We are delighted to announce that we have recently completed our multi-year project to catalog and scan over 16,000 photographs representing more than 11,000 “lost” Italian paintings and drawings from the 13th to the 17th centuries (see the description of the Homeless project on our website). Some of these artworks have been destroyed in wars or natural disasters, some have been stolen, and others – probably most – belong to art dealers or have been acquired by unknown private collectors. Whatever their fate, these works of art are essentially lost to public view as well as to scholarly study, except in many cases through the rare visual documentation preserved in the photo archive of the Berenson Library. The images and texts describing them are now fully available in Harvard’s HOLLIS Images catalog.
We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in planning and carrying out this initiative to make the Photograph Archive’s documentation on “homeless” works of art more widely accessible online.