Imagine visiting European museums, only to discover sparce walls and empty galleries. No Michelangelos. No Da Vincis. No Caravaggios. No Roman sculptures. Or imagine vacationing in Italy and not marveling at its wonderous monuments and architecture.
This was nearly a reality.
During World War II, the Nazis wreaked havoc, killing and displacing millions upon millions of people, leveling homes, buildings, and landscapes, while thrusting the world into a cataclysmic global conflict.
Yet, curiously, Adolf Hitler and his cronies did not lay waste to the conquered territories’ artistic, symbolic heritage as is par for the course in war — but stole an estimated 650,000 works of “degenerate” art. Many pieces were taken from Jews, who were tortured and executed en masse in the Holocaust, and museums and churches across Europe. According to the National Archives, “acceptable and desirable art included Old Flemish and Dutch masters; medieval and Renaissance German artworks; Italian Renaissance and baroque pieces; eighteenth-century French artworks; and nineteenth-century German realist painters depicting the German Volk culture.”
Stealing art quickly transformed not only into a means for “Nazi officers seeking social status and promotion within the party,” but an “organized government policy,” as the National Archives notes. In fact, the Third Reich created the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) to confiscate and organize the stolen works to be later displayed in the Fuhermuseum, a proposed museum in Linz, Austria, to “showcase European art and craftsmanship,” according to The National Museum of the United States Army.
The Allied Powers recognized this plundering of priceless European art as another front of WWII: a fight for Western civilization by preserving some of the most culturally significant works for future generations. Thus, in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) program — soon to be known as the Monuments Men. Most members of this group consisted of men and women scholars, historians, and museum curators.
As Robert Edsel describes in his book, Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis, the Monuments Men had the “seemingly impossible task” to:
“…minimize damage to Europe’s single greatest concentration of art, architecture, and history from the ravages of a world war; effect repairs when possible; and locate and return stolen works of art to their rightful owners.”
Throughout the Second World War, one of the most effective and consequential MFAA members was a 42-year-old “[i]ntroverted, sensitive, and extremely hardworking” painter, Yale University professor, and Connecticut native, Deane Keller.
For several years, Keller embarked on a massive search for lost works, traveling a total of 60,000 miles across Italy; preserved priceless structures; and returned an estimated $500 million worth of art to their rightful owners.
Today, Keller is enshrined in the Connecticut Hall of Fame for his unique efforts in combatting fascism. This is his story.
A Patriotic Arts Professor
Keller was born in New Haven, Dec. 14, 1901, to Caroline and Albert, the latter who served in World War I and as a sociology professor at Yale University. In both respects, the young Keller sought to emulate his father, albeit studying art instead. He graduated from Yale in 1923 and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree two years later.
A talented artist, he received the prestigious American Prix de Rome, which was presented to “fewer than a dozen of America’s most gifted emerging artists and scholars,” Edsel notes. He spent the next few years in Italy, learning not only the language and customs but studying some of Western civilization’s most important masterpieces. This time, evidently, proved providential, preparing him for his MFAA work nearly two decades later.
By 1929, he returned home and joined the Yale Fine Arts staff as an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting; he was then promoted to Associate Professor in 1936. Two years later, he married Katherine Parkhurst Hall, who was a former student in his drawing class. The pair had a son, Deane — nicknamed “Dino” — at the dawn of the Second World War.
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941), Keller, like many others, felt compelled to enlist and serve his country, but the U.S. Marines rejected him due to “poor eyesight,” Edsel explains. However, his life “changed dramatically” with the MFAA’s creation in 1943. At the behest of a friend (who happened to be Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, Theodore “Tubby” Sizer), Keller submitted his application to the specialized group, which was accepted. On Sept. 25, he received his official orders to report for duty.
Keller was elated, though anxious. As Edsel describes, “He fought the anxiety by writing letters — lots of letters — to his sisters, to his parents, but mostly to Kathy and their three-year-old son.” By early December, the Yale professor had left the United States, arriving in North Africa following the Allied liberation of the continent earlier that year.
Though his shyness led him to lead a lonesome life, which he particularly felt on Christmas 1943, Keller’s resolve to complete the MFAA’s mission held firm, writing to his wife: “I hear there is a lot to do in Italy and I hope the day comes soon for that. …I have great faith in this work, others to the contrary, and I want my chance.”
His chance would come the following February.
More Than an Art Tour
The Italy Keller witnessed upon his arrival in Naples was vastly different than from the Italy he experienced while studying abroad nearly two decades prior. Buildings were decimated. There were frequent air raids sirens. A typhus epidemic recently ravaged the local population. And the Italians were “hungry, homeless, and out of work,” as Edsel describes. While surveying damaged cities, Keller once noticed women “carrying buckets of rubble while their babies sat in the ruins” and people eating grasshoppers to avoid starvation.
Keller saw war’s destructive force, empathizing more with people’s pain than the broken pieces of art. In one letter to his wife, he described a “man without any nose” with “two holes in his face and great sores on his cheeks” who “asked me for a cigarette and bread.”
The pitiful state of Italy’s people moved the Yale professor — and, in some instances later in the war, he would distribute basic necessities like bread.
Still, after joining the Fifth Army, he had the MFAA’s mission to accomplish and its reputation to protect. As Edsel notes, Keller “knew that only consistent, hard work would debunk the notion that Monuments officers were in Italy for something more than some kind of surreal art tour.” He standardized his procedures, heavily preparing notes, befriending locals for critical information, and writing in-depth assessment reports during his inspections. Often, he visited towns “within hours of its liberation,” according to Saving Italy.
Along Italy’s west coast, Keller went about his work. Some cities were in worse condition than others. In Itri, the Monastery of San Martino — of the town’s most important monuments — “simply disappeared” Edsel describes; and in Terracina, Keller found an ominous German message that stated, ‘Whoever comes after us will find nothing.’ This was not entirely true. In fact, the Monuments Man discovered its Roman sculptures had miraculously not been stolen — yet, near the Temple of Jove Uxor, he stumbled upon not only armaments but two hundred dead German soldiers. The “sweetish smell death” stuck with him, as Edsel emphasizes.
This was not the only human suffering Keller found. After examining a bombed cathedral in Valmontone, he came across “hundreds of civilians huddled in a cave, their meager belongings at their feet,” according to Edsel. Yet seeing his first dead American infantryman struck him. As Edsel describes:
“Inside Keller found a letter addressed to the boy’s mother. For a man who believed that ‘the life of one American boy is worth infinitely more to me than any monument I know,’ it was a sorrowful experience.”
Conversely, high points in Keller’s MFAA service came when finding that the Abbey of Fossanova’s organ had been unblemished; when 50 people from Sezze Romano “offer[ed] prayers and thanks” to him; and locating the intact Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà — the prized altarpiece from the Cathedral of Siena, which had been locked in a crate and left behind by the Nazis. The latter held special significance to Keller as he “had last seen it as a student almost two decades earlier” and considered it as “an old friend,” Edsel states.
Overall, the work kept him busy. For example, in July 1944, he visited more than 50 cities and towns; yet he still managed to continue his letter writing and even drew pictures and/or cartoons for his son.
However, his most lasting, important MFAA efforts were to come when he followed the U.S. Army to Pisa and Florence.
A Sort of Faith
Unlike Rome or Florence, which received special protection from Allied bombings, Pisa had been left in ruins. Booby-trapped and reduced to rubble, the city, once populated with more than 70,000, was a ghost town when Keller reached it in early September 1944. While the most recognizable structure, the Leaning Tower, escaped destruction (though not flooding), the MFAA member realized the Camposanto had not.
The 13th century monument, the last on the Piazza del Duomo and adjacent to the Leaning Tower, sits on an ancient cemetery. Its vast interior walls are adorned with 20,000 square feet of religious-themed 14th and 15th century frescoes, painted by Francesco Traini and Bonamico Buffalmacco. For Keller, this site was special since he visited it as a student. It was also special more so for the Italians because, as Edsel suggests, the Camposanto “glorified local memory stretching back to the medieval era.”
However, due to the battle for the city, the pilgrimage site no longer had a roof. Thousands of pieces of the frescoes lined the ground, and the works were exposed to the elements. Dust was everywhere. Fire and bombings blackened and stained tombs and other sculptures. To save the monument, time was of the essence.
Yet he had no staff apart from his driver. Nevertheless, Keller enlisted the assistance of engineers, soldiers, and locals, who performed “heroically,” as Edsel highlights. For 34 days, the group, led by Keller, raised a temporary roof to protect the art and picked up the fragmented frescoes mostly by hand since the pieces were so fragile. As the New York Times summarized in a 2015 article, the Monuments Man “[t]hrough his quick thinking and leadership” is “credited with saving the frescoes,” which were still being “pieced back together” at the time of its publication.
Not only did Keller preserve and save artworks, but he located and returned them. His most notable effort began in the war’s closing months in the summer of 1945. As the Allied forces pushed back the Axis Powers toward Berlin, they discovered “German and Austrian salt mines, caves, and castles containing hundreds of thousands of paintings, drawings, library books, and sculpture, along with gold bullion and paper currency,” according to Saving Italy. Some were even found in a carriage house near Austria.
Many of these works, including several by Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Donatello, had been purloined from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the city famous for being the birthplace of the Renaissance. The task of safely returning the art fell to Keller and the Fifth Army. Completing the mission involved a gargantuan list of needs — from “packing materials, workmen skilled in such packing, and [52] trucks,” as well as extra security and more than 50 fire extinguishers. Keller also endured intense pressure. He could not afford the paintings and sculptures being damaged during the transfer lest the U.S. military incur Italians’ — and art enthusiasts’ — wrath. Nor could he respect himself if he failed.
According to Edsel, it was a massive initiative as “[e]mptying both repositories and getting their contents to the train stations at Merano and Brunico took two full days”; and moving some works proved more difficult than others, like a sculpture that “required a special truck-mounted winch.”
Still, on July 20, 1945, the “most valuable art cargo ever to be loaded aboard a single train” pulled into Florence, as Edsel describes. The next morning, the art was placed onto trucks, which Keller accompanied through the city to much fanfare. Thousands of Florentines lined the streets, “clapping and weeping,” while playing music and ringing bells, as Keller shared in a letter to Kathy. According to the New York Times, “hundreds of paintings, then valued at $500 million” were returned, while “only 11 remain unaccounted for.”
Keller’s work did not go unnoticed by international governments. For his efforts, he received the U.S. Army’s Legion of Merit, the Member of the British Empire, the Crown of Italy Partisan medal, the Medal of the Opera from Pisa and the Order of St. John Lateran from the Vatican.
Yet it wouldn’t be until May 1946, after nearly three years of MFAA service, that Keller — now a major — began the journey home. Once stateside, he resumed teaching at Yale until 1970; he and Kathy had another son, William; and he became notable for his portraits, painting President Herbert Hoover, Sen. Robert Taft, and Gov. John Davis Lodge, according to the Monuments Men and Women Foundation. His artwork is also featured in New Haven City Hall, the Knights of Columbus’ international headquarters, the Sterling Memorial Library, and around Yale’s campus.
He died on April 12, 1992, in Hamden. However, Connecticut would not be his final resting place. In a stunning tribute, and “recognition of his extraordinary wartime efforts in Italy,” Keller’s remains were reinterred in Camposanto in 2000. No doubt, the man instrumental in preserving the historical marvel would find it a touching gesture.
However, throughout his MFAA service, he had been more concerned about preserving life than art. Alleviating the pain of Italians, who suffered the ravages of war and near loss of its cultural heritage, was his primary mission. Still, as he once stated, “There is something in preserving the world’s heritage. It’s a sort of faith that we have. It is tangible and can be proven — if anything in life is worth proving.”
Art’s tangibility links the past with the present, while inspiring the future. The Nazis failed to recognize this, viewing these classic, timeless works as a means for their own glorification. They had no part in their creation or intended to truly safeguard them. The artworks, in short, were de facto prisoners of war.
However, Keller, in his unique way, fought against this evil ideology, and sought to free and save these works for future generations. For a Connecticut native to have been victorious in this front of the war should be remembered the next time one strolls through Pisa, Florence, or in Italian museums. He may not have saved Italy or Western civilization with a rifle, but he saved its memory, which continues to inform us today.
This memory cannot be taken for granted.
Till next time —
Your Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Andy Fowler
