Altes Museum
One of the world’s first buildings designed as a public museum. Facing the Lustgarten runs a colonnade of eighteen Ionic columns, and at its centre stands a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon. The building showed how antiquity could serve the public institutions of a new age.
The museum was commissioned by the Prussian king Frederick William III, who wanted to make the royal art collections accessible to the public. Karl Friedrich Schinkel received the commission, and the building was erected between 1823 and 1830 on the north side of the Lustgarten, opposite the royal palace. The site was marshy, and the foundations had to rest on a large number of timber piles driven into the wet ground. The walls were built of brick and rendered, while the columns and details were made of sandstone. Schinkel saw the museum as an institution of education: the art was to be arranged historically and cultivate the taste of the citizens, not merely display the wealth of the prince. The building was therefore given a dignified, almost temple-like form, raised on a high plinth above the square.
The plan is a simple rectangle with two inner courtyards, and between them lies the rotunda, the heart of the building. The rotunda is two storeys high, surrounded by a ring of columns carrying a gallery, and covered by a coffered dome with an oculus at the top, freely modelled on the Pantheon in Rome. Ancient sculptures stood between the columns, so that visitors could first attune their minds before beginning their tour. Sculpture was shown on the ground floor and painting on the upper floor, arranged by school and period. Behind the colonnade lies an open stair hall, where Schinkel had large frescoes painted on the development of culture. In front of the steps stands a huge bowl of polished granite, carved from a glacial boulder and originally intended for the rotunda but too large to get inside.
During the Second World War the museum burned and was badly damaged. It was restored in the GDR era and reopened in the 1960s, but Schinkel’s frescoes in the stair hall could not be saved in their original form. Today the building houses mainly collections of antiquities, and since 1999 the whole of Museum Island has been a World Heritage Site. The Altes Museum became a model for what a public art museum should look like, with a columned façade, a central domed hall and galleries en suite, and the pattern was repeated in museums throughout Europe and in North America. Schinkel’s pupil Friedrich August Stüler continued the work on Museum Island with the Neues Museum and then designed the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Through him the Prussian idea of the museum left a direct mark on Sweden, both in the building’s plan and in the idea of art as public education.