The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II [Hardcover]

Ilaria Dagnini Brey (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374283095 | ISBN-13: 978-0374283094 | Publication Date: August 4, 2009 | Edition: First Edition

In 1943, with the world convulsed by war and a Fascist defeat in Europe far from certain, a few visionaries—civilians and soldiers alike—saw past questions of life and death to realize that victory wasn’t the only thing at stake. So was the priceless cultural heritage of thousands of years.

In the midst of the conflict, the Allied Forces appointed the monuments officers—a motley group of art historians, curators, architects, and artists—to ensure that the great masterworks of European art and architecture were not looted or bombed into oblivion. The journalist Ilaria Dagnini Brey focuses her spellbinding account on the monuments officers of Italy, quickly dubbed “the Venus Fixers” by bemused troops.

Working on the front lines in conditions of great deprivation and danger, these unlikely soldiers stripped the great galleries of their incomparable holdings and sent them into safety by any means they could; when trucks could not be requisitioned or “borrowed,” a Tiepolo altarpiece might make its midnight journey across the countryside balanced in the front basket of a bicycle. They blocked a Nazi convoy of two hundred stolen paintings—including Danae, Titian’s voluptuous masterpiece, an intended birthday present for Hermann Göring.They worked with skeptical army strategists to make sure air raids didn’t take out the heart of an ancient city, and patched up Renaissance palazzi and ancient churches whose lead roofs were sometimes melted away by the savagery of the attacks, exposing their frescoed interiors to the harsh Tuscan winters and blistering summers. Sometimes they failed. But to an astonishing degree, they succeeded, and anyone who marvels at Italy’s artistic riches today is witnessing their handiwork.

In the course of her research, Brey gained unprecedented access to private archives and primary sources, and the result is a book at once thorough and grandly entertaining—a revelatory take on a little-known chapter of World War II history. The Venus Fixers is an adventure story with the gorgeous tints of a Botticelli landscape as its backdrop.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

They were a gaggle of misfits—nerdy, old, bookish and sometimes pompous and abrasive. Yet the group of Allied soldiers nicknamed the Venus Fixers believed that saving Italy's culture—from bombing, from Göring's coffers, from careless soldiers—was an essential component of the war effort. Initially, it was the Italians who tried to find safe havens for the art, and then the job fell to the Venus Fixers, who performed triage after an area was secured by the military. In one harrowing tale, Brey describes how the Venus Fixers saved delicate manuscripts from being bulldozed along with rubble into the Arno. Often these artistic subversives were at odds with their own armies. In her first book, journalist and translator Brey isn't as skilled as one would like in bringing her soldiers to life on the page—a shame, given what a unique bunch they were and what an unusual task they had—but the book makes a strong case for what the Allies were fighting for in Italy: its history, and the artworks that continue to inspire us today. 8 pages of b&w illus. (Aug.)
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Review

“Art and war come together in this superbly researched history that reveals how Italy’s Renaissance masterpieces were caught in the crossfire of World War II. Ilaria Dagnini Brey recounts how many of these works almost miraculously survived, and who we have to thank for saving them—a somewhat unlikely crew of art historians, scholars, and architects. She shows how their quiet courage stood between some of the world’s greatest treasures and a fate almost unbearable to contemplate.” —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

“The Venus Fixers is an extraordinary story—tragic, poignant, and inspiring by turn. A must-read for anyone who recognizes that the mute victims of any country’s war are frequently its works of art, it brings to light a little-known and entirely absorbing aspect of World War II.” —Caroline P. Murphy, author of Murder of a Medici Princess

“Ilaria Dagnini Brey expertly recounts the race to protect masterpieces of art and architecture caught on the battlefront. Fascinating and brilliantly researched, The Venus Fixers is a story of Botticellis hidden in castles, the monuments officers’ heroism, and the art’s often narrow escape, played out against air strikes and looting, leveled churches and shattered frescoes.” —Cynthia Saltzman, author of Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures

“In this finely written and researched first book, full of anecdotes that will fascinate all art lovers, Ilaria Dagnini Brey adds wonderful insight and detail to the gripping story of the miraculous preservation of many of the world’s most treasured masterpieces during the Allied campaign in Italy. The heroes are the curators of Italy’s patrimony and the fabled monuments men attached to the Allied invasion forces, and Ms. Brey does them proud.” —Lynn H. Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374283095
• ISBN-13: 978-0374283094
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #835,811 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read for anyone passionate about art or World War II history, August 4, 2009

By 

Anne Nelson "Anne Nelson" (NY NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II (Hardcover)

"The Venus Fixers" tells one of the truly great "untold stories" of World War II. There have been several fine books on Nazi looting, but this one describes the bold young American officers who struggled to save Italy's artistic legacy from destruction. The characters and their stories are extraordinary. (The book opens with a young Harvard grad piloting a Martin B-26 over Florence,ordered to bomb the exquisite city he loved...) The author has done incredible research, in both U.S. and Italian archives, and manages to balance engaging anecdotes with military history. The insert of photographs is exceptional, really brings the people to life. This book changes the way you look at art -- and war.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Totally absorbing, a real labor of love, August 8, 2009

By 

Henry Scott - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II (Hardcover)

Anyone who's interested in art history or Italy or the untold stories of World War II will find this book absolutely fascinating. The author's research is very impressive. What I especially enjoyed is the way her deep feeling for the art itself, and the beautiful towns and cities that gave birth to it, shine through in her narrative. I suspect that the "Venus Fixers" themselves must have felt the same way, and Brey makes us feel as if we are witnessing the drama through their eyes. Highly recommended.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How the art we see was saved by "The Venus Fixers"-recommended reading, May 9, 2010

By 

Doron Midroni "Slow Traveller" (Toronto, Canada; travelling mostly in Europe and North America.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II (Hardcover)

When I picked up the book, I initially had the impression that this will develop into a telephone directory type of book: too many names, too many details. But by the time I read the first 100 pages I was hooked.

Why: because it brought into focus, even to one like me, who lived during WWII in Europe, and lived under bombs and survived them, how little we know, how "nothing" really we know about the manner in which so many masterpieces we admire matter-of-factly at the Uffizi, Accademia, the Archaeological Museum in Napoli, the cathedrals which we visit and admire everywhere in Italy, the bridges, the Palazzi, etc., how all these were saved by only a small number of Allied officers and by the work of most of the 50 Italian superintendents who were entrusted with these treasures, alas! too late in some cases, when the Allied forces landing in Italy in 1943.

Much of the book concentrates on Tuscany and on Florence, but there is plenty about the South and the North of Italy.

Personally, I will never look in the same way at Boticelli's Primavera, I will never walk along the Lungarno in Florence without imagining palazzi destroyed, bridges over the Arno annihilated, the Palazzo Pitti serving as shelter for 6000 people while the bridges and palazzi of the Arno were being blasted, 6000 people living in the Pitti in the midst of the art treasures, cooking, sleeping, worrying, waiting the war out. Among them Carlo Levi, and the Guicciardinis of the street with the same name whose palazzo on the Lungarno was mined and blasted, so many others without famous names. How the destruction was observed with great risk to life by Italian art and monuments public officers from the relative shelter of the Corridoio Vasariano, which remained almost undamaged due to Hitler fixation over the Ponte Vecchio, the only Florence bridge not to be blasted by the retreating German army.

There is much about masterpieces gone forever: the bombed Camposanto in Pisa (later partially restored), the 50 or more churches of Genoa, the Ovetari Chapel in Padua and with it the Mantegna frescoes, the Ponte di Mezzo of Verona which was considered the oldest Roman bridge in Italy. So many which we will never see!

This book tells us what was saved, and how, and by whom. And what was lost.

Personally, thanks to this book, I will never again enter any of these museums and admire these monuments thinking that they have been there forever and forever will remain. They are fragile, and I now look at them as a gift from those who braved bombs and politics and conspired and took enormous risks to themselves in order to preserve them for us, and for those after us.

D. Midroni, Moderator, Slow Travel [...]