Sequestered Treasure

The fac,ade that Florence's Palazzo Capponi presents to the street is tawny and severe. Unlike Germanic peoples, the Italians built their palaces with austere exteriors, content to have the opulence displayed within. But for the past 15 years, the Palazzo Capponi has defended from public gaze a greater treasure than most. Locked up there was the collection amassed by the late Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi. No outsider knew exactly what it contained and the only people with access to it were the dead count's heirs and a handful of their friends.

The collection has been sequestered while the heirs haggled with the legal authorities about its status. Early this year, at long last, the dispute was finally resolved. The result was a bequest to the city of Florence of 15 ceramic plaques from the della Robbia workshop, 38 pieces of Tuscan Renaissance furniture, 43 prime specimens of majolica and Hispano-Moresque faience ware, twelve sculptures (capped by Bernini's small but superbly fashioned St. Lawrence on the Grill), and 35 paintings that any museum would be proud to own. Late this month they will go on display at the Pitti Palace in the apartments formerly set aside for the royal family on their ceremonial visits to Florence, thus meeting the heirs' condition that the works be displayed in a group, as if in a private home. The collection is the largest gift of art to a public museum in Italy since the vast Medici collections became state property 200 years ago.

From the Back. Not everybody agrees on the importance of the works. Part of the dissent is ideological. The count's title was bestowed on him by Mussolini after he made a politic gift of several statues and other art objects to the Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome. Part is sheer Italian snobbery. Contini-Bonacossi was the son of peasants, who made his fortune in South America by methods that are still muffled in obscurity. When he returned to Florence, he set himself up as an art dealer and put his collection together between 1900 and 1928.

In those years, anything went. To eke out their meager stipends, parish priests could (and did) sell a 14th century predella out of the back door of their church for a few lire. The art market was full of floating masterpieces at whose origins dealers winked. The outstanding picture in the bequest, Sassetta's Our Lady of the Snow, is arguably the greatest surviving work by this unprolific Sienese master and worth, according to a spokesman at Christie's, "about $1,500,000." But it was stolen 60 years ago from the high altar of the church at Chiusi, near Siena, and purchased later by Contini-Bonacossi.

The importance of the collection has long been a source of controversy. Some of its attributions (made by the late Roberto Longhi) are, in the delicate language of art historians, "optimistic." In the view of some Italian experts the collection ranks some distance after other private and far older collections--those of the Doria, Colonna and Pallavicini families in Rome, the Corsini and Serristori in Florence and the Cini family in Venice. Still, Professor Mario Salmi, vice president of the Consiglio Superiore delle Antichit`a e Belle Arti, says firmly: "It is undoubtedly the finest private collection of Italian Gothic and Renaissance art made after 1900 in Italy."

The bequest to Florence is particularly remarkable for its early-Renaissance works, of which all too few survive. Of the best among them is a St. John the Baptist by the early Florentine master Giovanni del Biondo. The saint's grim, forbidding mien reflects the panic of religious doom that fell on Tuscany at the time of the plague, but the man stands, feet implacably planted athwart the body of Herod, in symbolic triumph. With the gift of Contini-Bona-cossi's St. Jerome, Florence will have one of the half-dozen finest small Bellinis to be seen anywhere in Europe. Every detail, from the folds of the saint's robe to the squirrel on a branch behind him, was imagined and recorded by Bellini as the concrete signs of God's grace investing the world. Bellini came 50 years before Titian, but 100 years before him Paolo Veneziano demonstrated to Venetians, in works like The Birth of St. Nicholas, that paintings did not have to be as flat and hieratic as the Byzantine style dictated, producing pictures with depth and visual drama that have their own particular authority.

Large Bite. The hassle about the bequest derives from the fact that the count was intent on leaving a memorial to himself in his own homeland, but the state insisted on a large tax bite for itself. He died (in 1955) before the issue was settled, but in his will he directed that his heirs should find some way of giving part of his collection to the state. Negotiations between family and state dragged on for 14 years. Part of the deal is that the family's half could be sold outside Italy without the 30% duty imposed on sales of Italian treasures abroad.

The value of what the heirs have kept should be immense. Not all the cream of the collection has gone to Florence; the family is merely down to its last half-dozen Titians, five or six Bellinis, and a pair of Tiepolo ceilings. Nobody knows what price the art may eventually fetch, but it seems certain that no group of paintings like it will be seen on the market again for years.

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