The archive comprises photographic and documentary materials collected and ordered by the scholar Evelyn Sandberg Vavalà (1888-1961) for her studies on Italian painting from the 13th to the 16th centuries. The photographic collection consists of over 25,000 positives organised according to subject and type, including notable documentation on Mediaeval mosaics and frescoes, Romanesque sculpture and important areas of the applied arts such as cassoni, ivories and jewellery.

There are also documentary materials of various kinds, such as newspaper cuttings, printed reproductions, notes, and bibliographic index cards written by the English scholar, divided into 116 folders.

Sandberg Vavalà's collection of photographs (from Brogi, Alinari and Anderson), still intact on her death, was later divided up when one section of it was added to Federico Zeri's photographic collection.

The history of the archive at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini can be reconstructed by starting from a letter dated 11 July 1961, sent from Sandberg Vavalà's Florentine home. After a few laconic humorous remarks about her ailing health, she expressed her desire to sell her private archive and photographic collections to the Institute of Art History, for which she had been commissioned to compile the entries for the "Index of Venetian Painting, a project that ended with her death on 8 September 1961. On 7 October the same year, thirteen crates arrived on the island of San Giorgio. They contained the rich archive of notes, cuttings and photographs, collected for study and research purposes, and ordered in monographic and thematic files. Prof. Ulrich Middeldorf was then sent to Venice to see to the bureaucratic and legal procedures as well as to the payments to Sandberg Vavalà's son, John Kendrew.