Italians Pick Up Pieces After Gallery Blast : Art: Thousands gather to protest attack. Museum could reopen in 3-4 weeks.

Uffizi Gallery officials began picking up the pieces Friday as thousands of Italians took to the streets of Florence to protest Thursday’s car-bomb attack on the famed museum.

A tour of the gallery, on the top floor of the 16th-Century Uffizi Palace, revealed extensive damage both to the structure of the building and to about three dozen paintings and sculptures.

“The damage is serious but nothing like what it could have been,” said Anna Maria Petrioli Tofani, the gallery’s director.

She said the museum wing housing many of its most renowned treasures--including paintings by Renaissance Italian masters Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli--could be reopened to the public in three or four weeks if a damaged stairway in that wing is found to be structurally sound. Restoration of the 33 works of art that were damaged, mostly by flying glass and other debris, could take the rest of the year, she said.

The blast, said by police to have been caused by 400 pounds of plastic explosives, demolished a building adjacent to the gallery and killed five people.

Italian Interior Minister Nicola Mancino told Parliament in Rome that the Mafia, the target of an increasingly successful crackdown by the government, was responsible for the bombing.

But Pierluigi Vigna, Florence’s chief prosecutor, said: “I wouldn’t speak of only the Mafia. It’s a case of indiscriminate terrorism.”

Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, touring the damaged area, declined to place any blame but vowed that the government would not relax its anti-Mafia campaign.

Pedestrians who had passed by the palace shortly before the bomb blast in the early morning hours Thursday offered police descriptions of as many as three suspiciously acting young men. One of the men was said by one account to have jumped into a waiting car, which then drove quickly away with a screeching of tires.

A combination of foresight and luck saved the museum’s most precious treasures, which include works by Michelangelo and Raphael. Bulletproof glass shielded many paintings from flying glass; others were on display in rooms with no windows or windows of specially reinforced glass. Petrioli Tofani said the museum began installing the shields seven years ago to protect against vandalism.

And as it happened, the bomb was detonated outside the west wing of the palace, which housed mostly lesser works. The east wing, where most of the gallery’s greatest paintings were located, was relatively sheltered from the explosion.

A surreal atmosphere pervaded the gallery as workmen, many of them completing 24 hours on the job without a break, removed paintings from the most severely damaged room and swept up the glass and window frames that had been sent flying by the blast.

In what was perhaps the museum’s most outstanding room, 10 paintings by Botticelli, including “Birth of Venus” and “Adoration of the Magi,” clung to their original positions on the wall, unhurt.

But they were hard to find; the center of the room was crammed with dozens of other paintings, many of them torn, that had been moved from the museum’s other wing. Lying flat was what remained of one of the two paintings by Bartolomeo Manfredi that were destroyed by the bomb. The force of the blast had stripped the canvas clean of its paint.

Besides the two Manfredi paintings, the only other work totally ruined by the blast was by the 17th-Century Dutch painter Gerritt Van Honthorst, who also worked in Italy, where he was known as Gherardo Delle Notti.

The three destroyed paintings and 24 of those that were damaged had been located in the corridors that run the length of the Uffizi’s two wings along the interior courtyard, where they were exposed to shrapnel from the blast.

Among the others that were struck by flying debris were two works by Peter Paul Rubens that were so huge that they could not be fitted with protective shields.

Rubens’ portrayal of French King Henry IV at the battle of Ivry remained in place, with 18 pieces of “Japanese paper”--tape with water-soluble glue--placed over the tears to prevent further ripping and peeling of paint. Across from it, his equestrian portrait of King Philip IV of Spain suffered only one small cut. Between the two Rubens works, Anthony Van Dyck’s portrait of Spanish Emperor Charles V on horseback was undamaged.

Five paintings by Raphael and one by Michelangelo--the “Doni Tondo,” his only complete oil painting--were removed from rooms whose skylights had crashed to the floor. These paintings remained unharmed, thanks to their protective shields, specially made skylights that were designed not to shatter and the fact that it was not raining when the bomb exploded.

But these precautions did not protect another major work, Sebastiano del Piombo’s “Death of Adonis,” from shrapnel, Petrioli Tofani said.

Petrioli Tofani said she had received offers from museums all over the world to help restore the damaged 30 paintings and three sculptures. She said the Italian government had offered $20 million toward the restoration--a sum that she predicted would not be enough.

By forcing the Uffizi to close, the bomb left Florence full of disappointed tourists. “We came to Florence especially to see the Uffizi,” said Nancy Palmer from the Orange County community of Lake Forest.

Adding to her woes, most of Florence’s shops and other museums were closed Friday morning for a protest march against terrorism. Massing in a piazza next to the palace, several thousand demonstrators left no doubt who they felt were responsible for the bombing.

Carrying signs that read, “No to State Terrorism,” they blamed a combination of the Mafia and the many Italian politicians under investigation for accepting bribes in return for government favors.

* CHILLING ATTACK: When art is targeted, the blood runs cold. A commentary. F1