La Vierge sous le sapin

Cranach painted this small Madonna in 1510 for the cathedral in Wrocław, and for more than 400 years it hung there quietly. Then the war reached Silesia. In 1943, to save it from the bombing, the diocese took the panel down and moved it out of the city. When peace came they handed it to a priest and restorer, Siegfried Zimmer, to repair a crack that had split it in two. He mended it, painted an exact copy, gave the diocese the copy, and slipped away west with the real one. The switch went unnoticed until the 1960s, when a conservator in Wrocław looked at the supposed Cranach and saw at once that it was a fake. The original came home only in 2012.