Hundreds of paintings lost to the ravages of war—including multiple works by Peter Paul Rubens, Paolo Veronese, Anthony van Dyck, and Caravaggio—will soon be viewable online courtesy of a digitization initiative by Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie.
The museum’s formidable collection of Old Master paintings was damaged by two fires around the end of World War II. But as reported by the Art Newspaper, digital renderings made from high-resolution glass negatives from a photo-documentation campaign started in 1925 are bringing the works back to life, in a way.
“The losses have long represented a major gap in the visual record and in attribution, provenance and conservation research,” according to TAN. But records by way of the glass negatives—most of them made by the German photographer Gustav Schwarz, as part of an ongoing process related to new acquisitions that continued until 1944—stand to make the works accessible.
“They have tremendous documentary value—not only for the museum and the collection itself but also for the public,” Katja Kleinert, the Gemäldegalerie’s deputy director and project leader, told TAN. “By digitizing the glass negatives, the significance of the collection can be understood in a completely new way.”
To make the new digital renderings, the glass negatives were rephotographed with high-resolution camera equipment in the Gemäldegalerie’s photo archive room, so as to avoid moving the sensitive plates. “Considering their fragility, it is remarkable how well the collection has survived,” said Franziska May, a provenance research associate at the museum. “Only a very small number of plates had damage.”
After the digital images are uploaded (“probably later this year,” according to TAN), viewers will be able to zoom in and isolate details of the works—and download them as well.
