VANDALISM can be a form of murder. There are 13th century panels in Siena whose painted demons have been scratched to obliteration by pious fingernails; the Mona Lisa has been stoned. Last week, in one of the most vicious examples of vandalism to date, Michelangelo's Vatican Pieta was almost ritually assaulted by a 33-year-old Hungarian-born Australian geologist who cried: "I am Jesus Christ!"
Nobody will ever know what went through the scrambled circuits of Laszlo Toth's brain when he climbed over the guardrail of the chapel of the Pieta in St. Peter's Basilica and started battering with his hammer at the Madonna's resigned stone arm, the folded veil, the nose, the translucent shell of her left eyelid. But one may guess: Toth had lost all power to distinguish between an image and the reality it denotes.
In a sense, his motives no longer matter. The damage is done, and, according to the Vatican's optimistic experts, it can be repaired. No tourist looking at the Pieta in the future—through a prophylactic wall of reinforced glass —will be able to see the traces of restoration. But another supreme product of man's spirit will have become more distant, less intelligible.
Yet Laszlo Toth's act may serve one purpose. For decades, the cultural heritage of Italy (or that part of it embodied in architecture, painting and sculpture, urban planning and landscape design) has been deteriorating—rotting or stolen or bulldozed, concreted over in the name of progress, or just strangled in red tape. Last week's attack on the Pieta may direct the world's attention to the urgency of this problem. It is not a matter of one Michelangelo the less but the gradual death of the most complex and exquisite cultural ecology that Europe or the world has ever seen.
VISIT ITALY NOW, BEFORE THE ITALIANS DESTROY IT said one European travel poster. And Environmentalist Roberto Brambilla—who compiled the catalogue to a heartbreaking exhibit of photographs entitled "Italy—Too Late to Be Saved?", now on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City—put the point no less bitterly: "How can a nation's heritage be saved when her own people fail to recognize it as their own irreplaceable culture?" The overriding threat is not posed by iconoclastic maniacs like Toth but by eminently respectable town mayors, government planners and chairmen of land-development companies, whose greed or laziness is transforming Italy's historic centers into a chaotic urban wilderness, its coastline into holiday camps lapped by a salty chemical soup, and its museums and churches into understaffed, crumbling fermentation chambers where works of art sit and decay.