Seeing the Great Art Hitler Stole

Seeing art masterworks in person is always a pleasure. Seeing masterworks stolen by the Nazis and recovered by the Monuments Men makes viewing them even more pleasurable.

Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, his first sculpture to leave Italy in his lifetime, can be seen in an ancient Bruges church. The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a polyptych painted by the Van Eyck brothers, is on display in St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent.

Bruges and Ghent are just a 30-minute train ride from each other in Belgium. For a while, the masterpieces were even closer. The Monuments Men found them and other art pieces in a deserted salt mine in Altaussee, Austria.

Hitler and his cronies ordered the theft of thousands of art treasures in occupied Europe. His plan was to display them in his personal museum in Linz. If Soviet art-hunters had found the salt mines before the Monuments Men, the masterworks would now be in Russia.

The Madonna and Child and Mystic Lamb, along with other great works of art, had been stolen before by French Revolutionary soldiers to adorn French museums. The theft was justified as the fruits of war and the price of liberty in France. When Napoleon seized power, he kept up the looting in Italy. He made the Pope pay ransom by surrendering his great art works.

Michelangelo’s sculpture, carved from a single chunk of marble, weathered banditry better than the seven panels of Mystic Lamb, also referred to as the Ghent Altarpiece. It has undergone extensive restoration that revived its vivid original colors and many of its subtle details, including the intensity of the eyes of the bleeding lamb, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice and the center of the main panel.

Madonna and Child
Today, the Madonna and Child commands the center of an altar in the Museum of the Church of Our Lady, which features a 377-foot-high tower, one of the tallest in the world.

A rich Bruges merchant commissioned the work, which Michelangelo completed roughly five years after sculpting La Pietà, his first major sculpture now seen in St, Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. The Madonna and Child was delivered to Bruges in 1504, the same year Michelangelo completed David, his most well-known work on display at the Accademia Gallery in Florence. All three works were completed when Michelangelo was in his twenties.

There are many sculptures of Mary and a young Jesus. In Michelangelo’s version, Mary doesn’t look down at Jesus, as did most preceding versions of the same subject. His Jesus is depicted as almost standing and, according to some art critics, looks ready to begin his preordained life’s journey. The faces of Mary in La Pietà and Madonna and Child resemble each other and both reflect a resigned understanding of Jesus’ earthly fate.

It’s easy to understand how the sculpture could reassure parishioners and incite envy. Bruges residents were ordered to ship the sculpture to Paris in 1794. It was returned in 1815 after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. German soldiers smuggled the sculpture out of Bruges in 1944 wrapped in mattresses inside an ambulance.

Mystic Lamb
The Mystic Lamb had a more complicated journey back to St. Bavo’s Cathedral. The work by two brothers began in the 1420s and was completed in 1432. Hubert, the older brother, died before the masterpiece was complete and his brother finished it. Hubert and Jan van Eyck reflect a Flemish style and is credited with leading a stylistic transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

The two-sided, 12-panel painting is an eyeful to view. The riveting main panel featuring a bleeding Lamb of God is flanked by Mary, John the Baptist, naked Adam and Eve and various groups of worshippers. The back side (or the front when the panels are closed) shows the archangel Gabriel and the Annunciation, as well as Joost Vijdt and his wife Lysbette Borluut, who commissioned the work.

The Mystic Lamb is now viewable in its own room behind a protective glass casing. The low lighting in the room allows the striking colors of the painting to pop. The restoration project removed dirt, repaired damage and restored the painting’s vivid original coloring. It takes a while to drink it all in, then you have to step around to view the back/front panels.

The Monuments Men
In the movie The Monuments Men, Frank Stokes (played by George Clooney) convinces President Roosevelt to form a group to save Western art stolen by Hitler. In actuality, 345 men and women from 13 nations volunteered to save art. The real Monuments Men were museum curators and art historians who had professional expertise to recognize and validate stolen original art pieces.

Their official organizational title was the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section of the Allies. The leader was George Stout, a World War I veteran and a pioneer in art conservation at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Clooney’s character was modeled after Stout.

An account in Smithsonian Magazine said, “Early in the war, Stout unsuccessfully campaigned for the creation of a group like the Monuments Men with both American and British authorities. Frustrated, the World War I veteran enlisted in the Navy and developed aircraft camouflage techniques until transferred to a small corps of 17 Monuments Men in December 1944.”

“Stout had been crossing France, Germany and Belgium recovering works, often traveling in a Volkswagen captured from the Germans,” the account added. “He was one of a handful of Monuments Men regularly in forward areas, though his letters home to his wife, Margie, mentioned only ‘field trips.’” Stout used German coats and gas masks to wrap captured art pieces before sending them to safety.

The Monuments Men weren’t all men. Rose Valland, played in the movie by Cate Blanchett, was part of the French Resistance and an art curator at a Paris museum where, at great risk, she secretly recorded the whereabouts of artifacts stolen by the Nazis. She collaborated with the Monuments Men for several months before entrusting them with her invaluable information. Captain Valland became one of the most decorated women in French history.

Was Saving Great Art Worth the Cost?
In the movie, Stokes gives a report to President Truman on what the Monuments Men recovered. Truman asks if the art saved was worth the lives lost saving it. Stokes said it was. Truman then casts doubt anyone 30 years in the future will remember the men’s sacrifice. In the movie’s closing scene, an elderly Stokes answers Truman’s question with “Yeah” as he takes his grandson to see the Madonna and Child in Bruges.

The visit by Carole and me to the Madonna and Child sculpture and Mystic Lamb altarpiece comes more than 75 years after their recovery by the Monuments Men. Was their sacrifice worth the reward? In our view, “Hell, yeah”.