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National Geographic : 1946 Jan
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The National Geographic Magazine British Official "Welcome Back, Cosimo!" A Battered Medici Grand Duke Returns from the War Found in its hiding place at Poggio a Caiano, the 8-ton equestrian statue of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, proved too heavy for the Germans to carry away. To move the bronze from Florence's Piazza della Signoria, Italians had separated horse and rider. American soldiers brought the two pieces back to Florence on a tank-transport truck, with Italians cheering as it passed and a GI mounted in Cosimo's saddle to cut obstructing overhead wires (page 46). for the removal to the Reich of the altarpieces in their entirety. Moreover, toward the end of the war Ger man policy apparently changed, and there was considerable looting of public collections in Antwerp and elsewhere, which resulted in the removal of the Bruges (Brugge) "Madonna" by Michelangelo and other important works, all now recovered by our Army in Austria. Apart from Poland, about which I have no direct information and which I therefore omit from discussion, Italy suffered the most serious looting of public galleries. The first important case of German pillage from Italian museums was discovered when our Allied experts arrived in Rome and checked the cases from the Naples Museum, which had first been evacuated to Monte Cas sino and then taken by the Hermann Goering Division to the Vatican. It was noted that while in transit certain important pictures, such as Titian's "Danae," a "Madonna" by Raphael, a "Holy Family" by Palma Vecchio, and Pieter Brueghel's "The Blind Leading the Blind," together with bronzes, gold objects, and jewelry, had been removed. When this was stated in a broadcast by the Office of War Information, the Germans immediately accused the "pluto-democracies" not only of this theft but of many thefts they intended to perpetrate themselves. In spite of the German denials, these objects were discovered last summer hidden with other loot in Austria. Heavy Pillaging in Tuscany The chief pillaging of Italy done by the Germans was, however, in Tuscany. As a result of the Allied advance in Italy, it was
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