LITMIR.BIZ

      8

       The Italian Exhibition

       What a horrible affair the whole thing is! I wonder if … Italian friendship is worth the risk?

      LORD BALNIEL to Kenneth Clark1

      On 18 December 1929 there sailed into the East India Docks in East London the greatest cargo of art ever brought to Britain’s shores. The priceless hoard of over three hundred works – paintings, sculpture and drawings – was placed in the hold of a single boat, the Leonardo da Vinci, which made its way from Genoa through winter storms off the coast of Brittany to London. With it came Kenneth Clark’s first great opportunity in the London art world: his involvement in the extraordinary exhibition of Italian art that opened at the Royal Academy on 1 January 1930.

      The exhibition’s aims were shamelessly political – it was an attempt by Mussolini to promote italianita, or what Francis Haskell, in his entertaining account of the saga, described as ‘Botticelli in the service of Fascism’.2 With enthusiastic support from Il Duce, the loaned works of art were of a quality and importance inconceivable outside a fascist state. They included virtually every major painting that was judged safe to make the journey from Italy to London: Masaccio’s Crucifixion, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giorgione’s Tempesta, Titian’s Portrait of an Englishman, and the pair of portraits that had brought Clark to his knees in the Uffizi, Piero della Francesca’s Duke and Duchess of Urbino. The irresponsibility of consigning so many of the world’s art treasures to such risks was widely condemned at the time. ‘Naturally,’ wrote Clark, ‘all right thinking lovers of art were horrified by this piece of vandalism – none more so than Mr Berenson.’3 So why did Clark become one of the principal organisers of the exhibition? It was an irresistible opportunity to catalogue some of the greatest paintings in the world that no ambitious young man could forgo.

      The idea of the exhibition had in fact been born in Britain. During the previous decade a series of successful London exhibitions, each with a different national theme, had been held at the Royal Academy: Spanish paintings, Flemish art, and Dutch art. The last two were not actually organised by the Academy, which levied a rental fee for the use of its galleries. These promising precedents gave Lady Chamberlain, the formidable wife of the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, the idea for an even more ambitious exhibition of Italian art. She and her husband were enthusiastic Italophiles, and it was her vision, energy and connections that brought the exhibition into being. It came, however, at a shocking cost in strained relationships between the two countries.

      All started reasonably well. Lady Chamberlain and the collector Sir Robert Witt4 put together a committee in the second half of 1927, which elected her as chair. The historical range of the exhibition was agreed to be 1300–1900, mostly paintings, but also drawings, sculpture, manuscripts and ceramics. Loans – all chosen by a London selection committee – were sought from museums and private collections across Europe, but well over half would come from Italy. At the Italian end, Ettore Modigliani was appointed to organise the exhibition. His qualifications were excellent: director of the Brera Museum for twenty years, and Soprintendente delle Belle Arti of Lombardy – but his distinction was lost on Clark, whose aversion to bores got the better of him. He described Modigliani as ‘a ridiculous figure by any standards and must have risen to high office by sheer volubility. He never stopped talking for a second, and hard-pressed officials must have given him anything he wanted just to get rid of him.’5 Haskell, from an examination of Modigliani’s life, thought this

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