Five elderly ladies live on Museum Island. Or, to be more accurate, they don’t actually live in the generally accepted meaning of that word, because they are the spirits who hover over five iconic buildings and who invite anyone who passes by to visit their homes.
The ladies may not be real, but the buildings they haunt most certainly are. Museum Island is a real place, being in the heart of Berlin and surrounded by the narrow waterways of the River Spree and the Spree Canal. This is where you will find Berlin’s four oldest museums and its original art gallery, plus the magnificent cathedral known as the Berliner Dom. There are no other buildings at the northern end of the Island.
The ladies issue their invitations with a few conditions. One is that you pay a few euros for the privilege and that you leave your backpack in the cloakroom before you start looking around. However, a free audioguide – in your own language if not too obscure - is offered and is well worth accepting.
The most senior of the ladies is the spirit of the Altes Museum. This was opened in 1830 in a magnificent neo-classical building that was originally built to house the Prussian monarch’s collection of paintings and antiquities. It now stages permanent exhibitions of the art and culture of Ancient Greece downstairs and Etruscan and Roman art upstairs.
Next in line is the lady who looks after the Neues Museum, whose home first opened in 1855 as a means of relieving pressure on the Altes Museum, the collections of which were growing too fast for the available space. Bomb damage during World War Two meant that it had to undergo considerable rebuilding and it did not reopen until 2009, but it now houses a major collection of Egyptian art with the world-famous bust of Queen Nefertiti as its star exhibit.
Another major collection at the Neues Museum features the Stone Age and other prehistoric eras.
The third old lady presides over the Alte Nationalgalerie, which opened in 1876. The building is a copy of a Greek temple, reached by a double staircase. This lady has a name, which is Germania, the patroness of German art, and her image forms part of the tympanum above the entrance to the gallery.
The national art collection has now vastly exceeded the capacity of the Alte Nationalgalarie and it is now also housed in five other buildings around Berlin. The original building displays works by German masters such as Caspar David Friedrich, but there are also paintings by French Impressionists and even a few pieces by John Constable, although these are not easy to find.
The Bode Museum is the preserve of the fourth lady, her home having been opened in 1904. This museum had to be built to fit the space available at the top end of the island, which is a rough triangle cut off from the rest by a railway line that runs across the island.
The museum is named after Wilhelm von Bode, who was Director of the Berlin state museums at the time the museum opened, but before 1956 it was known as the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. The collection is somewhat mixed, including sculptures, Byzantine art, and an outstanding coin collection that includes items from ancient Athens and Rome.
The new kid on the block, as far as our old ladies is concerned, is the patroness of what is arguably the most remarkable museum of the lot. The Pergamon Museum, which opened in 1930, is unlike anything one is likely to see anywhere else in the world, and it owes its existence to the activities of German archaeologists who worked in the Middle East during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and sometimes acted in ways that many people today would question. That said, the results of their efforts are well worth seeing.
The Pergamon Museum is currently undergoing a major redevelopment, which means that the main reason for its naming is not available to view. This is the Pergamon Altar, which was discovered in the ancient city of Pergamon in western Turkey and reconstructed in Berlin at around the turn of the 20th century. The Pergamon Museum was built specifically to display the Altar and associated friezes and other objects from the site.
The Museum was expanded to allow for the display of other huge monuments, and these are what can be seen at present in the South Wing of the Museum while the other parts remain closed.
You can therefore walk down the Processional Way of the city of Babylon and then, like King Nebuchadnezzar, walk through the Ishtar Gate. Both of these are adorned with thousands of brick-shaped glazed blue tiles that are decorated with images of real and mythical animals. These were discovered in fragments and shipped to Berlin in more than 500 huge crates, to be re-assembled according to documentary evidence from the time of Nebuchadnezzar.
When you go through the Ashtar Gate you find that you have also walked through the Market Gate from the ancient Greek colonial city of Miletus. This is a massive two-storey structure that stands nearly 95 feet across and 55 feet high. It dates from the 2nd century AD and stood as a link between two public areas in the town until it was felled by an earthquake in the 10th century.
The reconstruction in Berlin contains around 60% of the original marble blocks, despite further damage having been caused during World War Two.
The Miletus Hall also contains a superb mosaic floor from a house in Miletus, a round tomb from north of Rome, and a partial reconstruction of a porticoed hall from Pergamon, this being one of the few items currently on display in the Pergamon Museum that actually came from that city.
Go upstairs and you will find exhibits relating to Islamic Art. These include the remarkable Aleppo Room, consisting of painted wall panels from around 1600 that once adorned a merchant’s house in the Syrian city of Aleppo. It is probably just as well that the panels are now in Berlin, seeing that the building, which had survived for hundreds of years, fell victim to bombing in the recent conflict in that region.
The five old ladies are doing a grand job in looking after a huge quantity and variety of treasures in Berlin. Long may they continue so to do.
© John Welford
No comments:
Post a Comment