Invited Talk : Conférence de Neville Rowley

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FIREPROOF. Berlin Paintings and Sculptures Burnt in 1945: Matter and Memory In May 1945, two fires of unexplained origin ravaged a large anti-aircraft bunker in Friedrichshain Park, Berlin, where thousands of works of art from the Berlin State Museums had been stored for three years. These fires had radical consequences for the materiality of the works concerned. The fully destroyed paintings have been “dematerialized”, even if their memory survives thanks to pre-war reproductions. Meanwhile, many of the sculptures endured the fires, only to find themselves in precarious conditions of conservation: beyond the aesthetic aspect, their very material that has changed – marble has often become lime, for instance. Since 2018, a major restoration project has been underway at the Bode-Museum to restore these burnt artefacts, and as the eightieth anniversary of the bunker fire approaches, it is time to draw the first lessons of this vast operation. Neville Rowley is Curator for Early Italian paintings and sculptures at the Gemäldegalerie and the Bode-Museum in Berlin (Staatliche Museen). He received a PhD in art history from the Université Paris-Sorbonne and has taught at the École du Louvre, Paris and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil). He has worked on various exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Villa Medici in Rome, and the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris, as well as in Berlin itself (including “Mantegna & Bellini”, 2019; “Donatello. Inventor of the Renaissance”, 2022). He has published numerous scholarly articles on 15th-century Italian art, as well as short books on Fra Angelico, Donatello, Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, and Picasso.