ROOMS 3-7.
Roman antiquities found in Germany and German antiquities from fourth to tenth centuries. The exquisite German gold and metal-work of the Charlemagne period seems to foreshadow the work of the great Nuremberg goldsmiths.
ROOM 8.
Latest acquisitions of the Museum.
ROOMS 10-13.
A very fine collection of characteristic stoves and tiles. The latter, used for covering the walls and floors, took the place of mosaics and are ornamented with leaf-work, stars, rosettes, coats-of-arms or grotesques. The tiles of the stoves, which should be compared with those in the Castle and the Rathaus, were made, in the fifteenth century, to represent chiefly mythological subjects, whilst the seventeenth-century ones betray, as we should expect, Italian influence. A green stove with concave plates (Room 12) and an eighteenth-century rococco specimen (Room 13), from the house of the Löffelholz family are remarkable.
ROOMS 14, 15.
contain some beautiful examples of the locksmith’s art; locks, keys, hinges, knockers, and knocker plates, exquisite in workmanship and in design. We have here a real lesson in ironwork, a perfect education in hinges.
ROOM 16.
is the Wilhelms-halle, so-called after Emperor Wilhelm I. It contains a window given by him in 1860, when he was still only King of Prussia. Passing by this and the Hohenzollern-halle opposite and going down the Ludwigsgang, built by the aid of Ludwig of Bavaria (1870) we come to the Reichs-hof, a court (left) in which stands a gigantic cast of the Roland in the market-place of Bremen. Rooms 18-25 are called the Victoria and Friedrich Wilhelm buildings. (More tombs and casts.) On the right of the corridor (Room 26) there now begins a very interesting collection of stained glass which is arranged chronologically. (Twelfth to sixteenth-century glass here.)