Displaced Masterpiece

Before the war in Italy rolled north to Monte Cassino, the chief ornament of the monastery's Chapel of the Assumption was a handsome altarpiece of the Virgin. Then the ancient monastery threatened to become a defensive keystone for the Germans, and U.S. bombers leveled it.*The painting, by 17th-Century Paolo de Matteis, disappeared amid the rubble. Officially it was written off as a lost art treasure.

Last week the State Department announced that De Matteis' Assumption of the Virgin was not lost, just displaced. A German private who was also something of an artist had spotted the picture in the ruins, rolled it up and carried it away with him. He cached it for a while in Austria, then took it home to Bavaria. Eventually he wrote to the abbot of Monte Cassino, offering to return the picture if he was hired to repair it himself. U.S. Occupation authorities traced the letter, briskly reclaimed the painting and sent it on to the Bavarian State Picture Gallery in Munich for authentification.

Last week, still showing battle scars of blasted paint and torn canvas, the Assumption was back in Italy, where it will be restored and given its old place in Monte Cassino's reconstructed chapel.

*Not without military controversy beforehand. New Zealand's General Bernard Freyberg, commanding the assault troops, insisted on the bombing. His superior, U.S. General Mark Clark, resisted for a while, then reluctantly referred the matter to the theater commander, British General Sir Harold Alexander, who gave the go-ahead. Winston Churchill's later verdict: "The result was not good. The Germans now had every excuse for making whatever use they could of the rubble of the ruins, and this gave them even better opportunities for defense than when the building was intact."

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