote. On average, a third of the gallery's
(19:54):
rooms are closed during the tourist season because of a
chronic staff shortage that famous works like those of Bonicelli,
the things that were drawing people to the museum, were
often off limits because that room like others was closed
to manage crowdflow because no one was available to just
keep an eye on the art. This was an issue
(20:16):
that government officials were, according to the article, frustrated by
Antonio Palucci, who was the municipal supervisor over Florence's museums
at the time, gave a statement to journalist John Fullane
that evidenced his frustration at the way people had to
elbow one another just to get a look at the art. Quote,
the pushing and shoving and the galleries is a barbarity.
(20:38):
Visiting a museum today has become a strain for museum
guards and directors. It's like trying to hold a trench
with fewer and fewer soldiers in the face of an
ever bigger offensive. The museum had reached a point where
it would sometimes borrow guards from other museums to try
to keep up with demand, but that meant that those
other museums often had too. There were proposals in discussion
(21:03):
to ban school groups as one way to try to
mitigate this problem. The head of the UFIZI at the time,
Anna Maria petriol Tofani, told the press that the problem
stemmed from the fact that while bureaucrats in Rome were
happy to accept the income that the Ufitzi generated. They
micro managed every move the museum tried to make to
(21:24):
improve the visitor experience and ensure proper running and upkeep
of the facility, and they were not approving any kind
of spending. So at the time, the UFIZI was estimated
to generate about five point five million dollars in income
each year, and yet they were only allowed seven curators
for their massive and historically significant collection. Other branches of
(21:46):
their staff were similarly disproportionately small for what they were
trying to do. The allocated budget for its upkeep was
tight enough that, according to newspaper reports, staff had to
buy their own stamps and office supplies. In the years
just before the attack, the museum proposed a fifty million
dollar project that would expand the museum's space by taking
(22:08):
over a handful of State Archives offices in the building
that had been empty for five years after the operations
in those offices moved to Rome. The government approved it,
but then insisted on hiring their own contractors for the renovation.
Those contractors were not familiar with working on historic buildings
and caused damage by injecting cement into the foundation and
(22:31):
that resulted in cracking. This project stalled. After that, we
are going to talk about how the Ufitzi recovered from
the blast and how that recovery has stretched into the
very recent past. After we hear from the sponsors to
keep stuff you missed in history class going. In the
(22:56):
immediate aftermath of the bombing, the Ufizi was incredible quick
to form a plan of action for recovery. Curators and
other museum staff started clean up the same day as
the blast, mobilizing quickly to protect the art and to
assess the damage. In cases where canvases and sculptures had
been shredded by glass and other debris, staff members carefully
(23:19):
crawled the floors of the galleries to collect every possible piece.
They matched them to their frames and what was left
of the original art, and then they stored them all
together for possible reconstruction. This meant that they were literally
pawing through rubble to identify what debris was from a
painting versus a sculpture versus possibly a piece of the building,
(23:40):
and there was broken glass everywhere, so this was an
act of dedication. As they worked, they sorted those collected
pieces into wooden trays to try to keep the various
works of art separated. It is really hard to imagine
how much determination and teamwork it took to clean up
the museum and reopen it, but he was incredibly organized
(24:01):
in this effort, and other museums in the city also helped.
While the Yufitzi was closed, some of the other museums
extended their hours so that tourists would still have access
to the city's art. Twenty days after the bombing, less
than three weeks, the museum was partially reopened. A lot
of the paintings from the damaged part of the building
(24:22):
were rotated into the reopened galleries so that people could
still see them, and then the remaining galleries were restored
and reopened over the course of the next four years.
Because of the need for the museum to rebuild, the
logistical problems of space it had faced before the tragedy
were able to be addressed in the aftermath of the bombing.
(24:42):
The response to the tragedy was so impressive that it
became a model for how museum recovery should be managed. Yeah,
I feel like that could be its own whole topic.
There have been papers written about how they handled it
and how every other museum should study how they handled
it because they're bias for action was so great while
also maintaining an incredibly high level of care. It's quite cool.
(25:05):
In the years immediately following the attack, Menfrate's painting the
Concert was restored as much as possible. It had been
shredded into fragments, but the recovered fragments were big enough
that restorers were able to piece what they had together,
although it is not a complete picture. Then, in two
thousand and three, Gerardo de la Natti's Adoration of the
(25:27):
Shepherds was also restored, but the card Players remained as
the one piece that was believed to be beyond repair.
It was so damaged that it actually remained untouched for decades.
In the days and weeks following the explosion, the museum
staff had carefully taken what was left of it, which
was just hundreds of tiny, fragmented pieces, and covered it
(25:50):
with rice paper to protect it. Those pieces were placed
in an envelope that was stored along with the original
canvass and frame of the work. That particular painting had
not actually been in the Ufizi for terribly long when
the bombing happened. It had been in Palazzo Peti in
a storeroom until nineteen sixty nine, when it went through
(26:10):
a restoration, and then it was added to the Caravagesque
collection on display at the Eufitzi. Fast forward to twenty fourteen,
when Danielle Lippy happened across the fragments of the card Players.
She had studied painting restorations, starting all the way back
when she was nineteen, and from there she had started
working with Superintendenza that means superintendency, which is an office
(26:34):
within Italy's Ministry of Culture that focuses on conservation and
protection of important works. She described the moment when she
saw the card Players this way in twenty twenty three
in an interview quote, I was at the gallery's storage
rooms for an inspection when I came across the work,
in what was left of it. The work bailed on
the frame had been placed in the entrance hall, and
(26:57):
on the table lay the envelope containing all the paintings
spranggments collected from the floor. Among them, the fragment with
the playing cards stood out somehow, The identifying element of
the represented subject had survived, but the fragments of painted
canvas would become dust if left in that envelope. I
thought that through my work I could contribute in a
(27:17):
small way to saving a record of that dramatic event.
Lippi put together a detailed proposal describing her plan to
at least partially restore the badly damaged painting, and she
got approval. But then the next hurdle was money. In
June twenty seventeen, the UFIZI, along with partners from the
Florence community, launched a fundraiser for the project, which was
(27:41):
called Culture against Terror through Crowdfunding and more than twenty
six thousand euros were raised, so at that point the
financials were in place and then began the actual work.
So keep in mind the six hundred and fifteen pieces
that Leapy and her team had to work with were tiny,
some of them just a centimeter or two in width
(28:03):
and height. So she was tasked with a very precious
jigsaw puzzle where all of the pieces were so damaged
and you could not try to match them edge to
edge to find their locations. She needed a good visual
reference to try to match the colors and the shadings
of the fragments too. The Ufitzi Archive had photographs of
(28:24):
it that had been taken after the nineteen sixty nine
to nineteen seventy restoration, but those were in black and white.
But then Leby started searching the Scala archives. This is
a Florentine archive dating back to nineteen fifty three that
collects images of cultural history, including art, and then creates
very high quality digital versions that can be licensed, so
(28:47):
sort of like Getty Images, but for art and film.
And they had a high resolution photograph of the card
players from nineteen eighty eight, so five years before the
attack and well after the prior restoration. Scala donated this
image to the project, and the resulting project is this
really cool marriage of technology and art because each tiny
(29:11):
piece was scanned and then the image of the original
painting was projected onto the canvas to enable the restorers
to visualize placement and kind of match up pieces to
their positions. Keep in mind, this painting was in the
style of Caravaggio, which meant that a lot of these
recovered pieces were just incredibly dark shades of brown and
(29:32):
plums verging on black. So discerning which tiny fragment was
gonna fit where required incredible concentration and care. As Leape
and her fellow restoration experts started carefully comparing what they
had in hand to that high resolution photo, they realized
that not all of the pieces were going to be usable.
(29:54):
Even with all six hundred and fifteen pieces, this would
have been a partial restoration, but some of those fragments
were so small or so damaged that they could not
be reincorporated into the piece. In the end, almost two
hundred pieces were deemed unusable. Each of the usable fragments
had to be very carefully cleaned. They were painstakingly stitched
(30:15):
together and affixed to a new backing canvas with special adhesive.
The ones that could not be used were affixed to
panels that are placed in a custom folder on the
back of the painting, so they will be available for
future analysis. In the end, right around thirty percent of
the original painting has been pieced back together. It's both
(30:36):
beautiful and heartbreaking to see the vast blank areas in
this frame. In a twenty twenty three interview with Scala Archives,
Leap you stated, quote the work thus recovered is not
brought back to an intact state, but has become a
document a memory and warning of that terrible affront. If
you were watching this on our Netflix channel and you're wondering,
(30:58):
why are you not showing us what this looks like?
It is that artwork that is part of Italy's cultural
heritage has special protections through the Italian government. So you
can use pictures of these works for like personal use,
but not for something like what we are doing where
we are putting a show on Netflix. But you can
(31:18):
see them on the Ufizzi's website. Yeah, if you do
an Internet search for Ufizi Manfredi, it's gonna come up
like I did that right before we recorded, and three
of the top five results were images of this restored painting.
It's a very famous effort. When the partially restored painting
(31:39):
was set to make its debut in twenty eighteen, the
Ufizi's director Iika Schmidt told The New York Times that
this whole project was really about much more than art.
Quote for Florence, Italy in the world, it was such
an important event of terror. We can't bring back to
life the people left dead or the heavily damaged paintings,
but we can build a memori for culture against violence
(32:02):
and terror. In addition to the Manfredie painting. When this
debut happened, the museum also showed a documentary in the
gallery that showed the work that Leapy's team had done,
and it also included interviews with rescue workers who had
been on the scene following the blast in nineteen ninety three.
Since then, the partially restored the card players as well
(32:24):
as the concert, have been displayed on subsequent years as
temporary exhibits marking the anniversary of the bombing. Yeah, I'm
not clear whether they do it every year. One thing
that I read while I was in Florence made it
sound like this is an annual thing they do now,
But I couldn't find any clear evidence where they were
(32:44):
like now and you know, twenty twenty, and I don't
know what happened during like the really harsh period of
the pandemic where they were they had just shut down
and weren't doing it or not. So probably they're you know,
I'm sure they will show it again and again. It's
so cool. I have a listener mail that's also kind
(33:04):
of about art. Yeah, it's about greeting cards all good,
which I was delighted that people enjoyed our weird greeting
card episode because that's one of those ones that I
was like, I'm into this. I don't know if anybody else,
but this is an email from our listener Kelsey, who writes, hello, ladies.
I've been listening to the show for many years through
(33:26):
many hosts. I started when I got my first iPod Nano,
when I was in college around two thousand and eight.
I love your banter and hearing about your crafty pursuits.
The recent podcast about greeting cards was particularly interesting. Over
last summer, I got into watercolor painting through a project
where I illustrated a short story I wrote. I'm working
on self publishing it on Amazon. Since then, i've been
(33:49):
painting cards. They're a great small unit of art. As
a teacher, I'm tired after work. Thank you for being
an educator, and then Kelsey mentions the plan to get
back into crochet when there's more time available over summer,
and conclude, thank you for your hard work. I love
this email one because I always want to thank all
of our teachers because they deserve it, and especially in
(34:12):
this episode where we talked about museum staff needed to
buy supplies. I'm like just like teachers was how I
felt when I was doing the research. But also I
also have gotten into water color painting recently in the
last year. When I was in Japan last year, my
best friend is an artist. She's also who I went
to Italy with, and there was this one art supply
store in Japan she wanted to go to and we went,
(34:34):
and I, on a whim bought art supplies. I bought
watercolor sets. I had not watercolor painted since I was
a kid, and that wasn't real watercolor, that's just goofing off.
But these sets were so beautiful that I was entranced
and I was like, must buy. And then earlier this
year I was like, I'm going to start using these
a little bit, and so I've been doing my own
(34:56):
little self directed watercolor study for the same reasons Kelsey mentions,
you can spend fifteen twenty minutes and produce something kind
of cute. And also I've been using it in fabric design.
Oh nice. We all do a watercolor and then scan
it in and incorporated into a fabric print. So I love.
I want everybody to make art in whatever way makes
sense to them, because I honestly think it is some
(35:18):
of the best therapy you can do outside of actually
having a therapist. I just think it's good for your
soul to make things. It makes your brain work in
a new way that we're not given the opportunity to
do all the time, where you're just kind of playing
low stakes. Art is the best for your mind in
my opinion. Anyway, that's just me proselytizing that I want
(35:41):
everybody to please make art in whatever way they like,
because I think it's really good for your soul. Kelsey,
thank you so much for this email, because you made
me delighted and gave me an excuse to talk about
the importance of art. There are also photographs of some
of the art that Kelsey's still and one says be
a good plant, water yourself, and I just think that's
(36:03):
charming as heck. And is a painting of a sunflower,
which I also love. And then there is another that
has some beautiful colored dragonflies in it, and another that
I am not one hundred percent commonent. I believe it
is a lion and that its main is the rainbow. Yeah,
(36:26):
I think it's a lion with the rainbow main and
not My first thought was is this a kitty that
is just surrounded by a halo, like a kitty kitty,
not like a lion. A little lions are kitties anyway,
These are very beautiful. Thank you for sharing your art
with us. I love art. There's no surprise there, uh,
but I'm always delighted when people share their work with us.
(36:48):
So that's another thing. If you don't want to do
pet tacks, you can share your art. It's great. You
can send us whatever you want. If you want to
do that, you can do that at History podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com. If you would like to check out
our source lists and our show notes, which we've mentioned
a couple times in this episode, you can do that
at mistinhistory dot com. If you would like to subscribe
(37:10):
to the podcast and you haven't done that yet, you
can do that on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
(37:31):
to your favorite shows,
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