Now we come to the sixth hall, containing the Spanish and French schools; and here are those pictures of Murillo's with which we are all so familiar from engravings, viz., the Beggar Boys eating Melons and Grapes, Boys playing Dice, Beggar Boys, &c.; Nicolas Poussin's pictures, &c.
The seventh and eighth great halls contain other paintings of the same schools of art; among them Carlo Dolce, Tintoretto, Domenichino, and Correggio. So also does the ninth apartment, formerly the private cabinet of the king, in which there are beautiful works from the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Giorgione, and Raphael. We come from this gallery of art literally surfeited, fatigued with long gazing, walking, pausing, looking, wondering, and admiring, and realize over again what an exhausting work is continuous sight-seeing.
Besides the art collections which have already been described, we visited the new Pinacothek, containing ten halls and fourteen cabinets for the exhibition of modern paintings, among which we saw Kaulbach's Destruction of Jerusalem, a magnificent picture, familiar from the print that has been made of it; Wilkie's capital painting of the Reading of the Will; the Deluge, by Charles Schorn, a Dusseldorf artist; Peasant's Wedding, an excellent picture by Maurice Muller; Frederic Bischof's First Snow; Battle of Custozza, by Adam; Two Boys buying their first Cigars, by H. Rhomberg, a Munich artist, &c. There were nearly three hundred pictures in this collection, which was first opened to the public in 1853.
The Glyptothek, or Hall of Sculpture, is another priceless collection of art. The exterior is handsomely adorned with statues, and the interior, which consists of twelve halls, and each devoted to different branches of art, is admirably planned and appropriately decorated.
In the hall known as the Æginetan, which is devoted to marbles discovered in the Island of Ægina, we saw a splendid group of marble figures, fourteen in number, which have been set up exactly in the position they formerly occupied on the Grecian temple they adorned, being carefully put together, and such parts as were broken carefully restored by Thorwaldsen, giving one some idea of the beauty of the sculpture of the ancient Greeks, and showing the actual figures in all their spirited grace and action, which has never been excelled by modern sculptors.
There were Hercules and Telamon fighting the Trojans, and the struggle of the Greeks and Trojans over the body of Patroclus, as described by Homer, the warriors with helmet, shield, and javelin, in the most spirited attitudes—specimens of the wondrous skill of the ancient sculptors, and the reality of those outline engravings, by Flaxman and others, of statues and sculpture, which adorn the illustrated books of Greek and Roman history. In the Hall of Apollo, among many other fine works, were a superb Bacchus, found at Athens, with a crown of vine leaves most exquisitely cut, a beautiful Ceres, and a grand and majestic statue of Minerva.
The Hall of Bacchus, however, contains the gem of the whole collection, and, in fact, the most wonderful and life-like statue I ever looked upon—the celebrated Barberini Faun, a colossal figure of a Satyr, half sitting, half reclining, as if in a deep sleep after a carouse. The attitude is so perfect, the appearance of relaxation of the muscles and limbs so thoroughly true to nature, and the very atmosphere of complete languor and repose so pervades the countenance and whole body of the figure, that the spectator almost forgets it is but senseless stone before him in half expectancy of the breast heaving to the breathings of the sleeper, which seems all that is lacking to make it a living reality; and yet this wondrous work is from an unknown hand. The catalogues and guide-books claim it is from the chisel of Praxiteles; but that is only surmise. On account of its excellence they doubtless think it ought to be; but it was dug out of the ditch of the Castle of St. Angelo, where it was supposed to have been hurled from the walls in the year 537. In this hall is also a magnificently executed figure of Silenus, Bacchus and Panther.
In the Hall of Heroes are some splendid figures; Jason binding on his Sandal; Nero as a gladiator, a fine head, with the brow and curls of a Hercules; the Victorious Gladiator, Alexander the Great, &c. In the hall of modern sculpture were Canova's beautiful figures of Paris and Venus; Adonis, by Thorwaldsen; Love and the Muse, by Eberhardt; and others, giving the visitor an opportunity of comparing ancient with modern art.
The great bronze statue of Bavaria, just outside the city, is a huge figure of sixty feet in height, standing upon a pedestal thirty feet high. It represents a female with a sword in her right hand, while the left raises on high the wreath of victory. At her side sits the lion of Bavaria. By the staircase inside we ascended to the head of the bronze giant, which we found would comfortably accommodate eight or nine persons; and from a window in its curling locks we had a fine view of Munich and the surrounding country. This great statue was modelled by Schwanthaler, and cast by F. Miller at the royal foundery of Munich, where so many bronze figures for this country have been cast; and having for that reason a desire to see it, we drove thither. On sending our cards in, with a message that we were a party of Americans, we were immediately waited upon by the superintendent, who, with the greatest courtesy, showed us over the entire establishment, where were bronze giants in every process of manufacture, from the mass of liquid metal to the shapely figure under the artistic files of the finishers.
We were shown here the Hall of the Colossi, in which were the plaster models of all the works that have been executed at the foundery. Here, among others, we saw the cast of the statue of Henry Clay, made for New Orleans, those of Beethoven for Boston Music Hall, and Horace Mann for Boston State House grounds, Colonel Benton for St. Louis, and the figures of Jefferson, Mason, Henry, Nelson, Lewis, and Marshall, which adorn the Washington Monument at Richmond, Va.; also the model of the triumphal car, drawn by lions, which adorns the arch at one end of the fine street (Ludwigstrasse) named after King Louis. The lions were giants ten feet high, and a cast of the hand of the great figure of Bavaria was six or seven feet long and two feet thick, suggesting that a box on the ear from such a palm would undoubtedly be a "stunner." From here we naturally went to the studio of the great sculptor Schwanthaler, where we were courteously received by his son, and were interested in the processes of sculpture, which we saw in all its phases under the workmen's hands.