After studying art history in Göttingen, Berlin, Vienna and Graz, Gert Adriani wrote his doctoral thesis in 1933 in Jena on monastery libraries in Austria and south Germany. Until 1936, he was an assistant in the Department of Art History at the University of Graz and then worked as an intern in the Staatliches Kupferstichkabinett (State Cabinet of Prints, Drawings and Photographs) and the Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) in Dresden. In 1938, he was recommended to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna by the director Hans Posse, where he succeeded Johann Wilde, who had emigrated to the UK because he was "jüdisch versippt" (married to a Jew). In February 1941, Adriani became head of the Picture Gallery in place of Bruno Grimschitz, who from then on devoted his entire attention to the Österreichische Galerie. Unlike Grimschitz, Adriani advocated the acquisition of pictures owned by Valentine Springer, who had fled Austria in early 1939 because she was considered a Jew according to the Nazi definition. As a British citizen, her assets were not immediately confiscated, but treated as "enemy assets". In October 1940, Adriani and Fritz Dworschak took Jan Vermeer's The Art of Painting, owned at the time by the Czernin family, to the "Führerbau" in Munich, because Hitler had expressed an interest in purchasing it. In December 1941, Adriani inspected the salvaging of the works from the Kupferstichkabinett and Gemäldegalerie in Dresden and the effect of air raids on the collections in Kassel. As head of the Gemäldegalerie he was also in contact with the Mühlmann office and the Dutch art dealer Alois Miedl. In early 1945, Adriani was appointed head of salvage operations in Lauffen, but was soon replaced by Victor Luithlen, head of the Collection of Historic Musical Instruments at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, because a transport had been returned to Vienna by mistake without being unpacked. Adriani spent the last days of the war with his family in Klosterneuburg, which he left after it was occupied by the Soviets. As a German citizen, he applied on 2 September 1945 to leave the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Thereafter he was a curator at the Art Museum in Düsseldorf and became its director in 1954. From 1958 to 1970 he was director of the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig.