COMMENTARY : Uffizi Palace Blast a Deeply Personal Attack : Art: The terrorist bombing of such a significant cultural site sends a chill. And the act seems typical of recent precedents.

The terrorist bombing of the Uffizi Palace in Florence, Italy, first engenders panic in the heart and mind. Then, slowly, the blood turns to ice.

The panic comes from a sudden jamming of the mental circuits. Which beloved works of art in this most extraordinary museum might have been damaged or destroyed? Among the countless masterpieces of the Uffizi, which would you grab first, in any unthinkable emergency, to rush to safety? The task of choosing is impossible.

The Uffizi, which ranks among the three or four greatest repositories of European painting in the world, claims 45 rooms literally packed with extraordinary art. Simone Martini’s “Annunciation” may be the most exquisite painting made in all of 14th-Century Siena. Three panel paintings of the “Madonna Enthroned,” by Cimabue, Duccio and Giotto, together form the textbook story of the epochal transition between Medieval and early Renaissance style in Italy. Gentile da Fabriano’s spectacular pageant “Adoration of the Magi” looks simultaneously forward and backward from its exalted, early 15th-Century perch.

You can’t even get to the bare beginnings of the Renaissance art that was to set the European standard for centuries to come without facing an embarrassment of riches. Yet to be encountered are some of the very finest paintings by their authors, from Botticelli in the late 15th Century to Watteau in the early 18th Century. Collectively, they rank among the most formidable Dead White Males--and one Female, Artemesia Gentileschi--in the history of painting.

In Thursday’s early morning hours, an as-yet-unidentified explosive device was detonated in a car parked in the street outside the west wing of the Uffizi. At least five people were killed. Although none of the aforementioned paintings was hurt in the blast, a dozen great paintings were, including Rogier Van Der Weyden’s “The Entombment” and Gentileschi’s “Judith and Holofernes.”

Damaged, too, was the famous Hellenic sculpture of Niobe. One superb painting, Gerrit Van Honthorst’s “Adoration of the Shepherds,” was totally destroyed, along with two minor ones.

As for the building, in its own right an important example of Mannerist architecture, it’s a mess. Most of the windows were blown out by the force of the blast. Major structural damage was incurred, including to the so-called “Corridor.” Nearly two-thirds of a mile long, the Corridor becomes a bridge that spans the Arno River, linking the Uffizi with the Pitti Palace.

Fortunately, the ruin is nowhere near as awful as it could have been. That does not mean the losses are not grotesque. For, while terrorist attacks against any target are abhorrent, those directed against cultural icons are particularly horrifying.

The Uffizi was built in 1560 for the great Medici patron Duke Cosimo I as an administrative building adjacent to the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine seat of government. The narrow, colonnaded, U-shaped structure was designed by artist Giorgio Vasari, legendary biographer of Italian painters.

Cosimo’s successor, Francesco I, first made the upper loggia of the Uffizi into an art gallery in 1581. He did it for a specific purpose. Concentrating the Medici art collections in the center of Florence, he meant to create a vivid symbol for the unrivaled cultural power and prestige of the republic.

In the 19th Century the holdings were further enriched, with paintings that had been removed from churches throughout Tuscany. The regional consolidation of national patrimony in the Uffizi, which was now opened to the general public, became one potent symbol for the Risorgimento, the popular movement for the unification and liberation of Italy.

Therein lies the source of the special chill that, in the face of Thursday’s assault on a cultural site of such crucial significance, creeps through the arteries. For the Uffizi is not the first major art museum to be the site of an attack like this; indeed, it seems typical of recent precedents.

In March, an underground Islamic fundamentalist group bombed a tour bus parked outside Cairo’s great Egyptian Museum. In December, 1991, the Irish Republican Army set off a firebomb inside London’s extraordinary National Gallery of Art.

Unlike Florence, neither explosion damaged works of art. That doesn’t mean the wreckage has not been severe.

Terrorist bombings assert fearsome power against established political authority, by individuals unknown and cloaked behind a shadowy name--the Gamaa al Islamiya, the IRA, the Mafia. They seek to intimidate, not simply through the immediate force of dynamite and shattered glass, of broken masonry and, almost inevitably, human bone.

Instead, the terror is magnified, precisely through the lingering anonymity of the perpetrators. For their anonymous power is perversely matched, its scale monstrously balanced, by the fame, grandeur and stark visibility of the target.

The terrorist bombing of a cultural icon does not merely signal our own mortal vulnerability. Be it a pair of unsurpassingly tall skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, or one of the world’s signal art museums in a major tourist mecca, the action is also an ultimate act of egotistical ambition. For the expansive greatness of our collective heritage is ruthlessly ripped from our hearts and claimed as the perpetrator’s toy.

The blood runs cold because, in a profoundly shocking way, an assault against art is a deeply personal violation.