The artist had just added them to liven up his picture. Artistic license became reality.

From The Polish way of rebuilding by Ed West.  The subheading is Let's make Coventry medieval again.  

In part, it is a description of the irony that the reconstruction of Warsaw under the occupying Soviet forces was much more responsive to citizen sentiment and therefore ended up with a beautiful city in the architectural fashion of its own history.

In contrast, in Britain, birthplace of parliamentary democracy, Coventry, which was raised to the ground by the Luftwaffe, was rebuilt according to the desires of urban planners and steadfastly against the wishes of the residents of the city.  Coventry is a byword in England today, and for decades, for urban ugliness and decline.

A couple of items.

The Polish Army and resistance fought bravely - some 20,000 Germans were killed or wounded - but at huge cost. As many as 200,000 Poles, most civilians, were killed in the battle and over 80% of the city destroyed – worse destruction than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And so the Nazis had carried out their plan to erase the Polish capital — yet this was something the Poles refused to accept, even after 1944

In the past whenever I used to occasionally fall into debates about nuclear weapons, one of my central questions has always been why we distinguish how a city is destroyed versus the extent to which they were destroyed.  

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tragedies but more people lost their lives to Allied fire bombing of Tokyo and other cities.  Do we care that one was nuclear versus age old fire bombs or do we care how many people died and how much was laid waste?  

West is adding Warsaw to the list of virtually leveled continental cities such as Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden - each with monstrous death tolls and comprehensive physical destruction and none involving nuclear weapons.  

There is a second point that comes up with some regularity on this blog.  The importance in modern world history, the distinctive advantage of the West, in creating, storing, and distributing knowledge.  Part of that is related to cultural openness and generative capability.  

Time and again over the past five centuries, we find northwestern and some Mediterranean powers, even without resource or numeric superiority, overcoming daunting odds due to access and utilization of stored knowledge.  Here is another example.

Remarkably, as Polish art historian Aleksandra Janiszewska-Cardone wrote last year, the authorities were helped in their efforts to rebuild the old town using the paintings of  Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto, who had visited Warsaw in the 18th century before its partition. When the Capital City Reconstruction Office (BOS) presented their plans to the Soviets in late 1945, they included five photographs of Bellotto’s artwork.

Janiszewska-Cardone quoted Małgorzata Omilanowska, a Polish art historian and former minister of culture and national heritage, who described it as ‘the emanation of the dream of a generation of architects experiencing the trauma of war, who built the Warsaw they wanted to love and believed that its residents desired one like it.

Some things were not quite accurate. The Branicki Palace was mostly destroyed but rebuilt based on a Canaletto work, and today features little statues of lizards and a gorilla eating a banana – but they never actually featured in the original building, the artist had just added them to liven up his picture. Artistic license became reality.

But the artist proved invaluable in restoring the city, and as the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand put it. ‘From the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw’. 

The paintings themselves, previously taken by Napoleon and by Tsar Nicholas I after the uprising in 1831, had been seized by the Nazis but survived the war and can today be found in the Royal Castle, (below) destroyed and only restored in the 1980s. The Castle forms part of a citadel that is today UNESCO listed, part of a beautiful square that is almost entirely reconstructed – except, I noticed, one modernist building opposite the castle which, horror of horrors, prominently displays the legend ‘McDonald’s’.

Warsaw isn’t the only European city to rebuild itself in this way. Part of Frankfurt’s Old Town is being reconstructed, the German financial centre in recent years tearing down a 1970s concrete block and replacing it with 15 reconstructed medieval houses.

Similarly the Royal Palace of Dresden, in a city destroyed on the fateful date of 13 February 1945, has been rebuilt as before.