Saul Steinberg

During World War II, while serving in the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Office of Special Services, Steinberg covered the war in drawings for magazines. Cassino is one of five depictions Steinberg made after the war of American bombardment around the world. It was inspired by the February 1944 Allied bombing of the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, south of Rome, and the four-month siege of Nazi forces that followed. Steinberg evoked this human, cultural, and historical disaster through an extraordinary network of graphic marks encompassing earth, sky, architecture, soldiers, and tanks.