Nicholas, working in Brussels, read an obituary about a French woman who spied on the Nazis’ looting operation for years and singlehandedly saved 60,000 works of art. Their work was largely forgotten to the general public until an art scholar, Lynn H.

They found and recovered countless artworks stolen by the Nazis. Kirstein and Posey were two members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Allies, a small corps of mostly middle-aged men and a few women who interrupted careers as historians, architects, museum curators and professors to mitigate combat damage. 'Calm and beautiful, the altarpiece was, quite simply, there.' 'The miraculous jewels of the Crowned Virgin seemed to attract the light from our flickering acetylene lamps,' Kirstein wrote later. In one panel of the altarpiece, the Virgin Mary, wearing a crown of flowers, sits reading a book. There, resting on empty cardboard boxes a foot off the ground, were eight panels of The Adoration of the Lamb by Jan van Eyck, considered one of the masterpieces of 15th-century European art. They walked past one sidechamber in the cool damp air and entered a second one, the flames of their lamps guiding the way. Lincoln Kirstein were the first through the small gap in the rubble blocking the ancient salt mine at Altausee, high in the Austrian Alps in 1945 as World War II drew to a close in May 1945.

Monument of the lost vikings