Grandstand. Where have the anti-fascists gone? French opinion, at least since the publication of Stéphane Hessel’s manifesto, is generally quick to be indignant. Whether denouncing the government’s health dictatorship or the hegemony of white thought, the lack of recognition of sexual minorities in Poland or the urban planning of Paris, indignation has become a habit in France, a reflex, a posture supposed to protect us from this ” indifference “ seen by Stéphane Hessel as the worst attitude.
In view of this trend, one can be surprised at the benevolence with which the presentation, in France, of the collections of one of the pillars of Italian fascism was received. Under the title “Treasures of Venice, the Cini collection”, the Hôtel de Caumont presents in Aix-en-Provence, from November 19, 2021 to March 27, 2022, several treasures of the Italian Renaissance – from Fra Angelico to Filippo Lippi, from Cosimo Tura to Ercole by Roberti.
The choice of paintings, from the collections of the Cini Foundation in Venice, intends to represent the history and taste of Vittorio Cini, “Ferranese by birth and Venetian by adoption”a great industrialist and exceptional patron, presented in one of the exhibition halls as “the last of the doges”.
The trivialization of Vittorio Cini’s fascist past
If the chronology presented at the beginning of the exhibition recalls that Vittorio Cini was curator of the Universal Exhibition in Rome (1942) and participated in Mussolini’s last government as Minister of Communication (February 1943), at no time does the exhibition refers to the crimes of the regime of which Vittorio Cini was one of the pillars.
The distances he takes vis-à-vis the fascist regime “one month before his fall” and the financial support he brought to the resistance at the end of the war cannot, however, make us forget his central role in the rallying of the employers to Italian fascism, nor his cumbersome proximity to the Minister of Propaganda of the Reich, Joseph Goebbels, who shares with him, according to the catalog of the exhibition, “the same cultural interests”.
This trivialization of Vittorio Cini’s fascist past is emblematic of the silence that allowed the fascist elites to regain an eminent position after the war – nourishing the discourse of the Red Brigades, which equated capitalism with an extension of Italian fascism.
Restitution of looted works of art
Even more problematic, the exhibition refrains from mentioning the dubious nature of these acquisitions. Some of the works presented at the Hôtel de Caumont were in fact acquired by Vittorio Cini in the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when many Jewish families in Europe were forced to dispose of their works of art. However, neither the route of the exhibition nor its catalog evoke the slightest research work on the provenance of the works from this collection.
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