Raffaello — On The Road. Rinascimento E Propaganda Fascista In America -1938 40- __full__

The centerpiece of the tour was not a statue or a vase. It was the St. George and the Dragon (1505-1506), a small but potent panel painting by Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael). Housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., today, in 1938, it was on loan from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

American visitors to the San Francisco fair saw the St. George slaying the dragon. The caption, curated by the Fascist press office, read: "As Raphael’s knight subdued the beast, so does the Duce subdue the chaos of socialism and liberalism." The dragon was subversion. St. George was Mussolini. The centerpiece of the tour was not a statue or a vase

In 1939, as the world neared global conflict, the Italian Fascist regime sent priceless artworks—including Madonna della Seggiola Michelangelo’s Pitti Tondo Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus —across the Atlantic on the ocean liner Housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D

These paintings, lent directly from the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, and Vatican collections, represented the highest achievement of humanist civilization. The message was implicit but unmistakable: Only a strong, authoritarian state could have produced and preserved such beauty. The caption, curated by the Fascist press office,