«This volume brings together contributions on sculptures from the Italian Renaissance which are (or were) in the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, starting with the key example of Donatello. Some of these objects, thought to have disappeared since the end of the Second World War, are in fact stili preserved on the territory of the Russian Federation. They are presented here in their current state for the first time since 1945. The present volume was conceived as the conference proceedings for the "Donatello and the Lost Museum. Research, Memories and Rediscoveries" colloquium held on 17-18 September 2015 at the Bode-Museum in Berlin. It has taken almost seven years to gather part of the lectures that were given during the event. Several texts have also been added, dealing with the two Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, main themes of the colloquium: the collection of Italian Renaissance sculptures of the Russian Federation belonging to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (starting from the figure of Donatello), and the damage caused to many works from the collection by two fires in the Friedrichshain bunker in Berlin, at the end of the Second World War. In this introduction, I would like to briefly retrace the genesis of this symposium, organized jointly with Julien Chapuis, as well as the significant changes that occurred since then. Between 2013 and 2015, I was commissioned by the Berlin Museums to compile an online catalog of some forty Donatellian works that belongs (or belonged) to their sculpture collection'. This is not to say that this museum has ever possessed so many works by Donatello: besides two established masterpieces, the so-called Pazzi Madonna and the Putto with Tambourine, only a handful of other objects are considered autographs. All of these pieces were acquired between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century by the legendary director of the Berlin Museums, Wilhelm (von) Bode. However, Bode's acquisition policy was far from entirely directed toward the acquisition of autograph objects. In fact, numerous reliefs in bronze, terracotta, stucco, papier-màché, as well as productions by contemporaries were added to the Berlin collection because they were considered to be more or less direct reflections of Donatellian inventions - and, more generally, of that "Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy" praised by the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt, Bode's master of thought...» (Introduction by Neville Rowley)