Committee to Rescue Italian Art Papers, Biblioteca Berenson, Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

The Committee to Rescue Italian Art was an American committee whose mission was to lend aid to Italian institutions in their own efforts to rescue the cultural heritage damaged by the 1966 flood of the Arno river. Jacqueline Kennedy assumed the Honorary Presidency of the organization. Professor Millard Meiss of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton chaired the Committee working with members of the executive committee. CRIA’s members included art and architecture historians such as Bates Lowry, Fred Licht, Millard Meiss, Frederick Hartt, Sidney J. Freedberg, James Ackerman and Rudolf Wittkower, as well as historians and linguists such as Paul Oscar Kristeller, Felix Gilbert and Myron P. Gilmore. All were intellectuals with close ties to Florence and to Italy who had long studied its culture through original sources and documents.

There were three general headquarters of CRIA in its six years of activity: an office in New York at 717 5th Street, where Bates Lowry supervised work and spent the bulk of his time fundraising, (from both large donors and smaller appeals in universities and schools) and two offices in Florence, the ground floor of Palazzo Pitti and Villa I Tatti.

CRIA Advisory Committee selected works of art to adopt with the funds raised by CRIA. Thanks to CRIA’s assistance, monuments, paintings, library materials and manuscripts were restored at a cost of two and a half million dollars, roughly the sum that the committee had originally set out to raise.

http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:VIT.BB:ber00002 Electronic finding aid available:Palazzo Pitti office

Electronic finding aid available: Villa I Tatti http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:VIT.BB:ber00003