Its collection includes masterpieces from such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers the Younger, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and Antonio Viviani.

The two paintings are historically connected; after hearing of the scandalous portrayal of the theme "love conquers all" in Caravaggio's work, a Roman bishop commissioned Baglione's reply, which mimics Carvaggio's style, including the features of Amor.

The current gallery sits in the southwest corner of the Kulturforum, a modern-styled answer to the old Museumsinsel (Museum Island).

The hall sometimes displays sculpture, but is mostly empty, allowing easy crossing between rooms, and somewhere for school parties to sit.

In 2012, the gallery's collection faced a pending move to a temporary site on Berlin's Museumsinsel, to make room for the expansion of the Neue Nationalgalerie and the 20th-century collection of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, bequeathed on condition that it be displayed in its entirety.

The proposal has provoked controversy and criticism, particularly since there are no permanent plans for a new structure that would house the collection in its full scope.

[4][5][6][7] The plan to move the collection was later scrapped following the public backlash and financial considerations regarding the new buildings.

At the end of the war, however, 400 works that were regarded as too large to take to the remoter hiding places were destroyed in a fire in a Flak tower that served as a bomb shelter.

Furthermore, several hundred paintings were looted by Russian or American soldiers or confiscated by the Red Army and never returned,[12] although in June 2006 a small painting by Alessandro Allori, missing since 1944, was returned by the British journalist Charles Wheeler, who had been given it at the end of the war in Berlin.

In 1992 the museum administrations of East and West were re-united, but uniting the collections physically took longer.

[15] In 1999 the Gemäldegalerie restituted to the heirs of the Jewish art collector Federico Gentili di Giuseppe a painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, entitled Rinaldo Abandoning Armida.

[16] In 2019, Berlin's Gemäldegalerie (Old Master Gallery) returned two late medieval panels to the heirs of a famous Jewish art collector Harry Fuld Senior who had been looted by Nazis.