Berlin Museum Oversees Digital Resurrection of Hundreds of Paintings Destroyed During World War II
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 ...