Giannino Marchig was born in 1897 in Trieste where he studied with local painters Giovanni Zangrando, Bruno Croatto, Argio Orell and Gino Parin. At the beginning of World War I, in 1915, he left Trieste in order to escape recruitment in the Austrian army, and moved to Florence as other irredentist intellectuals had already done before him. There, he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti.
From 1930 he dedicated himself mainly to paintings conservation and by 1937 gave up painting and started a new professional life as a conservator. In 1949, after having met Janina (Jeanne) Paszkowska, he left Florence and moved to Switzerland with her. He continued to work as a paintings conservator through the 1960s, and resumed his earlier activity as a painter in the 1970s.
The collection comprises 1,342 black-and-white negatives on silver gelatin glass plates taken by an unidentified photographer between the early 1930s, when Marchig devoted himself to conservation, and the end of 1949 when he left Florence and moved to Switzerland. The original envelopes of the glass plate negatives are preserved separately. Many of them bear old handwritten negative numbers and some are inscribed with annotations by the photographer and occasionally by Marchig, providing information about the artwork's owner, subject and attribution. All the glass plates have been cleaned, numbered and rehoused in acid-free four-lap envelopes. They are arranged according to the last given numeration and are stored in metal boxes. Contact gelatin prints were made in the late 1990s from the glass plates, and they are available for consultation in the Special Collections reading room. Most of the negatives document restoration carried out by Marchig, and show works of art before, during and after treatment. Such documentation is not always complete for all the works of art photographed. This collection includes Italian and non-Italian artworks, mainly paintings of sacred but also profane subjects, numerous portraits, and a small group of still life paintings. A wide range of artists and schools from the 12th to the 19th centuries is represented, with a notable concentration of images of Venetian paintings, a school of which Marchig had a deep knowledge.