Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation's Treasures from the Nazis by Robert M. Edsel Read Free Book Online

nurturing family, Fred Hartt had endured a miserable childhood. Fred’s father, Rollin, was a Congregational minister and journalist in Boston. The first child born from his marriage to Jessie Clark Knight was stillborn. In 1914, almost forty years old, Jessie gave birth to Fred. In 1917, shortly after the family relocated to Staten Island, New York, Jessie died. Her death proved a crushing and formative loss for Fred, who “longed for her the rest of his life.”
    Two years later, Rollin remarried, to a Miss Helen Harrington, whose kind demeanor offset Rollin’s rigidity and abusive behavior. Fred’s emotional connection with his stepmother improved his teenage years considerably, but then she too died, of cancer. This triggered a depression, aggravated by Rollin and Helen’s adoption of a French boy, Jack, that had Fred in and out of therapy for many years.
    Fred commuted daily from Staten Island to attend Birch Wathen, a private school on New York City’s Upper East Side. Already six feet tall, his awkward appearance, accented by dark, heavy-rimmed glasses, set him apart from other boys his age. While most of his schoolmates longed to be on the athletic fields, mimicking the New York Yankees’ newest sensation, former Boston Red Sox pitcher-cum-hitter Babe Ruth, Fred Hartt was lost in a world of French Gothic cathedrals, Italian Renaissance sculpture, and Oriental silk screens. His gift for the arts was apparent almost from the day he arrived at Birch Wathen—as a student, he designed the school logo. Soon his talent as a draftsman led to an interest in sculpture.
    Fred’s career as an artist ended abruptly, however. Despite his obvious ability and enthusiasm, his therapist expressed concern that “working with his hands in such materials as clay would trigger a very negative response from [his] subconscious. These negative responses would bring about thoughts of, if not [actual,] self-destruction.” The death of that dream proved a crushing blow. Fred’s later efforts to resume drawing produced more frustrations than results. Often he would begin a drawing only to stop early in the process and tear it apart. Any thought of becoming an artist was abandoned.
    In addition to being an exceptionally gifted student and voracious reader, Fred impressed teachers and classmates with his photographic memory. Fred decided to apply those skills to the study of art history, specifically Asian art. At just seventeen years of age, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. Graduate studies at Princeton soon followed. He then earned a Master of Arts degree from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. By this time, his interests had shifted to Italian Renaissance art. Not surprisingly, his thesis focused on the master sculptor Michelangelo, his favorite artist. Despite the brilliance of Fred’s academic work, and his growing reputation in the field, Rollin remained critical of his son’s achievements.
    In 1942, while working as an assistant and cataloguer at the Yale University Art Gallery and studying for his doctoral degree, Fred met Margaret DeWitt Veeder, known as “Peggy.” As a fellow art historian, she and Fred shared a love of education, art, and travel. Their relationship provided Fred with the encouragement and support lacking from his earlier years, and they soon married. In many ways, she was the perfect partner for Fred, but Fred had one need that was beyond her ability to satisfy—he was interested in men.
    America in the 1940s was structured around a norm of heterosexuality. A homosexual man seeking employment, especially at a prominent American museum or college, had to keep his sexual preference closeted. Fred Hartt, like millions of Americans who lived through the Great Depression, was acutely aware of the difficulties of getting a job, so marrying a woman he truly loved, who was a friend and companion, was an ideal solution for the times.
    Hartt, like