It is characteristic of the purism of Schinkel’s approach, a purism not archaeological but visual, that this attic masks externally a Durandesque central domed space (Figure 6). Such circular central spaces, so recurrent in Romantic Classical planning, had been a favourite setting for classical sculpture, the principal treasure of most art collections of this period, ever since the Museo Pio-Clementino was built at the Vatican. None is finer than this in the proportional relationship of interior colonnade, plain wall above, and coffered dome with oculus. Most, indeed, are but feeble copies of the Roman Pantheon; this exceeds in distinction, if not in scale, its ancient original.
But the Museum, unlike the Munich Glyptothek, had to have picture galleries as well as sculpture halls; and Schinkel’s organization of these, so much less palatial than Klenze’s in his Pinakothek, is a technical triumph of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism. Screens at right angles to the windows, and thus free from glare, provided the greater part of the hanging space, a premonition almost of the movable screens of mid-twentieth-century art galleries (Figure [6]).
The external treatment of the rear walls of the Museum, moreover, achieved a clarity of mathematical organization and a subtlety of structural expression in the detailing which was also hardly equalled before the mid twentieth century. Tall windows in two even ranges express clearly the two storeys of galleries behind; the stuccoed walls between delicately suggest by their flat rustication—so like that Soane used on the Bank of England—the scale of fine ashlar masonry. But the giant order of the front is also clearly echoed in the flat corner antae just short of which the string-course between the storeys and the rustication of the walls are stopped. A prototype of such detailing can be seen in the Athenian Propylaea, no doubt familiar to Schinkel through publications; a derivation—or at least a superb twentieth-century parallel—is the way Mies van der Rohe handles the juxtaposition of steel stanchions and brick infilling in his buildings erected for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in the last fifteen years (see Chapter [20]).
The rapid deterioration of rationalist Grecian standards, which followed within a few decades even in the hands of Schinkel’s ablest pupils, is to be noted in the Neues Museum, built in 1843-55 by F. A. Stüler (1800-65) behind the Altes Museum. It is even more evident in the contiguous Nationalgalerie, also by Stüler but based on a sketch by Frederick William IV. This temple stands on a very high substructure in an awkward perversion of the theme of Gilly’s monument to Frederick the Great and Klenze’s Walhalla. It was finished only in 1876 by which time, even in Germany, Romantic Classicism was completely dead (see Chapter [9]).
Behind his museum Schinkel himself had built in 1828-32, along the banks of the Kupfergraben, the Packhofgebäude. This range of utilitarian structures was definitely consonant, towards the Museum, with the Grecian rationalism of its rear façade. But for the warehouses at the remote end of the group Schinkel used a rather direct transcription of Durand’s paradigm for an arcuated market.[[48]] Here, at almost precisely the same time as at Gärtner’s State Library in Munich and Hübsch’s Ministry of Finance in Karlsruhe, the Rundbogenstil makes an early appearance as an alternative to the trabeated Grecian. In comparably utilitarian works of a few years earlier, the Military Prison in Berlin begun in 1825 and the lighthouse at Arkona of the same date, Schinkel had already used dark brickwork unstuccoed, but with square rather than arched openings; while on his long-demolished Hamburg Opera House, begun also in 1825 and completed in 1827, there were arched openings throughout of a somewhat High Renaissance order but far more severely treated than by Klenze on his Munich Pinakothek.
To the year 1825 belongs too the beginning of the Werder Church in Berlin, Gothic in its vaults, as also in its detail, and executed in brick and terracotta. Less just in its scaling than his earlier Gothic monument of cast iron, this church as executed makes one regret that Schinkel’s domed project of 1822, derived either from Vignon’s interior of the Madeleine in Paris or from one of Durand’s paradigms, was not executed.
In 1826 began Schinkel’s extensive and varied work for the Royal family at Potsdam,[[49]] the town destined to be the richest centre of later Prussian Romantic Classicism. Here he worked in close association with the heir to the throne who was later, after 1840, king as Frederick William IV. This romantic and talented prince—who actually wished he were an architect rather than a ruler—frequently provided Schinkel and, after his death, Schinkel’s pupils with sketches from which as we have seen in the case of the Nationalgalerie) various executed buildings were elaborated with more or less success. One of the great amateurs, his was a very late example of direct Royal intervention in architecture. Some of the modulation of Schinkel’s style towards the Picturesque—still more evident in the work at Potsdam of his ablest pupil Ludwig Persius (1803-45)—may be credited to this princely patron.
In Berlin, in the later twenties, Schinkel was also remodelling and redecorating palaces for Frederick William’s brothers, major works in scale but rather limited in architectural interest.[[50]] More characteristic of Schinkel’s best Grecian manner is the somewhat later palace for Prince William built in 1834-5 by the younger Langhans (K. F., 1781-1869). This architect’s still later theatre at Breslau, begun in 1843, is worth mention at this point and also the old Russian Embassy of 1840-1 in Berlin by Eduard Knoblauch (1801-65), but Schinkel’s comparable work is fifteen years earlier.
At Potsdam, even though much of what he did there also consisted of enlarging earlier buildings, Schinkel was freer than in Berlin. Collaboration with the gardener P. J. Lenné (1789-1866), who provided superb naturalistic settings in the tradition of the English garden, may have encouraged a looser and less Classical sort of composition. In many views, Charlottenhof with its dominating Greek Doric portico, remodelled from 1826 on as the residence of the Crown Prince, may appear a sufficiently conventional Greek Revival country house. But if one considers the planning of the house and its close relation to the raised terrace, and also the relation to the solid block of the open pergola—’an object of nature’ in Durand’s special sense—one sees that here, as earlier at the Zivilcasino, but from no necessity enforced by the site, Schinkel sought to apply the most stringent sort of geometrical order to an asymmetrical composition. For this, of course, the Erechtheum and to some extent the Propylaea on the Akropolis, those two fifth-century Greek examples of Romantic Classicism, provided precedents. At Schloss Glienecke near by, also begun in 1826 for another Prussian prince, Karl, whose palace in Berlin he was remodelling too, the Athenian derivation is very patent in the later belvedere of 1837 based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. But it is the asymmetrical massing of carefully organized elements here that reveals the extent to which Schinkel was able to absorb and actually to synthesize with the discipline of Romantic Classicism one of the major formal innovations of the Picturesque. The bold off-centre location of the tower actually makes of this a sort of Italian Villa in the Cronkhill sense.
In the enlargement of the medieval Kolberg Town Hall in Pomerania, begun in 1829, Schinkel employed secular Late Gothic in a version as stiff and mechanical as that of Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace a decade later. A remarkable centrally-planned Hunting Lodge, built for Prince Radziwill at Ostrowo in 1827, on the other hand, illustrated a bold attempt to apply the principles of Durandesque structural rationalism to building in timber; the result is very different indeed from the contemporary American, Russian, and Swedish houses of wood that were designed as copies of marble temples.