V.[ToC]
MUSEUMS.
he chief art treasures of Berlin are found in the Royal Museums, Old and New, and in the National Gallery. There are few more characteristic and inspiring sights in Europe than that which greets the eye in a walk on a sunny afternoon in winter from the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm I. through the Operahaus Platz and the Zeughaus Platz, across the Schloss Brücke and the Lustgarten, to the peerless building of the Old Museum,—with the grand equipages, the brilliant uniforms, and the busy but not overcrowded life which throng the vast spaces of these handsome thoroughfares. The Old Museum is not so rich in masterpieces as some other and older art galleries, but there are many fine original works. The Friezes from the Altar of Zeus, excavated within a few years at Pergamus, are extremely interesting, and are exhibited with all the adjuncts which the most thorough German scholarship can supply for their elucidation. The celebrated Raphael tapestry, woven for Henry VIII. from the cartoons now in the South Kensington Museum, and long the foremost ornament of the palace of Whitehall, hangs in the great upper rotunda, which is a setting not unworthy of its fame. Michael Angelo's "John the Baptist as a Boy," one of his early works, is quite unlike most of this master's work, in conception and execution, and is interesting especially on this account. The "Altar-piece of the Mystic Lamb" is remarkable for its merits and because it is reputed to be the first picture ever painted in oils. Murillo's "Ecstasy of Saint Anthony" is a picture of rare sweetness and power. In one room are five of Raphael's Madonnas, but only one of them is in his better style. "The collection of pictures in the Old Museum," wrote George Eliot in 1855, "has three gems which remain in the imagination,—'Titian's Daughter,' Correggio's 'Jupiter and Io,' and his 'Head of Christ on a Handkerchief.' I was pleased, also, to recognize among the pictures the one by Jan Steem which Goethe describes in the 'Wahlverwandschaften' as the model of a tableau vivant presented by Lucian and her friends. It is the daughter being reproved by her father, while the mother empties her wine-glass."
The department of the Museum known as the Antiquarium has its treasures. Here is the original silver table service, supposed to be that of a Roman General, dug up in 1868 near the old German mediæval town of Hildesheim. A handsome copy of this service is among the beginnings of Chicago's Art collections. Here are the exquisite terra-cotta statuettes from the ancient Grecian Colony of Tanagra, which no modern work of plastic art can imitate in grace of form and delicacy of color,—dating three or four hundred years before the Christian era; and in other rooms, a fabulous collection of jewels, and numberless precious vases, illustrating especially the progress of Ancient Grecian Art.
The New Museum, connected by a colonnade with the Old, is not, like it, remarkable for architectural beauty; but its vast collections, especially in marble, already need and are to have a new building. The masterpieces of ancient sculpture gathered at Munich, Vienna, Paris, Rome, Naples, and elsewhere, are here reproduced in casts, making up a collection said to be, in its way, unrivalled in the world. The collection of originals in Renaissance sculpture is also extensive and valuable.
Referring to sculpture in Berlin, George Eliot wrote: "We went again and again to look at the Parthenon Sculptures, and registered a vow that we would go to feast on the originals [in the British Museum] the first day we could spare in London." At the date before mentioned, her opinion was that "the first work of art really worth looking at that one sees in Berlin is the 'Horse-Tamers' in front of the [Old] palace. It is by a sculptor [Baron Clodt, of St. Petersburg] who made horses his especial study; and certainly, to us, they eclipsed the famous Colossi at Monte Cavallo, casts of which are in [before] the New Museum."