Michelangelo_s Notebook

Author’s Note

Much of the information contained in Michelangelo’s Notebook is true. Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, is known to have had an intimate relationship with his niece, Katherine Annunzio, while he was both Papal Nuncio in Berlin and later as Vatican secretary of state, a post he held until 1939, when he was elected pope. It is also known that his niece was confined in a convent in northern Italy and committed suicide shortly after the birth of her son. There is no conclusive evidence as to the fate of the child although some Vatican historians have speculated that Pacelli’s close friend, Archbishop Francis Joseph, Cardinal Spellman of New York, may have helped in the child’s relocation to the United States. Spellman, as chaplain to the United States Army, was in Rome during the closing days of the second world war.

It is also known that there was a direct relationship between Pacelli and the disappearance of the so-called Gold Train, as well as six truckloads of looted art hijacked by associates of Gerhard Utikal, Paris director of the ERR unit directing the theft of art from France, Belgium and Holland. Utikal’s fate, at least officially, is still a mystery although there is some evidence that he escaped to South America through the so-called Vatican ratlines.

A large amount of looted art, including a startling quantity of ecclesiastical works, has recently been showing up in the United States. The largest amount of this art, commonly referred to as the Quedlingburg Treasure has now been returned to its rightful owners.

The annual world market for stolen, looted and otherwise misappropriated artwork and antiquities, including that held by museums and public galleries, exceeds five billion dollars. The vast majority of art looted during Hitler’s Third Reich has never been found. The looted artworks mentioned in the story, such as the painting by Juan Gris and Rembrandt’s Raising of Lazarus, are all real.

There really was a convent/maternity home occupying the site of 421 Hudson Street in New York, and the children’s playground directly across the street really was once a large burial ground occupying two city blocks of Greenwich Village, including the churchyard once favored by Edgar Allan Poe on his midnight rambles. There is no Number 11 St. Luke’s Place, but the exterior of Number 10 was used as the facade of the Huxtable residence on the Bill Cosby show of the 1980s.

The notebook known to have been used by Michelangelo for his human anatomy drawings has never been found.