When Italy entered the war, a commission was immediately appointed by the Government to consider measures for the protection of the country's art treasuries. Under the direction of the curators of galleries and museums, a civil engineer or architect was placed in charge of each principal building in all the art centers of northern Italy. The persons so appointed set about devising individual means adapted to the shielding of walls, towers, statues and pictures from attack by air and water, from shell and fire. In Venice the chief works and structures selected for protection were the Doges' (Dukes') Palace, with its rich arcades, sculptured façade and splendid halls, the superb Church of St. Mark, the medieval Loggetta, or vestibule, on the east side of the Campanile, the Church of St. John and St. Paul, the San Rocco School, the noble equestrian statue known as the Colleoni Monument, and the Academy of Fine Arts, with its canvases by Bellini, Carpaccio, Palma Vecchio, Tintoretto and Titian. At Padua, Donatello's equestrian monument of Gattamelata, erected in 1453, and the sepulchral church of St. Anthony of Padua received special care; likewise the Gate of the Scaligeri, Verona; the early Renaissance Colleoni Chapel and some precious frescoes at Bergamo; Leonardo da Vinci's immortal canvas, "The Last Supper," in the refectory of the abbey-church of Santa Maria della Grazie at Milan; the Fountain of Neptune and the Church of San Petronio at Bologna; the early Christian edifice of San Vitale, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (a queen of the fifth century) and the Tomb of Dante, in the deserted old city of Ravenna; and at Cremona, in the Church of Sant' Agostino, the famously beautiful altar-piece of the Madonna and Two Saints, by Perugino. The most renowned works of art in Rome, including the statue of Caesar in the Capitoline Museum, were padded and boarded up, and from Firenze and Naples rare examples of Italian craftsmanship, guarded through the centuries--manuscripts, statuary, paintings, tapestries, metalware, mosaics, glass--were carried away to safety, some of them to the vaults of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.