Striking At the Past Itself

By ROBERT HUGHES

How does one decipher the moral calculus of terror? In August 1980 a bomb blew up in the railroad terminal of Bologna, killing 85 people and injuring 200. Nothing was fully proved; no one was ever punished. So no one will ever know what agenda that atrocity served or whether it achieved anything for the murderers. Last week another bomb went off, next to the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence's principal museum. A stolen Fiat van packed with explosives blew up in the middle of the night next to the museum's west wing. The fireball and blast killed five people, destroyed museum archives and an important library near the Uffizi, weakened some of its ancient structure, and destroyed or damaged a number of works of art. Luckily, none of them were Botticellis, Michelangelos, Leonardos or Titians. Paintings by 17th century followers of Caravaggio (two by Bartolommeo Manfredi and one by the Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst) were totally destroyed, and several others, including an important work by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo, were shredded by flying glass. No doubt the terrorists, whoever they were -- and Italian authorities seem to be in little doubt that the beleaguered Mafia set the bomb -- would have much preferred to have taken out Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Michelangelo's Doni Tondo and perhaps a Giotto or two. But as an image of unrepentant terrorist power striking back against the Italian state, the bombing of the Uffizi could hardly have been improved upon. Florentine tourism may plummet. No Italian museum or church, however great or venerated, can be considered safe from this new breed of butchers, whose target is not only human lives but the past itself.

Since World War II, art vandalism has been relatively rare, and always (so to speak) personal. When a deranged Hungarian-Australian tourist named Laszlo Toth attacked Michelangelo's Pieta in St. Peter's with a hammer in 1972, it was because he believed himself to be the son of God. When the future art dealer Tony Shafrazi vandalized Picasso's Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, he moronically fancied he was making a point about art politics.

Now the game hideously expands. Serbs set out to murder the Bosnian Muslims' past -- destroying historic mosques, incinerating ancient archives -- as deliberate cultural genocide, to reinforce their scheme of human genocide. And the Mafia (or whoever it was) knows very well that the waters of forgetfulness soon close over human death: that a few years after the blood has been hosed away not too many people remember whether it was eight people or 85 who were killed by a bomb in a railway station; that if you want to make your power felt, a good way to do it is by destroying something that, unlike human life, is not even notionally a renewable resource. That "something" is the sense of a readily accessible past, without which there is no memory and no civilization. Herostratus, a narcissistic Greek, burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus because he thought it would make his name immortal. The depressing fact is that he was right. If he had not burned the temple, he would be utterly forgotten, along with 99.99% of the rest of the human population of Asia Minor in the 4th century B.C. Does the bombing of the Uffizi usher in a new convulsion of Herostratic politics? Passionately, one hopes not; impotently, one fears so.