As a “fine arts officer” in World War II, Yale art professor Deane Keller ’19 helped to rescue Italian masterworks from the ravages of war. While the recent George Clooney film focuses on a group of Harvard experts working in France and Germany, Keller and a fellow Yalie were tasked with saving as much of the culture of Italy as they could.
By 1943, when the Americans bombed Rome for a second time, Keller desperately wanted to do his part. “The riches of thousands of years of civilization —some of mankind’s greatest creative achievements—lay directly in the war’s path. Italy would soon become a combat zone,” writes Robert Edsel in his book, Saving Italy. “And here he was, an expert on Italy and its cultural treasures, stuck in a classroom lecturing.”
Keller had been turned down by the Marines for poor eyesight. Now, his friend Theodore Sizer, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, recruited him for the Army’s newly formed art protection unit—known later as “monuments men.” Fluent in Italian and familiar with much of the region from his three years in Italy as the recipient of the American Academy in Rome’s Prix de Rome, Keller was the perfect man for the job.
The Monuments Men were a group of men and women from 13 countries. Most had expertise as museum directors, curators, art scholars and educators, artists, architects and archivists. Their task was to save as much of the culture of Europe as they could during combat.
In November 1943, Keller, 42, boarded a liberty ship bound for North Africa, where he would spend two months at the Army’s School of Military Government. As captain, U.S. 5th Army, Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA), he would be the 5th Army’s first responder in terms of cultural monuments.
Shortly after the Allies landed in early 1944, Keller was sent to MFAA headquarters in Naples. He didn’t feel much like a soldier at first, but traveling around southern Italy inspecting monuments relieved the tedium of writing reports. The devastation, though, was eye-opening.
He wrote letters home to his wife, filled with drawings to communicate with his 3-year-old son (Deane ’58)—a sketch of his jeep, or an illustration of himself sewing on his 5th Army patch.
Then, as the Americans moved North through Italy, forcing the Germans out, Keller followed behind, checking on the state of cultural and artistic treasures in each town, sometimes only hours after a town was liberated.
Americans wondered why, with so many dead and wounded, that anyone would care so much for buildings or works of art, but the Italians were grateful. Keller’s presence and interest in their villages helped ease the wounds the Allied bombs had caused. The ancient hillside town of Itria, for example, had tumbled down the cliff and splintered into a heap. Keller could not even identify its famous Monastery of San Martino; it was simply gone.
Arguably Keller’s most valiant effort was at the ancient cemetery of Camposanto in Pisa with its walls of medieval frescoes. Before World War II, Pisa was best known not for the leaning tower but for Camposanto. Badly damaged by American artillery and six weeks of battle, the frescoes now lay in millions of fragments. Keller saw that the situation was dire; a single rainstorm could wash the remains away, so he called for assistance. A man who had been working largely alone now supervised a group of army engineers, 84 Italian military personnel, and fresco specialists from Rome and Florence. They built a temporary shelter and began the tedious process of collecting every speck of plaster, saved for a day when restoration could begin.
Two days after the German surrender in May 1945, Keller received a report from his counterpart in the 8th Army that the missing Florentine works of art, which the Nazis had transported north, could be found at Campo Tures and San Leonardo. Before he could head there, however, Keller needed to assess the damage in Milan. “Leonardo’s Last Supper is in peril, “ he wrote in a letter to his wife, “and we won’t know for some time what it looks like.” A few days later he added ominously, “It may be in ruins.”
His stay in Milan turned into a week, but by May 14 he made his first visit to the repositories. The responsibility of returning the works to Florence now fell to him. While others celebrated the find, Keller focused on logistics—moving hundreds of uncrated paintings on roads and railways that were bombed to pieces. “The war is not over for me,” he wrote his wife.
In the documentary film, Rape of Europa, there is archival footage of Keller loading 13 fully packed freight cars and then later accompanying trucks on their triumphant return to Florence. The value of that shipment was estimated, in 1945, at $500 million. It contained the riches of the Uffizi Museum and the Pitti Palace.
Thousands crowded Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, clapping and weeping with bells ringing. Keller allowed himself three martinis when the job was done. He sent his son a sketch of his team unloading a 10-ton crate of sculpture by Michelangelo and Donatello at the Bargello Museum. There are photos of Keller chipping away the protective masonry from one of the Michelangelos.![Keller with Michelangelo's Bound Slave]()
Keller returned to Yale and became a full professor. As Yale’s unofficial portraitist of the faculty, he painted nearly 200 commissions from the university and another dozen or so at Taft.
After his death, the family donated his wartime papers to Yale. The collection includes letters, photographs and extensive records of Allied attempts to protect Italian art objects during the war and documents Keller's activities and the fate of specific monuments and collections.
For his efforts during the war, he was recognized with the U.S. Legion of Merit, the Member of the British Empire Medal, the Crown of Italy Partisan Medal, the Medal of the Opera from Pisa, and the Order of St. John the Lateran from the Vatican. He died in 1992 in Hamden, CT. In 2000, he was buried at Campo Santo in Pisa, in recognition of his extraordinary wartime efforts in Italy with honors from the United States, Italy, and the Roman Catholic Church.
“The life of one American boy is worth infinitely more to me than any monument I know,” wrote Keller, but that never stopped him from risking his own. For him, the monuments were something worth fighting for.
www.monumentsmenfoundation.org
books.wwnorton.com/Saving Itly
www.monumentsmenmovie.com
www.taftschool.org/alumni/bulletin/fall03
www.rapeofeuropa.com
