The Michelangelo taken from Bruges, twice

On the night of 6 to 7 September 1944, German troops were leaving Belgium. Musea Brugge, the museum body that manages the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, says German soldiers wrapped a marble sculpture of the Virgin and Child in a mattress and carried it out of the church. They took 11 valuable paintings with it. The NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster, reports that two soldiers came with a group of armed sailors, and that the load left in a Red Cross vehicle towards Zeeland in the Netherlands.

The sculpture is by Michelangelo. Musea Brugge dates it to 1503 to 1505 and describes it as white Carrara marble, about 130 centimetres high with its base. In 1514 a Bruges family, the Mouscrons, gave it to the church on condition that it stay there for ever. Erfgoed Brugge, a Bruges heritage body, names Jan Mouscron, a cloth merchant living in Florence, as the man who bought it and shipped it north. The German painter Albrecht Durer saw it in the church in 1521.

This was not the first time it had been taken. In 1794, during the French Revolution, it was carried to Paris. It came back after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The sources disagree on the year. Musea Brugge says 1816. The church’s own 2021 book and a Washington University thesis say 1815.

The soldiers of 1944 were never identified. The NOS reports that they said they acted so that the works would not fall to “American Jews”, and doubts that this was the only reason. Musea Brugge links the removal to Hitler’s plan for a museum at Linz in Austria. The Germans hid nearly 8,000 objects in a salt mine at Altaussee in Austria, and the Monuments Men, the Allied officers who protected art in the war, found it on 16 May 1945, according to Musea Brugge. Smithsonian Magazine reports that Captain Robert Posey and Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein were first into the mine and found the Madonna there.

An archive photograph shows Lieutenant Stephen Kovalyak, Lieutenant Commander George Stout and Lieutenant Commander Thomas Carr Howe packing it on 9 July 1945. Stout was a conservator who led the work. The Monuments Men and Women Foundation says that on 10 July he built a pulley to lift it onto a salt cart. Smithsonian Magazine reports that trucks took it to the Munich collecting point, with the Ghent Altarpiece, the day after.

On 22 September 1945, Howe, Lamont Moore and Kovalyak loaded the Madonna and the eleven church paintings onto a truck for Belgium. Greg Bradsher, an archivist at the US National Archives, says it was the first return where the receiving country came to Munich to collect. Musea Brugge says the sculpture was shown for a time at the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. After modest ceremonies in November 1945 it went back to the Church of Our Lady.

It stands there today, in the church on Mariastraat in Bruges.