Voices Mag

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was one of the most influential and successful painters of the 16th century. Particularly innovative pictorial creations such as “The Sermon of Saint John the Baptist” (Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum) were copied in large numbers by his sons Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder as well as other artists. Today there are 36 repetitions of the motif, among which the Dresden version, with its exceptionally high quality, occupies a prominent place. The film provides an insight into the elaborate restoration of the painting.

It is known that, for his paintings, Caspar David Friedrich made extensive use of sketches which he had created in nature and from works of other painters. But how did he manage to enlarge elements from these sketches and transfer them to canvas? Our conservators followed up on that question.

Every German knows the saying about the elephant in the china shop (in English it’s usually „the bull“) and so it may come as a surprise that there are elephants in Dresden's Porzellansammlung (porcelain collection). However, these are themselves made of the fine material and so they do not cause any damage, but would rather themselves be threatened by the dangers that the proverbial elephant means for the precious material. In a cooperation with Fraunhofer IKTS, it has now been possible to restore one of the elephants in the Porzellansammlung that was missing its trunk using 3D printing.