This is fascinating: lost masterpieces recreated by using the lowliest of art forms, the Stock Photo. If there's a DaVinci lost to time that featured the Madonna grinning while eating salad, now's the time to bring it back to life. Adobe has put together some examples, using - surprise! - Adobe stock photos.

The first one you see - a Rembrandt - was stolen in 1990, and will probably turn up in 300 years in someone's attic. Others were lost to fire. You might meet some names you haven't encountered, such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel. An architect as well as a painter, he "believed that in order to avoid sterility and have a soul, a building must contain elements of the poetic and the past, and have a discourse with them."

Well, we can't have that now, can we.

One of the lost paintings can be seen in larger size here - Gothic Cathedral by the Water. Impressive. If you're wondering how they got such a good photo of a painting lost in 1931, that's because it's not the original. It's a copy by K. E. Biermann. So the Adobe reconstruction is copying a copy.

Why was the original lost in fire in 1931? Because of the Glass Palace disaster.

So wrote a newspaper at the time. Horrible. To remind you there's no justice, this Shinkel work has survived: an allegory of Prussia's industrial renewal, the kitschiest thing you've seen this week. You can see the patron looking at it with a scowl: I like the naked man on the pegasus over the industrial zone, but shouldn't he be blowing bubbles?

"The man," says Shinkel through clenched teeth, "or the horse?"