The Spoils of War

Marvin Ross is a small, grey-haired G-5 captain, who used to be associate curator of medieval art at Baltimore's Walters Gallery. His job is to locate, check and guard artistic treasures. Last fall, before Strasbourg and its vicinity had been cleared of corpses and ruins. Captain Ross found the hiding place of one of the world's greatest medieval paintings, the Isenheim Altar Screen by Matthias Gruenewald. The treasure was stored in a vaulted room in Haut-Koenigsbourg Castle, near Colmar, Alsace, 40 miles from Strasbourg.

The Gruenewald masterpiece is a polyptych of six hinged wood panels, each depicting scenes from the story of Christ's life. Painted about 1516 for a convent at Isenheim, Alsace, the intense, now-gruesome, now-radiant Altar Screen is easily the most important set of medieval paintings any German produced. Most experts agree that the work ranks above the best of Holbein the Younger, Duerer and Cranach.

The Gruenewald Altar Screen was important enough to be mentioned in the Versailles Treaty: the Germans tried to keep it in Munich after the war, but the peacemakers of 1919 ordered its return to Alsace. Between wars, it was kept in the Colmar Museum. Last week, when the bare facts of Captain Ross's discovery first became known, nobody knew or even tried to guess why the Nazis left such a treasure behind when they were being pushed out of Alsace.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.