Caravaggio And Rubens Works Destroyed By Fire In Second World War Are Brought Back To (Digital) Life The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A cache of images long kept in storage is about to open a new window onto one of the Second World War's most significant museum losses. The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin has completed digitising its high-resolution glass-negative archive of paintings destroyed in a May 1945 fire at the Friedrichshain flak tower, where roughly 430 large-format works had been placed for safekeeping.

The archive includes works by some of the most important names in European painting: ten by Peter Paul Rubens, five by Paolo Veronese, five by Anthony van Dyck, and three attributed to Caravaggio. For decades, the surviving photographs have served as a crucial but limited record of objects that vanished in the war, leaving gaps in attribution, provenance and conservation research.

Most of the negatives were made by Gustav Schwarz (1871–1958), who began working for the Berlin museums in 1906. The photographic campaign started in 1925 and continued until 1944, with works typically documented soon after acquisition. According to Katja Kleinert, the Gemäldegalerie's deputy director and project leader, the archive was originally created both to document the collection comprehensively and to produce reproductions for publications and postcards.

The plates were stored for decades in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum archive on Museum Island before being moved to the Kulturforum at Potsdamer Platz after the city's collections were reunified in 1998. Kleinert said the negatives have survived in remarkably good condition, with their sharpness still striking.“They have tremendous documentary value - not only for the museum and the collection itself but also for the public,” she said.“By digitising the glass negatives, the significance of the collection can be understood in a completely new way.”

The project was carried out in the museum's photo archive room to avoid transporting the fragile plates. Rather than scanning them, staff re-photographed each negative with a high-resolution camera setup, then edited, cropped and prepared the files for upload. Franziska May, a provenance research associate, said each plate had been housed in a paper envelope labeled with its catalogue number, title and artist's name. During the project, the negatives were rehoused in acid-free paper and archival boxes for better long-term protection.

The digitisation itself took just under six weeks, while editing and database preparation continued for several months. Once the images are published in the Gemäldegalerie's online collections database, probably later this year, users will be able to zoom in on works that were previously accessible mainly through printed loss catalogues with small illustrations. The museum also plans to digitise more loss records, bringing the wider inventory to roughly 585 objects.

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