A city always carries the marks of time. But Berlin, even if it’s seen a lot, isn’t all that old. As we said earlier, the Museum Island is practically a young woman, just a little over two hundred, while the objects on display are at times rather old indeed.
Every time that you immerse yourself in observing the object on display it is like taking a trip through time, every room plunges you into a different era, in the captions accompanying the exhibitions we can read about the history of various civilizations and for a brief moment you lose the current frames of space and time.
A museum is also this very thing: an island of sorts that takes us far away from our today.
On the ground floor of the Neues Museum, near Room 104 where the less precious plates and vases from Troy are exhibited (because, as we said earlier, the others preferred to stay in Russia), you can hear a frantic clatter of dishware, an audio hallucination that lasts as long as it takes you to understand that the sound is coming from the Caffetteria Allegretto, a refined space loved by well-heeled visitors that faces out onto the street where the tourist buses often park and onto the beautiful room of the faces …
Even from the bar, therefore, you can appreciate glimpses of the life of a museum and there are as many possible uses of the set up as there are human types and personalities and no one is better than the other, all are genuinely significant.
The museum with its pieces and its architecture and the visitors with their bodies and their coffees collaborate with one another to create the entire scene, which links the past and the present in a remarkable and magical time within which the great Kermesse-History is the indisputable protagonist while people and things alternate around it on the stage, carving out shimmering times, styles, and contexts.
We can observe that moments of this infinite film sometimes present people who are so concentrated on their own selves that they remain unaware of their own limitations, while in other moments some let themselves go into the mystical, dreams, and transcendence, incorporating the whole universe, even if it is all just acting.
We now find ourselves in one of the most evocative rooms of the Neues Museum, Room 311 on the third floor, the one with the red walls and the old black display cases of subtle glass and slightly curved, really beautiful, a jump into the mind of the 19th century museum, a perfect set helped by the unmistakable smell of the 1800s escaping from the wood. The room is named the Early History collection because it contains part of the collection of illustrious collectors who contributed to create the museums. It is a room full of important names which reemerge from the past, of stories within history, the memories of challenges and passions, of leaps and intuitions and a lot, a lot of studying. But here, the joker, is a huge window looking out onto the flag of the Alte Nationalgalerie, the TV Tower, and even the Plattenbauten of East Berlin to remind us that in these displays there is a great amount of make-believe.
The slyest of visitors know this and therefore always retain an air of distance with the museum. The adolescents on their school trips take side-long glances at the display cases, squinting their suspicious eyes not necessarily in doubt of the authenticity of the artefacts, but to check whether the gel in their hair is still strong enough or that the object of their desires isn’t flirting with a classmate behind their back. But no, the object of desire is showing off her braces in the same glass. Everything’s under control. Or is the glass maybe reverberating for someone else, too?
And so once again the museum magically transforms itself from a past that does not have anything to do with us into a mirror of our everyday theatrics, powerfully returning us to the here and now just like the big windows of the 18th century room looking out onto the big buildings of once-socialist Berlin from up here on the third floor.
Inside the display case, of course, we are all – young and less young, city dwellers and foresters, civilized and less civilized – at home in every single room and are free to decide our own personal position, looking from up above, from down below, from the side or wherever we feel is best, happy to press all of the interactive buttons we can and to inspiredly stare at the holes in the wall because all of this has to do with us, all of humanity, and we are always welcome, we old and new actors, able to be organized and still fleeting, past, but also extraordinarily alive.
There are shrewdly two-dimensional tourists who are brought here but who are preoccupied with other things because they have an eye, an ear, and a foot in the museums but the other somewhere else. We shall give them their deserved respect if only because most likely they’re the ones natural selection would choose to carry on the species.
Other observers appear in the museums spontaneously, even when it’s not raining, and they let themselves be attracted and enchanted by the displays and their stories, undergoing the fascinating journey to other shores. These latter folks are those that are easily lost in a room, that literally dissolve in front of a painting, fall in love with a statue, and seem to be disappearing from the present to enter, even without any magic mirrors, directly into a painting or a mythical time and always have a hard time coming back to reality.
Right below the Early History room, having miraculously survived the war, is the aforementioned Room 211, also known as the Library of Antiquity, or of Niobe, perfectly preserved in its original sumptuousness, complete with two copies of snow-white caryatids, copies of those at the Villa Albani in Rome, encharged with sustaining the architraves of the two entrances. The walls, as we’ve mentioned, are a lovely Pompeiian red along the large central strip, blue along the base while up above three is a very elaborate frieze; the pavement made up of mosaics presents designs of vine leaves and is dominated by red and blue weaves. The ceiling is made up of extremely delicate coffers made of empty tiles of clay and the whole structure is supported by architraves that are similar to those that we most certainly noticed in the room of the early history, which were provided by the at-that-time most modern of locomotive companies, Borsig, and contained in arches made of seven reinforcing rods fused together and gilded, an extremely light structure thanks to the underlying ground, which is particularly sandy and muddy.
Precisely like the room above, here too the five beautiful windows face arrogantly out onto contemporary Berlin.
We’ve already said how much the room offers a glimpse of very old busts and how actual the myth of Prometheus is, which is referenced on the frieze of the northern archway.
For reasons of keeping calm we wanted to delay relating the terrible myth of Niobe, to whom the frescoes of the room are dedicated, but in so doing we would not have given honor to the eternal and complex anxiety of human nature.
It is said, then, that Queen Niobe of Thebes bragged about the fact of having seven daughters and seven sons while Leto, Zeus’s lover, had only two children, Artemis and Apollo. Artemis decided to kill all seven of Niobe’s daughters to get back at her for offending her mother to which Niobe replied she still had seven sons, which were by all counts more than two. Therefore Apollo decided to kill her seven sons. At that point Niobe, understandably distraught, began to wander throughout Lydia up until the point when she asked Zeus to transform her into stone in order to bring an end to her suffering. This he did, but the stone continued to forever shed tears.
With this agonizing image of the mother-stone crying in Lydia, we rush to seek comfort in the adjoining Room 201, dedicated to Bacchus, the walls colored with what remains of a nice, dark violet, the color of red wine, and delicate fragments of frescoes. The bronze statue of the so-called Xanten boy – that town on the Rhein River, today near Düsseldorf, which the Romans founded a few years before the birth of Christ as Castra Vetera in the region of Germania Inferiore – originally carried a tray and represented a serving boy. In his excellent book Die Römer am Niederrhein (The Romans on the Lower Rhein) Werner Böcking relates how the statue was fished out of the Rhein in 1858 by six salmon fishermen who seem to have at first wanted to trade it for some bottles of whisky but who then decided to display it for a while to their curious countrymen for a moderate sum: 10 pfennig to see it with its genitals covered and 20 without.
Coming out of Room 201 we are confronted by an incredible vision: the great stairway that goes down in the center toward the first floor and the two huge lateral ramps which, swallowing up the central passage, bring us from the second to the third floor and before the great loggia.
And this could possibly be the best point from which to observe the beautiful central restoration of the building. If we weren’t excessively attracted by the stairway and if we were able to resist the urge to walk it either up or down, it would be pleasant to walk sideways to the left, towards Room 202, that of the Roman provinces. Now, if someone still had doubts as to the grandeur of Rome here they would find important information that would give an idea of the real dimensions of the Empire. You can read how in the 2nd century AD the 40 Roman provinces were populated by more than 50 million people of every tongue and race that were able to get to learn about, in addition to their own traditions, the uses, clothing, laws, food, and drink of the Romans, not to mention Roman systems of burial and construction. If we imagine the mark that the Latin language made on all the cultures dominated, we have an idea of that power.
In a similarly interesting way, we can learn that the eastern provinces of the Empire remained influenced primarily by Greek-Hellenistic culture, while the Romans limited themselves there to introducing a common system of administration and law, willingly accepting the various manners and clothing of the Greeks.
From the lovely Roman room with its remains of the classical frescoes, we arrive in Room 203, which is dedicated to the Roman gods. It is the room where the southern cupola destroyed in the last war has been reconstructed in an absolutely extraordinary way. The walls of rough brick taper and round off toward the top in a continuum that challenges the laws of statics in an absolutely modern way. The light of the sky falls from above through the skylight onto the gigantic statue of Apollo, the god of the sun. From this special point we turn around and see a series of halls which we have just walked through: the room of the Roman provinces, the room of Bacchus, that of the library and, down at the end, in the distance and staring directly at Apollo, we catch sight of Nefertiti. The Roman god of the sun looks at the Egyptian queen of the sun and centuries of history run between them. If the sun is forever and only, until proven otherwise, singular, the history of humankind in the meantime has had a large number of sun gods.
All civilizations and peoples long looked at the sky and they evaluated the phenomena to scan time and to find answers to their numerous uncertainties. If solutions have therefore always been found in the skies, and scientists and astronomers have already found numerous ones there, from the other kind of air above us, with its colors and its lively changes of state, it remains in our common imagination a subject of true marvel and emotions capable of transporting us in a light-hearted way simply beyond the limits of the everyday.
All of our eras, religions, and cultures concerned themselves with the sky, we were saying, and here on our island as representatives of a not-so-distant period of special observers, we have the honor of hosting both pre-Romantic and Romantic painters. A great thread of European art between 1780 and 1840 were the interesting studies of clouds, or rather, the observation of the light and the sky, a living and constantly moving subject, a symbol of the yearning for immensity and for the absolute and an end more populated by sensitive creatures because the spirit always tends to raise itself and remain in the sky eternally. The great Goethe was, for example, fascinated by the studies of the English pharmacist Luke Howard who was the first to describe in detail the four different possible formations of clouds. A sky could be, he said, full of cirrus clouds (thin, willowy strands of aqueous vapor that extend and expand in every direction); stratus clouds (continuous horizontal clouds that grow from below); cumulus clouds (conic or convex tufts that rise upwards from a horizontal base); or threateningly populated by nimbus clouds (those dark systems bringing rain).
Some cloud studies from 1834 by Johan Christian Clausen Dahl can be seen in Room 3.08 on the third floor of the Alte Nationalgalerie, and we can find many skies and many clouds – whether vaporous and luminous or ashen and dark – throughout Romantic painting in general.
Another child’s game, if still of the utmost seriousness, to play in the gallery along with the previously mentioned “hunt for the accelerators of modern times” would be that of going to discover “what time period rests in the painter’s head”, recognizing that sometimes all you need is just a breath to suddenly change the scene.
The Romantic painters loved extending their brushes into the skies, but even the natural landscapes in the background to the human constructions as a symbol of contrast between the eternal and indifferent reproduction of natural phenomenon but also the immense marvel and wonder of the beauty of the created and of God and the transience of humankind. We have, therefore, cathedrals, churches, castles, often in ruins, that indicate human time and then infinite mirrors of water, like seas with their distant horizons, or even calm mirrors of smaller bodies of water, but similarly deep and significant deaths, but at the same time rebirth and then, as we said, skies, immense skies, the dream of God and of return to cosmic unity and the transcendence of every duality.
In the central room 3.05 we find multiple examples of Romantic painting with all of its typical elements fixed to express the ultimate completion of beauty through the transcendence of the contrast between nature and culture, between spontaneity and education, freedom and rules, that combine to form a superior natural order. In Friedrich Schinkel’s “Schloß am Strom” (Castle by the River) from 1820 we find ourselves before a fable-like landscape with a tree in the center, as if made by a nature that is more powerful than the castle which remains in the background. At the trunk there is even a bull’s eye. The vines, the dove and the church are all symbols of otherworldly life, the tomb is a reminder of the end of human things, while the deer, hieratic, looks elsewhere. The castle is on a Cliffside overlooking a cove. A small sailing boat is moving into the distance while barge full of people is closer to us. And then there are little steeples and church towers and two children collecting grapes. A great breath of life and of death, of movement and stillness, ascent and descent; in short, a synthetic, splendid representation of everything, illuminated by a warm central light that emanates from behind. The clouds are airy but the trees cover the sun and a good part of the sky. And more variations on the rearrangement between the real and irreal, art and nature, will and instinct can be found in Schinkel’s aforementioned “Gothic Church on a Rock by the Sea” from 1815 and “Gothic Cathedral by the Water” from 1813, which hang next to each other in the same room. The skies of the former painting are gorgeous with a red light of twilight illuminating everything from behind, just like the clouds of light and shadow contrasting the clear and dark colors of the air. In the foreground, in the Gothic cathedral on the water we see various human activities: men unloading a boat, a sailor having a drink with his beloved while in the churchyard people are coming and going and on the dock there are still other boats. A bridge made up of the immense arches fords the river and links the massive construction on the left which, with its spires and pinnacles, pierces the sky and the village to the bottom right of the painting while also acting as a horizontal element of transition between the mirror of the water and the huge sky above it.
An extremely clear sky without even a touch of cloud is that to be found in the background of Johann Karl Schultz’s light-filled masterpiece from 1829 “Tower of the Milan Cathedral”, the ultimate realization of the infinite as seen through divine light.
Another context of celestial overlapping can be found skipping over to the Bode Museum to find Jesus’s grandmother known as Anna to the Protestants and Saint Anne to the Catholics. Tilmon Riemenschneider’s famous lime wood sculpture from 1500 on display here is innocently called “Anna and the Three Husbands”, in other words, Joachim – Jesus’s grandfather and father of the Virgin Mary –; Cleophas, father of Mary of Cleophas; and Salome, father of Mary Salome.
Visiting Saint Anne pushed into another temporal, and unexpected, dimension. We notice that Mary, Jesus’s mother, did not only have two sisters with the same name, but was herself many different Marys depending on the historic and artistic period in which she was represented. At the Bode Museum we can admire many splendid Marys and, in a sense, every one of them seems to tell the same story even if, in the end, there are many different stories. There are Marys with different clothing, faces and postures but all daughters of religious epochs, there where with “religious” we also mean the Crusades, the Reformation and the Inquisition, naturellement. We encounter serene Marys with round, 14th century faces, popular, Gothic Marys with oblong faces, extremely delicate and young Marys, profoundly aware Marys and Baroque Marys who seem to be made of wax, incredibly inundated with tears and pain.
You could talk about every statue, painting or relief for hours. At the Bode Museum there are mothers of Jesus realized between 300 and 1800, or rather, fifteen centuries of art from throughout the world relatively close to us and known and on display together.
We cannot stop here and describe all of them, but a quick walk around to see them is definitely worth it.
The life of Mary, whose cult began with the Council of Ephesus in the 5th century, is generously represented in these rooms with an iconographic deployment that ranges from the tiny, newborn Madonna still in swaddling clothes through her death which, however, for believers did not happen; but rather, dormition and then assumption. The mother of Jesus is always of a different age, a different face and different features and this brief trip through the different ways of representing her is a fascinating path through peoples, mentalities, religion, artists, clients and history.
Berlin is naturally not the first city you’d think of in relation to the nativity or to the figure of Mary in the history of art and you don’t usually come here to see an image of the Madonna, but the museums also have this magical function of dispensing surprises and bringing distant stories and cultures live together in celestial harmony.
The Madonnas of the Bode Museum offer themselves up to the eyes of all but at the same time remain peacefully distant from the most well-known highlights of Berlin while, without any doubt, being one of the most marvelous secrets the city has to offer.
There is an entire universe around the madonnas of the Bode Museum, an intimate microcosm of surprising vitality protected by the silent cocoon of an airy and elegant neo-Baroque edifice.
In only one day – that is, today – we can see the centuries miraculously flow through the face of one single woman.
Mary is Polish, she has the red, puffy cheeks of a Tyrolean miller, Bavarian Mary has a round face and a dimpled chin, Mary has the smooth skin and delicate features of Bohemia, Mary is a French matron, Mary is as beautiful as a Greek god, her bright, white figure contrasted against the clear blue background in Della Robbia’s reliefs; Mary is a friendly Austrian woman with lively eyes, Mary is a Florentine noblewoman, Mary is a young girl sat on her mother’s knee while on the other there’s the baby Jesus, Mary has the astonished eyes of a Byzantine icon, the long face and olive skin; the Italian Mary of the 13th century is playing with the baby Jesus while another 13th century Italian Mary, this one blonde and slim, seems to be shrinking back, a bit afraid, probably by the annunciation of the angel, and is barely ruffling the folds of her luminous, orange clothing, allowing us to intuit the beauty of her forms. Mary is wearing a necklace of pearls, Mary is sitting quietly on a throne while behind her back the Tuscan hills roll; then there is Manneristic Mary all contorted, Mary on a crescent moon, Mary on top of a lion, a late-Gothic Mary dressed in gold protecting the people of Ravensburg beneath her cloak of blue, Mary the photo model wiggling her hips and holding onto her beautiful 18th century clothing, her hair softly gathered up and her shawl that falls charmingly to the side, who knows what vision Joseph Anton Feuchtmayer had. Belgian Mary has blonde curls in the 16th century; Mary with the child Jesus and a parrot; Spanish Baroque Mary has a face that seems as if it were made of wax and the tears she cries seem real; Mary with a tense and thin face; Mary at the foot of the cross, riven by pain; Mary next to a fountain in a 15th century garden; Mary being wed; Mary trying to control the baby Jesus who alternates between playing with an apple, turning to look at some saint or other who is in the vicinity, ruffling the pages of a book or, child prodigy, even reading it. At times the baby Jesus shows off his chubby behind and climbs up into his mother’s lap, at times he clings to her neck, at times he plays peekaboo under her veil, at times looks into his mother’s eyes with an intensity that is impossible to top as in Donatello’s bas-relief, “Madonna de’ Pazzi”.
In this famous tondo a centripetal force brings the child closer to his mother in one of the deepest mysteries of the Catholic religion. Who was born first: the mother or the child? Virgin mother, daughter of your Son, Dante wrote in his Paradiso, Humbler and higher than all other creatures You are the one who lifted human nature / To such nobility that its own Maker / Did not disdain to be made of its making. It is in you that God decided to become incarnate in order to descend among humankind. Within your womb was lit once more the flame / Of that love through whose warmth this flower opened / To its full bloom in everlasting peace. // To us up here you are the torch of noon / Blazing with love, and for the mortals down there / You are the living fountainhead of hope. // Lady, you are so highly placed and helpful, / Whoever seeks grace and does not call on you / Wants his desires to fly up without wings. // Your loving heart not only offers aid / To those who ask for it, but oftentimes / Free-handedly anticipates the asking. You help whoever turns to you, but often come to help even before you have been asked. In you is mercy, in you largeheartedness, / In you compassion, and in you is found / Whatever good exists in any creature. In short, within you are all the possible virtues imaginable and you are everything that humankind needs. Dante doesn’t seem to have any doubt: the figure of the Madonna is the ultimate symbol of hope and the power of pure and universal love.
It is incredible just how incognito the Madonna is in Berlin and just how much she is the magical multiplier of saintly times, bringing us to centuries in which the Christian religion, unaware of the extent of its horrors, was for a large part of Europe practically everything. The audio guides at the Bode Museum are only in German and in English and there are few disciples among the visitors, let’s let it be. Up there with the bright and gilded neo-Baroque cupola of the Bode you can enjoy a rarefied and exclusive coffee.
( Translated by Alexander Booth )
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