Including many of the paintings acquired by Catherine the Great as well as others added more recently, this book features paintings from 18th- and 19th-century France, works of the Italian Renaissance, Spanish paintings and paintings from England, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and the USA.
Museums at Potsdam and Charlottenburg are included in this book, along with those from Jagdschloss Grunewald and the old and new Nationalgaleries, works long kept at the Kaiser Friedrich (Bode) Museum, and more recent art from the Markisches and Brucke museums. Major Italian panels include masterpieces by Giotto, Fra Angelico, the Lorenzetti, and Masaccio, with later works by Botticelli and Raphael. Berlin has the world's leading collection of early Netherlandish.