Works by Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens lost in a fire in the Second World War will soon be viewable online. The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, home to one of Europe’s most comprehensive collections of Old Master paintings, has finished digitising its high-resolution glass‑negative archive of hundreds of destroyed paintings, giving scholars and the public access to one of the most consequential museum losses of the era.
In May 1945, at the end of the Second World War, two fires swept through the Friedrichshain flak tower where around 430 large-format works from the museum had been stored for protection. Among them were paintings by some of Europe’s most celebrated artists, including ten by Rubens, five by Paolo Veronese, five by Anthony van Dyck and three attributed to Caravaggio. The losses have long represented a major gap in the visual record and in attribution, provenance and conservation research. The surviving photographs stem from a systematic campaign begun in 1925. Most of the negatives were made by Gustav Schwarz (1871-1958), a photographer who began working for the Berlin museums in 1906. Katja Kleinert, the Gemäldegalerie’s deputy director and project leader, says works were typically photographed soon after acquisition. The series continued until 1944 and includes wartime acquisitions.
The glass negatives were originally produced both to document the collection comprehensively and create photographic reproductions for publications and postcards. Organised by format and catalogue number, the plates were stored for decades in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum archive on Museum Island. They were moved to the Kulturforum at Potsdamer Platz when collections in the formerly divided city were merged in 1998.
Kleinert explains that, with few exceptions, the glass negatives have survived in very good condition—and their sharpness is striking.
“They have tremendous documentary value—not only for the museum and the collection itself but also for the public,” she says. “By digitising the glass negatives, the significance of the collection can be understood in a completely new way.”
New digital life
Kleinert says this accessibility is also important for provenance research, as the glass negative collection is essentially the main visual source for many of these lost works. “People regularly send us images of paintings and ask whether they might correspond to works believed to have been destroyed or lost during the war,” she says.
Digitisation was carried out in the Gemäldegalerie’s photo archive room to avoid transporting the highly sensitive plates. Rather than scanning them, the team re-photographed each negative with a high-resolution camera setup. The images were then edited, cropped and prepared for upload.
Although there were a few colour photographs among the collection of black-and-white images, those colour plates were not digitised as part of this project because the process is more complex.
Franziska May, a provenance research associate, says each negative had been placed in a paper envelope labelled with the catalogue number, title and artist’s name. During the digitisation project the negatives were unpacked and rehoused in acid-free paper and archival boxes to ensure better long-term protection.
“Considering their fragility, it is remarkable how well the collection has survived,” she says. “Only a very small number of plates had damage.” The digitisation itself took just under six weeks; editing, database preparation and online publication extended over several months.
Once they are published in the Gemäldegalerie’s online collections database—probably later this year—the images will grant a global audience high‑resolution viewing of works previously accessible mainly through printed loss catalogues with small illustrations. Users will be able to zoom in and enlarge the images, and downloads will also be possible, although the downloadable versions will not be the full highest resolution.
Kleinert says that the museum plans to digitise glass negatives for other losses recorded in its catalogues, including old loans never returned, paintings confiscated by the Soviet military and not repatriated, pre‑1945 losses, and works recorded as stolen or destroyed—bringing the wider loss inventory to roughly 585 objects.
“There is a certain relief once they are digitised because then they are preserved digitally,” Kleinert says. “When you hold the glass negatives in your hands you realise how fragile they are. You’re thinking: I must not drop this.”
