A proactive effort to document the collection of the Gemäldegalerie will pay off a century later as negatives of lost paintings by Rubens and Caravaggio are digitized and published online A photograph taken in 1926 depicting paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that likely burned in a fire in 1945 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zentralarchiv In 1925, following the destruction of artworks and cultural artifacts across Europe during World War I, a photographer named Gustav Schwarz took an assignment in Berlin systematically documenting precious museum holdings in case another catastrophe threatened them in the future. Schwarz’s efforts to photograph the collection of the Gemäldegalerie—an art museum in the German capital recognized for its European paintings from the 13th century through the 18th century—proved prescient just a few decades later, when World War II reached its climax in 1945.…