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.

Instead of showing the writer as an inspired and elite genius, the original oil art showed St. Matthew as an ignorant peasant, barefoot and bumbling as an angel guides his writing hand like an adult teaching a child to write. The theological interpretation of the piece was quite profound – it captured beautifully the minuteness of humanity’s mental abilities compared to those of the divine – but Cointrel wasn’t after deep religious insights. He wanted paintings that would glorify him as a patron, and the Saint Matthew wasn’t going to do that. He rejected the painting, and Caravaggio painted a new, more “appropriate” version (seen here). The original piece was purchased by banker Vincenzo Giustiniani for his private collection and eventually made its way up to Germany and then to the Berlin museum.

The destruction of this portrait painting marks a particular loss for Caravaggio scholarship. It was the first of several of his religious paintings to be rejected as irreverent and scandalous, yet it was arguably one of his most profound pieces. On this list, however, the value of this piece is unfortunately as a stand-in for too many other works lost to war. In many cases, we are fortunate to still have photos of paintings lost in World War II, which skilled artists can use to create adept reproductions that give us an idea of the texture and depth of the original, but without the canvas touched by the genius artist himself, we’ll always be left with questions.

Don't miss the other blog posts in my series on lost paintings!

10 Lost Paintings:

• #10 - Magritte's Olympia