The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin has completed the digitization of its high-resolution glass-negative archive, which documents hundreds of Old Master paintings destroyed in a fire at the end of the Second World War. The collection includes lost works by Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Paolo Veronese, which were stored in a flak tower for protection and burned in May 1945.
This project makes a major visual and scholarly resource globally accessible for the first time. The digitized images provide a crucial tool for provenance research, attribution studies, and public understanding of one of the most significant museum losses of the 20th century, allowing detailed examination of works previously known only through small printed reproductions.