Art: War in the Treasure House

More monuments to human genius are crowded into the Italian peninsula than into any other like area in the world. If Italy is steadily bombed or shelled, man's most concentrated cultural record may be destroyed. This dilemma reverberated in the letters column of the London Times last week. The issue—Art v. Human Life in Wartime—was first raised by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Lang of Lambeth (see p. 62). "It would indeed be lamentable," he wrote, "if by the action of our armies . . . incomparable treasures of the history of art and of religion were destroyed or...