The Altes Museum opens
Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s museum opens in Berlin, with a long colonnade and a rotunda modelled on the Pantheon.
The museum became a new building type, and the ancient temple became an image of learning and public life.
During the Napoleonic Wars the French carried off art treasures from Berlin to Paris, and when they returned after 1815 the idea arose that they should be shown to everyone, not just the court. King Frederick William III agreed to create a public museum, and behind the project stood, among others, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had also founded Berlin’s university. The architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel was already Prussia’s leading builder and had designed the Neue Wache guardhouse and the theatre on the Gendarmenmarkt. He chose a site on the Lustgarten, opposite the king’s palace, where an arm of a canal first had to be filled in. The museum was to stand alongside the palace and the cathedral, as the equal of royal power and the Church.
Construction took place in the second half of the 1820s. The façade is a long Ionic colonnade, raised on a high plinth with a broad flight of steps, like a Greek stoa on a public square. Behind the columns an open staircase leads up to the upper floor, from which the visitor looks out over the Lustgarten and the city. At the centre lies the rotunda, two storeys high and covered by a coffered dome that cannot be seen from outside because it is hidden by a square superstructure. Ancient sculptures stood there in a ring around the room. The ground floor held antiquities, the upper floor the paintings, arranged by school and period. It was a new idea that the collection should tell the history of art to a broad public.
The Altes Museum was the beginning of Museum Island, where several large museums were built over the following hundred years and which is now a World Heritage Site. The building was badly damaged in the Second World War and restored by East Germany in the 1960s. Schinkel’s solution of colonnade, staircase and rotunda was copied in museums all over the world. His legacy came to Sweden directly through his pupil Friedrich August Stüler, who designed the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. It opened in 1866 and was one of the first Swedish buildings erected solely to show art to the public. Carl Ludvig Engel’s Helsinki and many Nordic university buildings also belong to the same German classicism.