The Altes Museum am Lustgarten in Berlin's Mitte district is part of
the building ensemble of the Museum Island and is therefore a UNESCO
World Heritage Site. Commissioned by King Friedrich Wilhelm III. Built
in 1825-1830 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it is one of the main works of
German classicism. It is surrounded by the Berlin Cathedral to the east,
the rebuilt Berlin Palace to the south and the Arsenal to the west. The
Altes Museum is currently home to the antiquities collection and part of
the coin cabinet.
In 2019, the Altes Museum had around 204,000
visitors.
In the early 19th century, the bourgeoisie in Germany became
increasingly self-confident. The idea of making the art collections,
which were closed to the public, accessible to all citizens, began to
gain acceptance. The general public should be given the opportunity for
comprehensive cultural education. The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm
III. shared this Humboldtian ideal of education. In 1815 the king
acquired parts of the Giustiniani collection and in 1821 the collection
of Edward Solly and developed initial ideas for the expansion of the
royal stables or the art academy on Unter den Linden. Finally, he
commissioned Karl Friedrich Schinkel to plan a new museum building for
the royal art collections. The commission appointed by the king and
headed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, responsible for the conception of the
new museum building, decided to only exhibit high art there. According
to the understanding of the time, this excluded the ethnografica,
prehistorica and art treasures excavated in the Middle East; they were
initially housed in Monbijou Castle for the most part.
planning
and construction
The plans by the architect Schinkel were also based
on designs by the crown prince, later King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who
wanted the Museum Island to have an antique, acropolis-like structure.
The Crown Prince sent Schinkel a pencil sketch showing a main building
receding behind columned halls. In his plans, Schinkel embedded the
Royal Museum in a building ensemble around the Lustgarten. The city
palace of the Hohenzollerns in the south was supposed to be a symbol of
secular power, the arsenal in the west represented the military and the
then Berlin Cathedral in the east embody divine power. The museum in the
north, which was intended to serve the upbringing and education of the
people, also stood as a symbol for science and art - and last but not
least for their bearers: the self-confident bourgeoisie. Schinkel had
already been responsible for the neoclassical redesign of the originally
baroque cathedral. The redesign of the pleasure garden by Peter Joseph
Lenné, which was carried out parallel to the construction of the Altes
Museum, was largely based on Schinkel's ideas, which created a coherent
ensemble.
The architect had previously studied the structures of
large museums in London and Paris. He developed the plans for the museum
with the location on the north side of the Lustgarten around 1822/1823.
After that, complicated foundation work was necessary because a
connecting canal ran here between the Kupfergraben and the Spree. Around
3,000 pine poles were driven into the ground for the foundation. It was
not until 1825 that construction work on the museum could begin, which
lasted until 1828. On August 3, 1830 (according to another source on
April 1, 1830) it was handed over to its destination. When it opened and
until 1845 it was called the "Museum" or "Royal Museum". Originally it
housed the artworks of the picture gallery.
destruction and
reconstruction
During the National Socialist period, the Old Museum
formed the backdrop for propaganda events, both in the museum itself and
in the Lustgarten, which was redesigned as a parade ground. Hit by
explosive bombs during Allied air raids in 1941 and 1943 in World War
II, it burned down on May 8, 1945 when an ammunition truck parked next
to the house exploded.
Under General Director Ludwig Justi, Hans
Erich Bogatzky and Theodor Voissen restored the building from 1951 to
1966 as the first museum on the Museum Island, largely true to the
original. The small remains of the frescoes designed by Schinkel and
executed by Peter Cornelius on the back wall of the columned hall and in
the stairwell as well as the transition to the New Museum built by
Stüler in 1844 were removed. The restoration of the colored painting of
the rotunda took place in 1982 according to Schinkel's designs. The
ceiling system of the showrooms adjoining the courtyards on the ground
floor and the pairs of columns under the beams were not reconstructed.
The Altes Museum, with its clear external form, follows the design
canon of Greek antiquity and thus embodies the idea of a museum as an
educational institution for the bourgeoisie, rooted in the
Enlightenment. The rotunda, following the model of the Pantheon in Rome,
underlines the sacred dimension of the museum as a temple of art.
Standing on a base, the two-storey building is 87 meters long and 55
meters wide. It consists of a flat-roofed, cubic structure, which ends
in a porch with 18 fluted Ionic columns in a monumental order. The hall,
bordered by two corner pilasters, opens onto the pleasure garden.
Eighteen sandstone eagles sit on the entablature of the hall above the
pillars. The four pillars of the stairwell and the eighteen pillars on
the front of the Lustgarten are made of Cotta and Reinhardtsdorf
sandstone (Saxony) from the Cretaceous period, the base is made of
Postaer sandstone (Cretaceous period) and the steps are made of Lusatian
granodiorite (Precambrian) from Demitz-Thumitz (Saxony). The inscription
on the front of the building reads:
FRIDERICVS GVILHELMVS III.
STVDIO ANTIQVITATIS OMNIGENAE ET ARTIVM LIBERALIVM MVSEVM CONSTITVIT
MDCCCXXVIII
(Friedrich Wilhelm III donated this museum in 1828 for
the study of antiquities of all kinds as well as the liberal arts)
Figure jewelry
Schinkel's concept
envisaged the installation of large equestrian statues on the cheeks of
the outside staircase. The statue of the Amazon on horseback by August
Kiss, completed in 1842, was placed on the right-hand side of the
outside staircase. It shows a highly expressive Amazon attempting to
fend off a panther's attack with a lance. The statue of the lion fighter
on the left cheek, erected in 1861, was created by Albert Wolff based on
a design by Christian Daniel Rauch. Depicted is a rider on a rearing
horse who is about to pierce a lion lying on the ground with his spear.
At the corners of the rotunda there are two groups of horse tamers by
Friedrich Tieck (1828) in the front and two groups of Pegasus by Hugo
Hagen and Hermann Schievelbein (1861) in the back. The horse figures at
the Old Museum corresponded with the horse tamers at the city palace.
Mural
Schinkel's main work as a painter
was a fresco cycle for the museum's vestibule, which the artist included
in the first plans of the museum in 1823. For this monumental picture
cycle, murals were created from 1841 to around 1870 over the entire
length of the vestibule and in the upper staircase hall, of which only
the two drafts by Schinkel's hand are preserved in the Berlin Print Room
today. The frescoes were executed by Peter von Cornelius. This cycle of
paintings, almost forgotten today, was one of the most important works
of painting of the 19th century in terms of quality and execution. The
pictures were of great importance for the architecture and the museum,
since Schinkel used the pictures to explain the function and the
requirements of his museum in more detail.
The building's exhibition rooms are grouped around two inner
courtyards, with the heart of the Altes Museum in the middle, the
rotunda that extends over both floors and is covered with a skylight. It
is 23 meters high and has a gallery ring supported by 20 Corinthian
columns. Like its model in Rome, it has a dome decorated with coffered
panels. Some of the museum's statues were placed between the columns.
The granite bowl by Christian Gottlieb Cantian, which was erected in
1831 in front of the outside staircase and had a diameter of 6.91
metres, was originally intended to be placed here, but ended up being
too large. From the rotunda you have a view of the praying boy in the
exhibition area "Greek Art / Masterpieces - The Human Image of Greek
Classicism". It came from the property of Frederick the Great. He had it
set up in a garden pergola next to Sanssouci Palace, his summer
residence in Potsdam, in such a way that he could see it in the garden
from his library and study. As early as 1742, King Frederick II had
acquired one of the largest private antiquities collections of the 18th
century in Paris – the collection of Cardinal Melchior de Polignac – and
had it brought to Berlin. Eventually it became the foundation of
Berlin's museums.
Staircase hall
The
two-armed staircase running parallel to the facade is located behind the
vestibule. Its special charm lies in the fact that it is both indoor and
outdoor space at the same time, since it is only closed off from the
outside by the columns. On a drawing of the stairwell, Schinkel used a
few staffage figures to make his ideas about the purpose of the building
clear: it was intended to provide material for immediate viewing and
instruction (father-son group, left), but possibly also for further
thoughts and discussions (two men in the dialogue, right).
Rotunda
When the Old Museum was restored in
1966, the rotunda was the only part of the interior that was
reconstructed in its old form. The circular cupola is surrounded by a
gallery supported by twenty Corinthian columns. The rotunda was planned
to house the granite bowl, but is now used to present larger sculptures.
From the outside, the rotunda can be recognized by a recessed cubic
attachment, at the corners of which four sculptures were placed on
pedestals. The recourse to the Roman pantheon is a feature that was
previously reserved only for stately buildings, as is the outside
staircase in front of the hall.
Here are some contemporary
descriptions from Samuel Heinrich Spiker's Berlin and its surroundings
in the 19th century from 1833:
“[…] stepping out of the actual
antique hall, [we have] the rotunda in front of us. The view through the
lower door leads to the vestibule with its magnificent arrangement of
columns, while through the entrance to the upper gallery, to which the
beautiful double staircase leads from the outside, one sees the coffered
ceiling of this vestibule.
The whole thing gives an
extraordinarily magnificent sight. The gallery, on which, in niches, the
smaller statues are placed, is supported by columns of the Corinthian
order, the shafts of which are covered with stucco marble imitating the
Giallo antico. The basic color of the hall is a light gray, and the
bases on which the statues stand are made of striped gray Silesian
marble. A delicate, light, bronzed, openwork iron grating runs round the
upper gallery, the niches of which are colored in a light brown tone, on
which the white of the marble stands out very well. The floor is
incrusted with black decorations on yellow, and in the middle is a group
in red clay (in the manner of those on ancient Greek vessels) on a black
ground. – The coffers in the dome are decorated with figures painted in
yellow on a bright red background.
Among the most excellent
statues which are set up in the Rotunda are the two beautiful Victories,
bought under Frederick II from G. R. Bianconi in Rome, which formerly
stood in the semicircle in front of the new palace in Potsdam; a hygica
found in the country house of Marius, and formerly placed in
Charlottenburg in the antechamber of the royal palace; a fine Greek
marble Apollo Citharoedus bought by Bianconi in Rome; an Apollo
Musagetes from the Polignac collection and formerly placed in the
ancient temple in the garden of Sanssouci near Potsdam; a colossal Juno,
purchased at Rome by order of His Majesty the now reigning king, etc.'
The building was originally created for all of Berlin's fine art
collections. The antiquities collection had been housed here since 1904
and was moved around 1942. The rooms then served as furniture storage
until the end of the Second World War. After the building was rebuilt,
the exhibits from the collection of antiquities were placed here again.
Changing special exhibitions were held on the upper floor, from August
2005 until the reopening of the New Museum in October 2009, the Egyptian
Museum showed its exhibits there. Since July 2010, the Etruscan and
Roman collection has been presented on the upper floor, while the main
floor houses the Greek antiquities collection. The Altes Museum is also
home to the coin cabinet.
Exhibitions (excerpt)
Sound Images –
Music in Ancient Greece (26 August 2021 to 3 July 2022)
ancient
worlds. Greeks, Etruscans and Romans (February 24, 2011 until further
notice)
strong guys Greek Portraits of Antiquity (June 19, 2019 to
September 27, 2020)
Meat (June 1, 2018 to January 6, 2019)
Dangerous Perfection – Ancient Funerary Vases from Apulia (June 17, 2016
to January 21, 2018)
Battle for Troy. The Munich Aeginetes with
Thorvaldsen's additions (September 30, 2015 to May 16, 2016)