I’ll be posting about the incredible collections housed at the Bode soon, but I wanted to provide a little background on this fabulous museum.

As is often the case, I turned to Wikipedia for a succinct summary of the Bode Museum.

The Bode Museum, formerly called the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (Emperor Frederick Museum), is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin. It was built from 1898 to 1904 by order of German Emperor William II according to plans by Ernst von Ihne in Baroque Revival style. The building’s front square featured a memorial to German Emperor Frederick III, which was destroyed by the East German authorities. Currently, the Bode-Museum is home to the Skulpturensammlung, the Museum für Byzantinische Kunst and the Münzkabinett (sculpture, coins and medals, and Byzantine art). As part of the Museum Island complex, the Bode-Museum was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 because of its outstanding architecture and testimony to the development of museums as a cultural phenomenon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Again, not to mention it’s incredible collections.

Originally called the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum after Emperor Frederick III, the museum was renamed in honor of its first curator, Wilhelm von Bode, in 1956.

During World War II, portions of the collection were stored in an antiaircraft tower called the Flakturm Friedrichshain for safe keeping. In May 1945, several fires destroyed some of the collections. In total, more than 400 paintings and about 300 sculptures were lost due to looting during the fire or destroyed in the fire itself.

The museum was closed for renovation from 1997 and was reopened on 18 October 2006, after a €156 million refurbishment. True to the ethos of its founding director, Wilhelm von Bode, who believed in mixing art collections, it is now the home for a collection of sculptures, Byzantine art, and coins and medals. The presentation of the collections is both geographic and chronological, with the Byzantine and Gothic art of northern and southern Europe displayed separately on the museum’s first floor and a similar regional division of Renaissance and Baroque art on its second floor.

The sculpture collection displays artwork of the Christian Orient (with an emphasis on Coptic Egypt), sculptures and mosaics from Byzantium and Ravenna, sculptures of the Middle Ages, the Italian Gothic, and the early Renaissance, including the controversial Flora attributed by Bode to Leonardo da Vinci but now widely argued to be a 19th-century work. Late German Gothic works are also represented by Tilman Riemenschneider, the south German Renaissance, and Prussian Baroque art up to the 18th century. In the future selected works of the Gemäldegalerie will be integrated into the sculpture collection. This is reminiscent of William von Bode’s concept of “style rooms,” in which sculptures, paintings, and crafts are viewed together, as was usual in upper middle-class private collections.

The Münzkabinett (“coin cabinet”) is one of the world’s largest numismatic collections. Its range spans from the beginning of minting in the 7th century BC in Asia Minor up to the present day. With approximately 500,000 items, the collection is a unique archive for historical research, while its medal collection also makes it an important art exhibition.

Writing in The Financial Times on the occasion on the museum’s reopening in 2006, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, hailed “the most comprehensive display of European sculpture anywhere.” He added: “It is no exaggeration to say that in the new Bode Museum, Europe will be able for the first time to read its history — aesthetic and religious, intellectual and political — in a three-dimensional form.”

There are probably a hundred videos on Munich on Youtube, but of the ones I watched, this one was best. It’s a good introduction if you, like me, have never been.

I’ve loved my time in Berlin, much more than I ever dreamed I would. For starters, it’s 20 degrees cooler than Florence right now and that’s really all I wanted when I came here. But, it was soooooo much more!

But, I want to see more and decided to spend some time in Munich, also for the first time. So I purchased a train ticket on the ICE, the fast train, from Berlin to Munich and off I went.

The Berlin central train station is a marvel. It’s efficient, clean, crazy busy.

Later, the scenery looked like the video above. I’m in Munich now and will be posting it soon! Guten tag!

After visiting the Berlin Cathedral and the Altes Museum on Museum Island in Berlin, I was faced with a dilemma. There were still 3 other museums I wanted to visit. Which one should I go to next? Decisions, decisions!

Ultimately, I decided to try the Bode Museum next. I knew nothing about it nor its collections and I typically don’t read up about these places until after I’ve visited them. Unless it’s the Louvre. There I need as much advance prep as possible not to be overwhelmed, and I’m still utterly overwhelmed.

I essentially knew that the Bode was named after a former director/curator and I liked that idea, since I have been an art museum curator.

But I knew nothing of the wonders that awaited me.

After the Altes Museum with its collections of ancient art, I knew at first glance that I was encountering a whole different kettle of fish. We are in Europe! We are in the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and things are going to get multi-cultural!

You probably can imagine with my background that I have looked at a lot of religious art. So what I took pictures of on this day were objects that were unusual to me, things I hadn’t seen a million times before.

This polychromed and gilded statue was beautiful and I loved the addition of the shoes to tell us what the queen of heaven would wear in the minds of a 13th century French artisan.

Never in my life have I seen a religious statue of Christ and St. John the Evangelist with John nearly breaking his neck to lean on Christ’s shoulder. I’ve never seen any medieval sculpture in this form. I found it weird and quite wonderful!

And I appreciated the label in English telling me that this kind of work was common in German convents around 1300. This is why I go to museums. To learn and be dazzled.

I’ve seen a thousand statues of Mary holding the Christ child. But, I’ve never seen a sculpture of a royal woman holding an architectural model before.

Now this next work is really interesting. In the black and white photo, we see a very awkward Pieta. You know I’ve seen a million of this subject. But never one like this with Christ with rigor mortis?!

Tragically, what survives from the sculptural group are only the 2 heads, of Mary and of Christ. And what happened to the rest of it? WWII. Destruction. It’s a reminder, like all of Berlin, that there’s a frightening history here. Sad, tragic, hideous. And that’s the human loss. The artistic loss is unfortunate. Wrought by meglomaniac Hitler and his band. The feeling is everywhere here, at least for me. I wonder if others feel it as much? Have you been to Germany? What are your feelings?

The sculpture below is of a type known in Italy as the Misericordia, where the Virgin Mary shelters the elect in her cloak. Often it is children represented in the folds of her garment. But, this one has a distinctly northern look to the faces. Unusual for my eyes.

I was captivated by the altarpieces found at the Bode. Again the northern countenance make perfect sense but are unusual and delightful to my eyes trained in Italy.

I’ve never, ever seen a statue of Christ riding a donkey. I’ve seen paintings of people riding donkeys, including the Virgin Mary and even Cosimo di Medici on a mule. But, again, this was different and fascinating to me! Arranged on it’s base, it seems obvious that the statue was meant to be carried at shoulder height in processions.

The scene of the Annunciation is my very favorite subject matter in religious art. Here is one part of such a sculptural group; the archangel Gabriel is announcing that Mary is to bear Christ. Sadly, the statue of Mary seems to be lost.

You can probably discern that I’m in love with the Bode and you can guess that I’ll be back with more posts soon!

I had heard that the Altes Museum’s collection of Etruscan art was the largest outside of Tuscany. I found that hard to believe before I went. Now, I am a believer.

I didn’t spend a huge amount of time taking pictures, because I live in Tuscany most of the time and am quite familiar with the art of Etruria. I love it. But, I was impressed with the didactic information available in Berlin in English. Very impressive. The art of museology is superlative in Berlin!

What follows is a small sampling of the incredible Roman collection at the Altes. It is as significant in its holdings as the ancient Greek collection, but I was on my 3rd hour and flagging. I’d love to return one day and start my visit with the Roman art.

The hole in her head indicates a section of hair that has been lost.

And, from the sublime to the ridiculous, as I was leaving this great museum, I saw a couple of nods to the present!

A continuation of Ancient Greek art. Incredible collection here in Berlin!

Here I continue a look at the ancient Greek collections.

The next 3 photos show a collection of toys:

The next, short statue, is quite arresting.

And the pottery!

Below, the gorgeous “Berlin Dancer.”

And the jewelry!

Tanagra Figurines are one of my favorite aspects of Greek art.

The name alone draws you in, right!?

In English the name means the pleasure garden. It is the green space that fronts both the Altes Museum and Berlin Cathedral on Museum Island in Berlin

The Lustgarten is a park on Museum Island which, at various times in its history, has been used as a public park, a parade ground, and a place for mass rallies.

The area of the Lustgarten was originally developed in the 16th century as a kitchen garden attached to the palace which was then the residence of the Elector of Brandenburg. This area was the core of the later Kingdom of Prussia.  After the devastation of Germany during the The 30 Years War, Berlin was redeveloped by Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector) and his Dutch wife, Luise Henriette of Nassau. It was Luise, with the assistance of a military engineer Johann Mauritz and a landscape gardener Michael Hanff, who, in 1646, converted the former kitchen garden into a formal garden, with fountains and geometric paths, and gave it its current name, Pleasure Garden.

In 1713, Friedrich Wilhelm I became King of Prussia and set about converting Prussia into a militarised state. He ripped out his grandmother’s garden and converted the Lustgarten into a sand-covered parade ground. In 1790, Friedrich Wilhelm II allowed the Lustgarten to be turned back into a park, but during French occupation of Berlin in 1806 Napoleon again drilled troops there.

In the early 19th century, the enlarged and increasingly wealthy Kingdom of Prussia undertook major redevelopments of central Berlin. A large, new classical building, the Altes Museum, was built at the north-western end of the Lustgarten and between 1826 and 1829 the garten was redesigned by Peter Joseph Lenne, with formal paths dividing the park into 6 sectors. A 13-metre high fountain in the centre, operated by a steam engine, was one of the marvels of the age. Between 1894 and 1905, the old Protestant church on the northern side of the park was replaced by a much larger building, the Berlin Cathedral (Berliner Dom), designed by Julius Carl Raschdorff.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, the Lustgarten was frequently used for political demonstrations. The Socialists and Communists held frequent rallies there. In August 1921, 500,000 people demonstrated against right-wing extremist violence. After the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, in 1922, 250,000 protested in the Lustgarten. On 7 February 1933, 200,000 people demonstrated against the new Nazi Party regime of Hitler; shortly afterwards public opposition to the regime was banned. Under the Nazis, the Lustgarten was converted into a site for mass rallies. In 1934, it was paved over. Hitler addressed mass rallies of up to a million people there.

By the end of WWII in the year 1945, the Lustgarten was a bomb-pitted wasteland. A movement to restore the Lustgarten to its earlier role as a park began once Germany was reunified in 1990. In 1997, the Berlin Senate  commissioned the landscape architect Hans Loidl to redesign the area in the spirit of Lenné’s design and construction work began in 1998. The Lustgarten now features fountains and is once again a park in the heart of a reunited Berlin.

I’m going to be showing you the works of art that inspired me to take pictures from many museums in Berlin over the next many posts. Berlin’s art collections took my breath away.

But, in doing so, I also want to talk about the museums themselves. Each is an interesting work of art in its own right.

All of the information I’m using in this post that isn’t part of my own pictures or text is based upon the fabulous Wikipedia.

The Museum Island (Museumsinsel) is a museum complex on the northern part of Spree Island in the historic heart of Berlin. It is one of the capital’s most visited sights and one of the most important museum sites in Europe. Originally, built from 1830 to 1930, initially by order of the Prussian Kings, according to plans by five architects, the Museum Island was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 because of its testimony to the architectural and cultural development of museums in the 19th and 20th centuries and the vast collections the island contains. It consists of the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode-Museum and the Pergamonmuseum.

When I had my chance to spend a few weeks in Berlin in the summer of 2024, the Pergamon Museum was closed, as it had been, I gathered, for quite some time. I hope someday it will reopen and I will be lucky enough to come back to see it. It would seem to be something quite astounding.

On this, my first visit to Berlin, my first encounter with one of the amazing museums housed on this smallish island was the Altes Museum (the old museum).

The Altes Museum was built between 1825 and 1830 by order of King Frederick William III of Prussia according to plans by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it is considered a major work of German Neoclassical architecture. The Altes Museum houses the Antikensammlung and parts of the Münzkabinett. As part of the Museum Island complex, the Altes Museum was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, in recognition of its testimony to the development of the museum as a social and architectural phenomenon and the superlative collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art it houses.

The design dome of the Altes Museum was intentionally made to resemble the Pantheon in Rome.

In the early 19th century, Germany’s bourgeoisie had become increasingly self-aware and self-confident. This growing class began to embrace new ideas regarding the relationship between itself and art, and the concepts that art should be open to the public and that citizens should be able to have access to a comprehensive cultural education began to pervade society. King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia was a strong proponent of this Humboldtian ideal for education and charged Karl Friedrich Schinkel with planning a public museum for the royal art collection.

Above, the museum about 1830.

Schinkel’s plans for the Königliches Museum, as it was then known, were also influenced by drafts of the crown prince, the future King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who desired a building that was heavily influenced by Classical antiquity. The crown prince even sent Schinkel a pencil sketch of a large hall adorned with a classical portico.

Schinkel’s plans incorporated the Königliches Museum into an ensemble of buildings, which surround the Berliner Lustgarten (pleasure garden). The Stadtschloss in the south was a symbol of worldly power, the Zeughaus in the west represented military might, and the Berliner Dom in the east was the embodiment of divine authority. The museum to the north of the garden, which was to provide for the education of the people, stood as a symbol for science and art—and not least for their torchbearer: the self-aware bourgeoisie. For the front facing the Lustgarten, a simple columned hall in grand style and proportionate to the importance of the location would most certainly give the building character. With the use of 18 Ionic columns, the portico was designed with a function in order to give the museum building an exterior befitting its site.

In 1841, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV announced in a royal decree that the entire northern part of the Spree Island would “be transformed into a sanctuary for art and science.” In 1845, with the completion of the Neues Museum, the Königliches Museum was renamed the Altes Museum (“Old”), a name it holds to this day.

Photo of museum before 1854

During the Nazi era, the Altes Museum was used as the backdrop for propaganda, both in the museum itself and upon the parade grounds of the redesigned Lustgarten. Close to the end of Second World War, the building was badly damaged when a tank truck exploded in front of it, and the frescoes designed by Schinkel and Peter Cornelius, which adorned the vestibule and the back wall of the portico, were largely lost.

Under General Director Ludwig Justi, the building was the first museum of Museum Island to undergo reconstruction and restoration, which was carried out from 1951 to 1966 by Hans Erich Bogatzky and Theodor Voissen. Following Schinkel’s designs, the murals of the rotunda were restored in 1982. However, neither the ornate ceilings of the ground floor exhibition rooms nor the pairs of columns under the girders were reconstructed.

he Altes Museum was originally constructed to house all of the city’s collections of fine arts, including Old Master paintings, and prints and drawings. However, since 1904, the museum has solely housed the Antikensammlung (Collection of Classical Antiquities). Since 1998, the Collection of Classical Antiquities has displayed its Greek collection, including the treasury, on the ground floor of the Altes Museum.

Because we are so lucky to be living in the internet age, you can access the floor plan of the museum here:

Click to access floor-plan-Altes-Museum.pdf

And, even more remarkably, again courtesy of the internet age, you can see great pictures and learn all there is to know about the dome itself here:

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/of-gods-and-heavenly-bodies-–-the-rotunda-in-the-altes-museum-altes-museum-staatliche-museen-zu-berlin/pwUh8VHfc040Lg?hl=en

I’ll be back soon with more on the collections housed within this fine Berlin institution.

The Altes Museum is fronted by the Lustgarten (pleasure garden), which I’ll be posting about soon as well.