In August 1943, on the eve of the Allied invasion of Italy, bombs threatened Michelangelo's David and nearly destroyed da Vinci's Last Supper. The race to save Italy's masterpieces was on. Two members of the U.S. Army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program—Deane Keller, a portraitist and Yale art professor, and Fred Hartt, a scholar at the university's art gallery—joined frontline troops to work against time to discover the location of priceless artworks snatched by the Nazis from the great museums of Florence and Naples.

With the whereabouts of the art unknown to the Allies, a heretofore obscure SS general held the works hostage while negotiating a secret Nazi surrender with American spies.

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Source: http://smithsonianassociates.org/