Deposition

You are looking at a photograph, because the painting itself is gone. Van Dyck made this Lamentation in Antwerp around 1629, and for decades it hung in the Berlin painting gallery, catalogued as number 778. During the war the Berlin museums moved their largest canvases into a flak tower in Friedrichshain, a concrete bunker judged safer than any museum cellar. Days after the fighting in the city ended, in May 1945, fire broke out inside it twice. Around 430 paintings from the gallery burned, five of them by van Dyck, and the cause has never been established. An English scholar, Christopher Norris, spent years working out what had been stored there and published the list in 1952. A copy of the composition hangs in a memorial chapel in Heilbronn, and the gallery has put online the photographs it took of its own pictures in 1925.