By most accounts, the Italian pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the fourth centennial of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America, was a marvel of artistic riches. Located in the 30-acre Palace of Manufactures and Liberal Arts, the pavilion displayed bronze statuary, marble and wooden carvings, ornamental furniture, paintings, mosaics, bas-reliefs, Venetian glassware, ceramics, and lace, as well as treasures from the Vatican.
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In 1894 these artworks were moved to Higgins and Furber’s Columbus Memorial Building, at 31 N. State. “Here the appropriation of civic form by commercial interests went beyond architecture to civic ritual,” writes Bluestone. “The skyscraper stood as a celebration of both the discovery of America and of Chicago’s triumphant commemoration of the event in the Columbian Exposition.” The sculpture was mounted in a niche above the grand entrance arch, and the bas-reliefs were placed around the inside of the recessed arch. The mosaics were installed on the back walls of two adjacent stores that faced State Street, where their colored tiles glowed in the natural light that streamed through skylight domes. One of the shops would later be converted into a cafeteria, recalls Charles Gregersen, a Pullman architect who tracks down and writes about remnants of the Columbian Exposition. “I ate in that restaurant when I was a kid in the 50s, and I remember seeing the mosaic.”
In August Swett announced that the statue, mosaics, and bas-reliefs would be donated to the Municipal Art League of Chicago, which had been founded in 1901 to promote civic art and had worked closely with the Art Institute and city agencies on various projects. It also had its own art collection. “Once Chicago showpieces, [the mosaics] have been sadly denigrated,” wrote a Daily News reporter. The scene of Columbus landing in the New World and being met by natives was in the rear of the cafeteria, half hidden behind chairs and tables. The scene of him in the court of Queen Isabella, natives in tow, was completely hidden behind panels in the fitting room of the other store, which had been closed for years.
The mosaics stayed in storage until 1975, when the architectural firm of Belli & Belli was hired to remodel the interior of the hospital. Edo Belli, who runs the firm with his sons Allen and Jim, says the nuns asked him if he could use the mosaics. “They wanted to get rid of them. We said, ‘Sure, let’s pick them up. We’ll have them fixed up and put in the lobby.’ So we took them out of the warehouse.”
Several years ago an employee of the Chicago archdiocese, who doesn’t want to be identified because he wasn’t acting in an official capacity, called Schmitt Studios about the mosaics. “I was curious to see what happened to them,” he says. “I felt we lost the right to them, and I was interested in getting them back. They said no way–we were delinquent in our storage payments. I asked them how much it would cost to get them back, and they said they were ‘priceless.’ It would cost a number of thousands of dollars.” He vaguely remembers that the figure was $100,000 to $150,000, and he assumed that was to cover the storage charges as well as the cost of repairing the scavenged work. A conservator familiar with old smalti mosaics says it would cost around $10,000 just to have the good panel transported to Chicago and installed, and roughly $40,000 to stabilize, restore, and install the scavenged one. The archdiocese employee thought Schmitt Studios was asking too much, particularly since the mosaics had been in Schmitt’s care when they were first damaged.
Bernardoni believes the mosaics ought to come back to Chicago, the city for which they were made. “As a sign of goodwill, [Schmitt Studios] should donate the mosaics to the Italian-American community of Chicago,” he says. “It would be a generous and wonderful gift for the community. But we don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend.” Still, he adds, “I’d be willing to work halfway across the table with them and connect them to people who might like to pay something.”
