Original subtitles

The city of Florence. 15th century heart of the Italian Renaissance.

Deep in the city's grandest house,

home to its wealthiest and most powerful man,

is an extraordinary room.

It is the most beautiful and ornate in the entire city.

And at its centre is a glorious picture,

by the finest artist of the day.

This is a really extraordinary picture.

It has the feeling of a vision.

This glowing, radiant sensibility. Something transcendent, divine...

This was a completely new scene.

The birth of Christ, set in a dark, wooded wilderness.

The style of the painting - the sort of dark, foresty, mountainous mood -

is simply unlike anything that came before.

It's an extraordinary achievement.

The artist's name was Filippo Lippi,

and his life was as groundbreaking as his art.

A Carmelite friar, he was no stranger

to the temptations of the flesh, to which he frequently yielded.

If you're looking for somebody

who can capture the essence of the female, both in terms of the mother

and the lover, Lippi has it.

Lippi's painting inspired Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci.

But it also conceals a deeply personal story.

It was painted for a wealthy banker

who feared that his money was dragging him straight to damnation.

He wanted to make his money religiously respectable.

Money and religion had to be compatible,

because he really did not want to go to hell.

In later times, the painting had a violent history.

Hidden on Hitler's orders in a secret hoard,

it would even inspire mutiny in the US Army.

From a Renaissance palace to a 21st century computer game,

this is a tale of a painting and an artist that defied all conventions.

The Gemaldegalerie, in Berlin.

Home to many jewels of the Renaissance.

And in a small room, one painting stands apart.

Among more familiar biblical scenes,

its dark intensity and bursts of golden light

hold a power to captivate.

This is a really extraordinary picture.

It sets you - the spectator - on a stroll in the woods.

All of a sudden, you stumble across this fantastical scene,

this adoration of the Christ child.

But what's very strange about the way Lippi does it

is that he adds dark, spooky, gothic, twisted woods

and this glowing assemblage of figures in the middle,

a rich carpet of flowers.

It feels like something almost out of the Brothers Grimm.

It's a very extraordinary picture.

The painting is presided over by the Virgin Mary -

young and serene -

and by the newly born Christ child, lying on the ground.

But this is no simple illustration of a Bible story.

There are no shepherds or kings here, no ox or ass,

and no Joseph.

Lippi removes a whole range of narrative details

which would have been present in a standard nativity.

He creates a whole set of mysteries

and then preserves them within the picture.

You're not meant to come at this picture

and understand immediately what's going on.

The setting of the painting is as unfamiliar as its cast of characters.

Instead of a stable nestled in a gentle landscape,

the scene unfolds in a steep, dark, wooded wilderness.

I think the wilderness in this painting

sums up something within Christianity's notion of wilderness,

which is that nature is both friendly and beautiful,

and the result of God's creation,

but that it can also be inhospitable,

and offer itself as a trial to humanity.

And certainly, when I look at this wilderness,

I have a sense this is not going to be an easy ride.

But why did the artist set a scene of joyful birth

in a barren landscape,

and who would have understood such a painting's hidden meanings?

The answers lie in the first home of the painting,

where a copy now stands,

and they lie in the compelling tale of two men.

One was the richest of his day.

The other, the greatest artist and a holy man to boot.

Yet both had sin burning in their souls.

CHURCH BELLS RING

Florence in the 1440s, the most artistically vibrant place on Earth.

Home to 50,000 souls, this was a city of wonders

that was then bigger than London and growing by the day.

Around this period, Florence is in one of her most expansive and ostentatious periods.

There's a lot of prosperity and a lot of the money is going into building.

There are so many foundations and pits in Florence

that people are falling into them. The city is actually a building site.

One new building in particular was impossible to ignore.

The future home of Filippo Lippi's Adoration was a private house

of enormous proportions, designed in a radical style.

Its owner was the wealthiest and most powerful man in Florence.

A banker, his name was Cosimo de' Medici.

Cosimo is born into the Medici family bank,

and inevitably found that money did get involved with politics.

He was a guy who loved wielding power from behind.

Machiavelli has a nice comment on him.

He says, "He softened power with sweetness.

"He always hid it behind a soft glove."

He was just an immensely adept Italian politician.

The outside of Cosimo's new house spoke of confidence and power,

but in private, its owner was a deeply troubled man.

Although devout, he had led a sinful life,

even fathering a bastard child on a slave girl.

Worse still to the church of the day,

Cosimo had grown rich by lending money and charging interest.

This was a practice known as usury,

to be punished by an eternity in hell.

He was a man who was genuinely concerned about his soul,

so he was a genuinely religious man.

And that was a rather large problem for a banker.

He said, "I will never have enough money to have God as my debtor."

But you kind of feel that he would have liked that arrangement

if he could have got there.

Instead, Cosimo set about making amends for his sins

in bricks and mortar, and art.

Deep inside his new palace, he had something extraordinary built,

the first domestic chapel in all of Italy.

This was a lavish and costly peace offering to God,

and a place for Cosimo to kneel and do penance.

The walls were decorated with extravagant frescoes,

including a portrait of Cosimo himself.

But the heart of the room would be the altarpiece.

This would be a nativity, but of a kind never seen before.

One that would echo Cosimo's very deepest hopes and fears.

One artist was chosen to imagine and realise this groundbreaking scene.

In a city of great painters, he was the most celebrated.

And he was famous not just for his art.

His eye for beauty extended beyond pictures, to women,

with scandalous results.

Yet he was a holy man, a Carmelite friar -

Fra Filippo Lippi.

Filippo Lippi was born in Florence around 1406.

His father was a butcher,

and the family home on the south bank of the Arno river

still stands today.

By the age of eight, though, Lippi was an orphan.

He was placed into the care of the local convent,

Santa Maria del Carmine, which towered over the neighbourhood.

We think of monks and nuns now as people who have made choices

to go into the Church to have a relationship with God.

Five centuries ago, convents and monasteries

took the young men or women that the family couldn't look after.

So, Lippi doesn't grow up thinking, "I want to be a monk."

Lippi finds himself at a very young age being trained to be one.

Lippi's convent was a fortunate home for a youngster of an artistic bent.

In the 1420s, a chapel there was being decorated,

and the result, which unfolded before the young Lippi's eyes,

was one of the most groundbreaking and beautiful works

of the Italian Renaissance.

The artist was known as Masaccio, meaning "Ugly Tom".

At 23, he was only five years Lippi's senior,

but his work revolutionised painting.

Biblical characters suddenly seemed real people,

lit by the sun, moving in the real world,

convulsed by real emotions.

Masaccio's work at the Carmine

was profoundly important for Fra Filippo.

It gave him...

a profoundly new way to think about representation.

About showing figures, using light and shadow to bring out

a sense of shape and presence, and to give the figures placement,

in a world that was grounded in gravity.

In the convent, it was said

that the spirit of Masaccio had entered Filippo.

The young friar's earliest surviving work

shows the influence of Masaccio's bold sculptural figures,

transformed by a grace and delicacy that were Lippi's own.

By the age of 30, Filippo had left the convent,

and begun to earn a living as a professional artist,

though he remained a friar.

As the years passed, his growing fame drew him inexorably

into the circle of the city's leading artistic patron.

The de facto ruler of Florence,

this was the man who would commission the Adoration,

Cosimo de' Medici.

At first, Cosimo paid Lippi

to produce pleasing religious scenes for his new home.

In one, the artist even included a self-portrait.

A put-upon holy man with a cleaver in his head.

This irreverence was typical of Lippi.

He was gaining a reputation

as a friar who liked to live life to the full.

Lippi was in love with life.

Being in love with life also sometimes got him into trouble.

Cosimo, in order to get him to finish a painting,

locked him up in a tower because he was always out on the town.

And Cosimo comes back one morning to discover that he's got out

by tying all the sheets together and escaping,

and decides, if he's that into leaving,

maybe I should just let him have his head.

This is a painter who really loved women,

who if he couldn't get his hands on them,

satisfied his love of them by painting them.

Lippi was no stranger to trouble,

but in the late 1450s, real scandal broke.

The friar had become embroiled in a nativity all of his own.

For three years, Lippi had been working in the small town of Prato, near Florence,

painting a huge fresco cycle in the cathedral.

He had also been busy conducting a daily Mass in the local nunnery.

When he is in the convent in Prato and he spots, across the convent,

this rather beautiful young nun,

the story goes that he persuades the abbess

to let the young woman sit for him,

and then, lo and behold, the young woman isn't in the convent any more,

and neither is Lippi, so they abscond together.

The nun in question was named Lucrezia Buti,

she was just 20 years old

and her seduction by the 50-year-old friar threw Prato into an uproar.

Soon, only one nun remained in the convent,

the rest having been seduced in their turn by visiting clerics.

The aged Mother Superior dropped down dead.

Legend has it that the besotted Lippi

incorporated Lucrezia's portrait into the cathedral frescoes.

Certainly, there is a wistful look in the eyes of the friar

who gazes across the chancel at her, a self-portrait of the artist.

I think there must be a really extraordinary tension that lay in Lippi's soul.

This overspilling, exuberant desire to celebrate his fleshliness,

to speak of how much he yearned to touch female flesh.

Indeed, DID touch female flesh.

He has this extraordinary sense of sensuality, even eroticism,

mixing with profound contemplation with visionary divinity.

Confirmation of Lippi's affair with Lucrezia duly arrived

in the shape of a son, Filippino, later himself a famous painter.

The scandal was the talk of Florence, but Cosimo,

in need of Lippi's services, smoothed it over.

And so it was that Lippi, by now no stranger to newborn babies,

returned to Florence to create Cosimo's groundbreaking nativity.

It's likely that the patron and the artist

discussed the plan for the altarpiece carefully.

It would need to reflect and deepen Cosimo's penitent mood,

a mystical painting of a kind never seen before.

When you look at the painting, you see Mary.

She's kneeling on the ground

and she's looking at her son, the baby Jesus,

and you think, "I'm looking at a nativity, I've seen it before."

But actually, the painting needs a great deal of "reading"

and you start to see that you're not looking at a nativity at all.

You're looking at a very different moment,

a moment that isn't actually in the biblical stories.

It's a construct in order to concentrate the Christian mind.

The painting was a defining example of a new genre in art - the Adoration -

which focuses intensely on Mary and the infant Christ.

For this, Lippi drew upon the teachings of a medieval saint, Bridget of Sweden,

who in visions, had seen exactly how Christ had entered the world.

In the medieval era, there was this idea

of the adoration that St Bridget had given.

This idea of the Christ child lying on the ground,

almost like something we stumble across,

that we suddenly see before us, and step back,

struck by the wonder, the awe.

This wasn't God as we saw Him,

floating amid the cumuli that was the earlier idea.

This was God made man, put among the rocks,

the very stuff of which our world was made.

If the depiction of the Christ child was unusual,

so was the supporting cast.

Instead of shepherds and wise men,

Lippi introduced two humbly dressed saints,

fitting role-models for the wealthy patron.

John the Baptist is said to have left home at the age of seven,

to lead an austere life in the desert.

Here, he wears his traditional hair shirt,

and carries a scroll that proclaims in Latin,

"Behold the lamb of God."

Above him, kneeling behind a natural prayer stool of rock, is a monk.

St Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian order of monks,

had a particular devotion to the Virgin Mary,

and here, he faces her, lost in meditation.

St Bernard believed in meditation as something that you did in private,

in wilderness, in seclusion.

So in a way, he gives you perhaps the biggest clue

as to how to read the picture as a whole.

Something that's seen by the heart and by the mind

as much as by the eye.

The two saints are not the only unexpected presence.

Few, if any, previous Nativities had included the entire Holy Trinity.

God the Father, his son, Christ,

and the dove of the Holy Spirit.

It was a subject dear to Cosimo after he helped to resolve

a theological dispute about its nature,

and is pictured here, wreathed together in rays of celestial light.

But the painting also has a darker side.

All around the newborn Christ child, wild flowers grow,

their delicacy concealing a sombre meaning.

The five petals represent the five wounds Christ will receive during his crucifixion.

Such symbols abound. On the ground, a goldfinch rests -

the bird that feeds on the seeds of the thorn bush,

calling to mind the crown of thorns of Christ's last hours on earth.

Most unsettling of all, though, is the painting's landscape.

Where painters had set previous nativities in a stable,

or in open, rolling countryside,

here we are immersed in a dark, dense forest.

This setting was Lippi's innovation and Cosimo's obsession.

Filippo Lippi sets the Adoration of the Christ Child

into an unusually specific landscape.

It is the high woods at Camaldoli to the east of Florence,

where in the 11th century, St Romuald had founded a monastery

to which the Medici were very devoted.

It is a landscape that the members of the Medici family

would have immediately recognised, resonant with a kind of holy silence,

a kind of interiority with the austere and ascetical spirit

of one of the great monastic orders, the Camaldolite order.

Camaldoli had another specific link to the painting.

The monks there ran a timber business,

chopping down the tall pines of the forest

to provide wood for the buildings of Florence.

These fallen trees are strewn through the painting,

and would have reminded Cosimo

of the biblical words of John the Baptist.

"Now the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.

"Every tree which bringeth not good fruit is hewn down."

This is a clear evocation

of the idea of the last judgement, the end of time.

Tall trees, proud trees, they're going to be cut down.

Cosimo is a tall tree.

By setting the birth of Christ

in a landscape of sacrifice and renunciation,

the painting bore down upon what, for Christians,

is the deepest spiritual truth of the Christmas story.

Christ's birth is not an innocent, joyful event.

God becomes man in order to die,

and in doing so, to redeem the sins of the world.

This ultimate act of penance would serve as the supreme example

to the guilt-ridden banker, Cosimo.

Drawing up the scheme for the painting

would have been a collaboration,

but the next stage would fall to Lippi, and Lippi alone.

I've always loved Lippi's work myself.

He created these graceful images - beautiful women, beautiful children -

that have always moved me.

He's a very personal artist, I feel.

You get some sense of his... love of the subject matter,

love of the people he was painting.

He's... He has a delicacy, particularly,

which I've always admired.

It's likely that Lippi would have begun work on his Adoration

with a worked-up scheme sketched out.

Then he would have created full-size drawings,

ready to be transferred to his panel.

What we assume Lippi would have done

is prick round the outlines with a fine stylus or pin,

so you end up with a little network of holes following all the contours,

and then you dust charcoal or black pigment through those holes,

and it leaves a very fine pattern of little dots.

And on this painting, you can see that even with that minimal amount of delineation, as it were,

the expression of the Virgin is already evident.

Lippi painted using tempura -

coloured pigments bound in egg yolk -

the standard medium of the day.

But his handling of the medium was second to none.

Tempura has, by its very nature, to be applied very gently, very delicately.

Little parallel strokes, you're just...

You are literally stroking paint onto the surface.

A great master like Lippi would have created seamless transitions,

which are barely visible until you get very close to the painting.

He must have had wonderfully fine brushes to...

And I don't know how many he got through each day, wearing them out.

Lippi knew that his painting was to be displayed in a very particular environment.

The chapel of the Medici palace had no windows,

and so the altarpiece would be seen only by candlelight.

A small part of the painting testifies to this.

On Mary's cloak, there are traces of damage

from the naked flame of an altar candle.

Lippi turned the darkness of the setting to his advantage,

by finishing the painting with a breathtaking display of gold.

In using gold, Lippi is both very extravagant and virtuoso,

but he's also very restrained.

The actual amount of gold on the painting

doesn't cover very much area, but it's controlled in such a clever way

There are the halos with their incised and punched decorations which reflect the light

at different angles, depending on the viewer and the illumination.

Sometimes he's not even using gold.

He's using little dots of yellow and ochre

to suggest the play of light across a golden surface,

set next to actual gilding. It's immensely sophisticated.

He's using the gold in a way

that I haven't seen in other artists of the period.

It would have amazed people, I'm sure, when it was first painted.

For Cosimo, the banker,

the gold might also have held a very personal meaning.

To me, the most important part of the picture

is the amount of gold that's used in it.

This extraordinary superimposition of, you know, cash and the sacred.

The darkness at the centre of the painting

does nothing but set off the gold here.

He wanted to make his money religiously respectable.

I think that's absolutely key in this whole thing.

"The Church has to need and want my money,

"and I am a genuinely devout person,

"but I'm damned if my money is not going to be accepted in the Church."

Unlike most artists of the day, Lippi chose to sign his picture.

With a panache typical of him, he painted his name

on the handle of the axe in a virtuoso display of foreshortening.

By the year 1459, Lippi's work was done,

and the painting was in place above Cosimo's private altar.

But the patron was by now a sick man.

Unable to walk, he spent more and more time in his chapel -

the banker settling, as he put it, his accounts with God.

This is not a painting for a kid.

This is a painting for a very great man,

who's approaching the end, you know?

And who has a number of things to be ashamed of.

Four years after the painting was completed, Cosimo died.

Lippi's fame continued to grow, as did his transgression.

He fathered another child with Lucrezia Buti,

and the Pope offered to release the couple from holy orders

so that they could be wed.

Lippi, never the marrying type, declined.

A decade after finishing his great Adoration, Fra Filippo Lippi died.

The altarpiece, meanwhile, not only lived on,

but inspired a new generation of artists.

The young Sandro Botticelli, once Lippi's pupil, adopted his style.

Michelangelo praised Lippi,

and Leonardo da Vinci borrowed the Adoration's landscape for his own work.

Soon, Lippi's picture had become one of the most copied paintings of the 15th century,

an image in demand for the homes of rich and poor alike.

Looking at a copy brings into focus the quality of the original.

It makes you realise that what may appear effortless in its composition

was very carefully calculated and certainly was inspired.

It's only when you see the same elements in a different order

or painted in a different way or with a different colour,

you realise that the original

had controlled all these elements almost perfectly,

and just altering one of them diminishes the whole work.

For all its fame, though, Lippi's original was far from secure.

It was only just embarking on a long and troubled journey

that would see it face the threats of rebellion, war, and mutiny.

In 1494, the Medici family was expelled from Florence.

Its dominance over the republic and city

had become too much for citizens to bear.

In riotous scenes, their palace was ransacked,

and many paintings and statues borne away.

The most important artworks were seized by the state

and taken to the seat of government, the Palazzo della Signoria.

There, Lippi's Adoration

was installed over the altar of the republican government's own chapel.

It was booty.

It was part of what was appropriated from this family,

who had been very powerful and very admired,

but also feared by many people.

"This was the Medicis' and now it's ours."

That was part of the value.

Just two decades later, the Medici returned to Florence in triumph,

and moved back into their palace.

Citizens and state alike gave up their looted art,

and Lippi's Adoration found its way back to its original home.

Here it would remain for three centuries,

its fame slowly fading,

until a new, unexpected character entered its story.

He was a wealthy English trader living in Prussia - Edward Solly.

Edward Solly was an English merchant who settled in Berlin

in the very first years of the 19th century.

His speciality was the trade in timber, and grain.

Prussia, basically, lived off the trade with these goods,

and with the trade to Britain,

it was a very important part of their economy.

Solly dealt in timber on a rather larger scale

than the monks of Camaldoli,

and the trade had made him one of the wealthiest men in Berlin.

Like Cosimo, he had a city-centre palace,

just yards from the Brandenburg Gate.

He moved among prime ministers and emperors,

ambassadors and kings,

and he had a curious passion that was particularly his own,

collecting early Italian art.

This was a time when early Italian works were not collected

because they were beautiful or important in themselves,

but they were collected as documents.

All of this was leading towards perfection -

towards Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci.

And that was the interest in these early painters.

What's new with Solly is that he must have been interested

in their look and their visual aspects as well.

Solly began to build up an extraordinary collection of over 3,000 paintings,

the largest private collection of Western art in the world.

Even his palace could not contain the sheer quantity.

Paintings were hung in the kitchen and out-houses,

and even stacked against walls.

Visitors were overwhelmed.

August von Goethe, the son of the great German author, wrote...

"I have just returned from seeing Mr Solly's art chaos.

"It is the work of a lifetime, not an afternoon, to take it all in."

The early 19th century was a good time

for the collector of Italian paintings.

Napoleon was in control of Italy,

and had imposed punitive taxes on its wealthy families,

forcing them to sell off much of their art.

Art like Lippi's Adoration, which Solly acquired,

most probably for just a few pounds.

But it was Napoleon who was also to prove the undoing of Solly,

when he established a naval blockade across the seas of Europe.

Solly was one of the people who was very personally affected by that

because his own speciality was no longer possible, legally, at least.

He tried to circumvent the blockade, and to still keep the trade going.

He was doing a high-risk business.

At first, Solly did well,

making huge profits as his merchant ships ran the blockade.

But then disaster struck.

The Danish, allies of Napoleon,

seized no fewer than 20 of his ships, complete with cargo.

Solly was in danger of going bust,

and taking a large part of the Prussian economy with him.

His proposed solution was elegant -

to sell his entire art collection to the Prussian state.

But the negotiations had to proceed quietly.

This purchase was kept secret,

because it was a huge sum of money.

The whole collection was estimated at 500,000 Thalers.

The state of Prussia in 1820 had a whole 50 million Thalers,

so it was one per cent of the whole state budget.

But it was still a bargain.

It was a snip.

In 1821, the deal was sealed, and Solly sold his collection

for the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds.

His business was saved, and at a stroke,

Prussia could boast one of the finest state art collections in the world.

For the first time in its history,

Lippi's Adoration now went on display to the general public,

in the newly-built Royal Museum in Berlin.

It was a good acquisition for Prussia,

because Lippi's star was in the ascendant.

Around the period in history,

we've fallen in love with the Renaissance again.

There is a real flowering of both understanding and appreciation

of Renaissance culture.

At the same time, it's the arrival of Romanticism,

and this birth of the notion of the artist

as somehow mad and bad, and possibly sad,

in order to be wonderfully creative.

And Lippi and his affair with Lucrezia Buti was completely irresistible.

Once again, Lippi was a seductive character.

In the very year that the Prussian state bought his Adoration,

the French artist Paul de la Roche

painted an overwrought scene of the friar with his muse, Lucrezia.

Many other artists, it turned out, also had an eye for a fallen nun.

By the middle of the century, poets were joining the cult of Lippi.

Robert Browning, living and working in Florence,

published an imaginary monologue in which a drunken Lippi

tottered through the back streets of the city,

proclaiming his libertarian creed.

"You should not take a fellow eight years old

"and make him swear to never kiss the girls.

"I am my own master, paint now as I please,

"and play the fooleries you catch me at in pure rage."

Throughout it all, the Adoration remained in its Berlin home,

its dignity intact, its fame quietly growing.

But with a new century would come a new threat.

1940. As the Second World War convulsed Europe

and the threat of bombing raids grew real,

the Nazi authorities in Berlin put into action

careful plans to keep Germany's art treasures safe.

Renaissance art was particularly prized,

and one painting, an early Italian altarpiece,

was described as "unersetzlich" - irreplaceable -

Lippi's Adoration.

Strange as it may seem, the safest place in Berlin

was deemed to be an anti-aircraft installation,

the Friedrichshain flak tower.

The bunkers had concrete walls

of three metres and more. And at that time, no available bomb

or torpedo or artillery could knock them out.

It was responsible

to put the highlights of the Berlin Museum in such places -

better than even banking strong rooms and so on.

For five years, Lippi's Adoration sat out the fighting

deep inside the flak tower.

But by 1945, Berlin was about to fall.

At the last moment, an order came from Hitler himself.

The paintings were to be evacuated.

Under cover of darkness,

they were transported to the small town of Merkers,

and hidden deep underground in a potassium mine.

Lippi's sacred masterpiece found itself housed alongside Nazi gold,

and the stolen jewellery of concentration camp victims.

And it was here in April 1945 that American troops stumbled upon it.

'Tipped off that Nazis had placed vast stores of gold and jewels in the caves,

'the unexpected and fabulous discovery

'was the collection of pictures, valued at $80 million.'

There were crates and crates and crates of paintings -

some 1,200 crates of paintings from the German museums -

and they had no idea at first

of what the riches were in those crates.

But they represented the finest

of the German museum collections.

There were Van Eycks, there were Vermeers, Botticellis,

Bruegels, and of course, the Lippi.

As the scale of the find became clear,

even General Eisenhower visited the mine

to take in the remarkable scene,

and soon, the American authorities made a stunning decision.

The art, they said, should be treated as reparations,

and taken to the United States

on the basis of a so-called trusteeship.

The troops who had salvaged the art from the mine -

specialist officers known as Monuments Men -

were now told to ready it to be shipped out.

In an unprecedented turn of events, they refused.

It is the only known case in the whole Second World War

of American officers refusing an order.

The Nazis had committed the greatest art thefts in history,

they had seized hundreds and hundreds of thousands of works of art.

And they were to be prosecuted at Nuremberg.

The Monuments Men said there was no distinction in their minds

between what the Germans had done in "safeguarding art"

and what the Americans were doing on the same pretext.

The idea that the Americans would be committing the very same act

was absolutely shocking.

Eventually, though, amid threats of court-martial,

the Monuments Men gave way.

202 of the very finest artworks - Lippi's Adoration among them -

were picked out and prepared for shipping to Washington.

Upon arrival, their condition was assessed.

Six years of warfare had left Lippi's fragile painting, "Fair, undamaged."

But by now, public opinion was turning decisively against

the American appropriation of the paintings.

Putting them on display no longer seemed wise.

Instead, they were hung under armed guard

in the National Gallery of Art's underground vaults in Washington.

Here, Lippi Adoration remained for three years, its beauty hidden,

before it was decided that the artworks should, after all, be sent back to Germany.

But not before an extraordinary event had taken place.

'From a salt mine to the National Gallery of Art in Washington,

'the richest treasures of Germany's art go on display...'

It was the first big blockbuster exhibition.

These were the crown jewels of the German collections.

'American art-lovers now have a chance to see paintings

'like Vermeer's renowned Pearl Necklace...'

The exhibition was hugely successful,

beyond what anybody could have imagined.

Within the first week, 100,000 people had come.

'..and Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna Adoring the Christ Child.'

There was a huge feeling from the public all over the country

that they also wanted to see these paintings,

so it was agreed that they would be toured

through some 12 other cities in America

and over 10 million people came to see them.

'America views briefly the heritage of beauty

'she preserved for Western Europe.'

In 1949, Lippi's Adoration returned to Germany,

now more famous than ever, but nonetheless, homeless.

Over the coming years, in a politically divided Berlin,

it would hang in a succession of temporary homes

until the new permanent Gemaldegalerie was finally built.

Today, Filippo Lippi's reputation is higher than at any time since his own.

Novels have dramatised his life story,

and a musical is in rehearsal.

His Adoration has even featured in a computer game,

boasting an additional feature - a magic lever.

In the Gemaldegalerie,

the painting presides over a room especially designed for it, and is one of the prize exhibits.

A masterpiece among masterpieces.

It retains a mystery and a harmony that its own adventures through the centuries only add to.

It's not an easy painting. I think it's a painting with great depth,

both literal depth - in the forest and the landscape -

and also a spiritual depth

of knowing that if you stay within the darkness,

you will start to see the Holy Spirit.

I think it's a very courageous painting.

To be frank, we live in a fairly irreligious world.

These pictures are like funny little old symbols to many people.

And yet this is still an astonishing and striking picture,

and even to the atheist, it's a picture

that you want to stare at and wonder at, and marvel at.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk