The photographic collection of Guglielmo Matthiae holds a prominent place among the archives acquired by Federico Zeri and sorted within his personal archive. The approximately 5,000 photographs that make up the collection — most of which are now accessible through the Foundation database — can be identified thanks to handwritten notes on the back, or through specific editorial marks and signs of wear.
These photographs were the focus of a research project, that was recently concluded.
By studying the morphology of the materials, it becomes evident that the Matthiae archive did not originally follow Zeri’s taxonomic organization. Instead, it was arranged by years of study and publication, closely reflecting Matthiae’s own critical approach, which— as shown by the analysis of his scholarly output conducted alongside the work on the archive—typically proceeds through associations and counterpoints.
In addition to the photographs documenting works of the Italian school — particularly Roman and Abruzzese paintings and mosaics — and the shots testifying to Matthiae’s active role in supervising post-war restorations in the Lazio region, there are numerous images that reflect his interest in the art of the Eastern Mediterranean. These were likely originally stored alongside prints of central Italian contexts without clear separation, but Zeri later divided them into different sections: in the Nuclei tematici_Icone folders, and more notably, in the Archeologia e arte alto medievale series.
Many of these photographic items are reproductions of book plates — equally housed in the library of the Zeri Foundation—or postcards, such as those documenting the rock-hewn churches of Cappadocia. Both types of material were reworked by Matthiae, who preserved multiple copies of the new images produced by re-photographing the original positives, altering their contrast, framing, and print dimensions.
The collection also includes more refined phototypes, capable of engaging in dialogue with the oldest materials from the Muñoz archive, which Zeri likewise categorized into the same sections, interweaving them by subject and by photographer. A particularly emblematic case is the photographic series of the Kariye Camii: both the albumen prints from the 1892 Sebah & Joaillier campaign — formerly part of the Muñoz collection — and several gelatin silver prints from Matthiae's archive are preserved. In the latter, captions have been altered and the represented objects carefully isolated from their background—either by intervening on the negative or by re-photographing and editing the positive. These reproductions may have been commercially distributed by the successors of the Sebah & Joaillier studio as didactic materials, or perhaps produced with similar pedagogical intentions by public institutions, such as the Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte in Rome, with which Matthiae maintained regular and collegial relations.
Additional professional connections, corresponding to a later phase of Matthiae's career, include figures active in the Hellenic world, who provided some of the rarest materials: prints by the Athenian photographer Pericles Papahadjidakis, whom Matthiae came to know through Manolis Chatzidakis—the renowned Greek Byzantinist and a key point of reference for Matthiae; the valuable positives by Georgios Lykides from Thessaloniki, essential for documenting now-lost contexts such as the Metropolis of Serres; and, finally, photographic series produced within campaigns promoted by the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, which document the most significant mural painting cycles preserved in Cypriot churches.
A particularly important aspect of Matthiae's legacy is his pioneering interest in the conservation and restoration of artworks; an interest that also emerges clearly in the photographic material accompanying his publications. Whether in his studies on the mosaic cycle of Nea Monì in Chios, the Roman mosaics, or the wall paintings of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme and Grottaferrata, Matthiae consistently devotes careful attention to such issues. Examination of the photographic campaigns linked to these works, preserved in the collection, reveals that numerous prints bear annotations that—with remarkable precision and scholarly rigor — distinguish original portions from those resulting from earlier restorative integrations or from more recent, sometimes non-philological interventions.
These autograph notations on the prints undoubtedly represent the most intellectually stimulating and valuable part of Matthiae's legacy, and offer rich potential for future research by scholars consulting the Matthiae materials, whether through the online catalogue or in its analog form.