Four Baroque paintings returned from the Berlin Picture Gallery
Press release from 07/03/2006
Today, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation returned four paintings from the 18th century. The paintings were handed over to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin for restoration in 1942 via an art dealer, but were not collected again despite repeated requests. From then on, they were kept in the collection as foreign property and published as such in 1999 in the "Documentation of Foreign Property" of the Gemäldegalerie and online at the Coordination Centre for the Loss of Cultural Property in Magdeburg.
Outstanding among the works is the oil painting "Stoning of St Stephen" by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), which measures over four metres by two metres. The painting was created in 1754 as an altarpiece for the Benedictine abbey church of Münsterschwarzach near Würzburg, for which the painter's father, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, had already created an "Adoration of the Magi" the year before. After the monastery was secularised at the beginning of the 19th century, all traces of the painting of St. Stephen were lost.
The painting is of outstanding importance for the history of Italian art in Germany and, alongside the frescoes in the Würzburg Residence, is an excellent example of the work of the two Tiepolos in Franconia. With its light-filled atmosphere and the depiction of figures, it demonstrates Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo's mastery of the formal language of his famous father. It demonstrates the particular ambition of the abbot of Münsterschwarzach to emulate his bishop and to orientate himself towards the best international taste and the highest artistic quality. Due to its importance, the picture has been on public display in the Gemäldegalerie's new building at the Kulturforum since 1998, together with other outstanding works of Venetian painting. It was also exhibited at a Tiepolo exhibition in Würzburg in 1996.
The three other German Baroque paintings cannot be clearly assigned to any one artist. Two of them depict park landscapes in the style of Januarius Zick (1730-1797) and presumably served as supraports. The fourth painting, painted in the style of Philipp Peter Roos (1657-1706), shows a resting herd with a shepherd. These paintings were previously kept in the depot.
The Gemäldegalerie's publication "Dokumentation des Fremdbesitzes. Verzeichnis der in der Galerie eingelagerten Bilder unbekannter Herkunft", published in 1999 by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, ISBN 3-88609-366-2 can be purchased in the online shop of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
The image of the Tiepolo painting can be ordered from the press office.