arthistoricum.net

Color slide archive of wall and ceiling painting

The "Color slide archive of wall and ceiling painting" contains 39,000 digitalized records of important periods of fresco art and murals in churches,  monasteries, castles and other secular buildings in Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia (east and west Prussia) and Czech Republic (Bohemia and North Moravia).
The archive was established between 1943 and 1945 in the middle of World War 2; an attempt by the National Socialist Regime, in light of threatening destruction, to document the permanent interior wall decorations of important historical monuments throughout the whole of the German Empire.
The time span of the photographed artworks in a total of around 480 buildings ranges from the 10th to the end of the 19th century. The material is entered into a database from an art-historical standpoint. The "Color slide archive" was being realized as a common project of the Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, and the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.