PURLOINED POLLAIUOLO PANELS

July 17, 1944, a Nazi truck convoy was crossing a pontoon bridge over the Po River in northern Italy when Allied bombers attacked. One driver was killed, but the trucks got across. Their cargo: a priceless haul of masterpieces, including the two pictured above, from Florence's Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace.

After the Allies landed in 1943, the Germans looted northern Italy as though it were an occupied territory. The most defiant response to this looting that Mussolini (by then only the head of the remains of the Fascist Party in the north) could bring himself to make was a demand for a list of the stolen art's whereabouts. Strangely, when he got the 19-page list, page 18 was missing; some German official (perhaps Goring) wanted to keep Il Duce from finding certain of the paintings, including the Pollaiuolos. The inventory helped Italy recover nearly all the paintings it listed, but until last December no trace was found of those on the missing page.

Then one night in Pasadena, Calif., a German immigrant waiter named Johann Meindl was watching television and heard an art restorer remark that there were many masterpieces hanging incognito on people's walls whose value not even their owners dreamed of. Meindl wondered whether the two pocket-sized paintings (one is 6 3/4 by 4 5/8 in., the other 6 1/4 by 3 5/8 in.) he had been given in 1946 by an old teacher of his in Munich, Fraeulein Josephine Werkman, just before her death, might be worth something. He took them to the restorer, who recognized them as the missing Pollaiuolos, worth perhaps $500,000 each.

Italy's official lost-art detective, Rodolfo Siviero, flew to Pasadena and verified the find. After showings in Washington and New York, the Pollaiuolos were sent back to the Uffizi. German police, tracing wartime cronies of the Meindls, recovered five more looted paintings (including a Bronzino Deposizione and a Lorenzo di Credi) from an old man in Munich who turned them over on a police promise to keep his name secret.

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