When discussing important stolen and lost oil painted pictures, World War II is going to have to be addressed.The theft and purposeful destruction of numerous works of art by the Third Reich has been well-documented (the film The Rape of Europa presents a particularly good history), and just as significant were the accidental destruction of works caught in the middle of battle – collateral damage of bombings and the razing of cities. This is how one of Caravaggio’s most pivotal large original oil paintings, Saint Matthew and the Angel, met its end. When the Allies bombed Berlin in 1945, the oil portrait painting, then housed at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, the painting was completely destroyed.

When it was painted in 1602, the painted portrait of the Gospel writer St. Matthew caused a scandal. Caravaggio, who often portrayed Bible elites as the poor Romans he knew and lived alongside, had gone too far in the eyes of his patron, Cardinal Matthieu Cointrel. Cointrel had hired the oil portrait painter to create three scenes from the life of his namesake, to display in a chapel in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi. When Caravaggio delivered his interpretation of St. Matthew writing his Gospel, Cointrel was appalled.