Unless otherwise noted, all of these photos are mine and freely available especially to educators.
The Altes Museum
Alas, I did not get into the Altes Museum. I arrived just as it was closing. I wanted to see this museum as much for the building as for the collection. While the exterior structure survived, the Battle of Berlin destroyed the interior. Only the rotunda was restored to something like its pre-war appearance. The rest of the museum interior is a modern rebuilding.
The Museum Island began with the Altes Museum, the "Old Museum," as it came to be known in the mid 19th century. When Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806, he took King of Prussia's very large collection of Classical art and antiquities back to Paris to the Louvre. When the collection returned to Berlin in 1814, the public clamored for it to be put on permanent display. King Friedrich Wilhelm III commissioned architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel to design a museum to stand opposite the Lustgarten -- then used as a parade ground -- from the Royal Palace, the Stadtschloss. Construction began in 1823, and the museum opened to the public in 1830.
In many respects, the modern museum begins with this building. Schinkel designed a very clear and simple design in contrast to the baroque Stadtschloss it once faced. He made the entire south side of the building fronted with 18 tall Ionic columns that form one side of a simple rectangular plan. The wall behind the columns is recessed and windowless, intended to carry large outdoor murals. The openness of the south-side colonnade and the brilliant entrance with its columns and staircase announced to the Berlin public that the museum was open to them. Originally this would have been a striking contrast to the guarded entrances to the Stadtschloss across the Lustgarten.
Schinkel wanted the museum to educate the public above all else, the first museum in the world with that specific mission. Earlier museums like the Louvre primarily showcased collections to announce to the world the might and power of the nation and its ruling regime. Such museums announced to their subjects that the regime is educated, civilized, and fit to govern. Schinkel certainly wanted his museum to do those things, but also to somehow teach the values of Classical culture to the broad public, to educate them in history and to "refine" them. Education remains the core mission of most art museums around the world. Schinkel designed the museum to make the artworks accessible with both architecture and visual imagery suggesting to people how they should be looking at the collection and what they should be learning from it.
Photo from Wikipedia.
Schinkel designed a mural cycle for this terrace, a series of mythological allegories about time, history, and progress. Those murals were once part of the educational program of the museum, preparing people for what they were about to see from the distant past. All of those murals were destroyed in the War.
The Pergamon Museum
I had one big disappointment with the Pergamon Museum. The Altar of Zeus is closed. It is in restoration and won't be finished until 2019 at the earliest, so I was told by the museum staff. But, the rest of the Museum was spectacular. It is still probably the most popular museum in Berlin, famous for its huge reconstructions of ancient monuments.
This is the smaller of a pair of gates to the inner city of ancient Babylon built by King Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BCE. The Pergamon Museum also owns the larger gate, but its parts are kept in storage.
The gate is built of glazed brick and adorned with bulls and dragons sacred to the gods Adad and Marduk. This gate was a major feature of Nebuchadnezzar's reconstruction of the city center of Babylon that included his palace, a temple to Marduk, and the legendary Hanging Gardens.
The museum has Nebuchadnezzar's dedication inscription for the Gate:
Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, the faithful prince appointed by the will of Marduk, the highest of princely princes, beloved of Nabu, of prudent counsel, who has learned to embrace wisdom, who fathomed their divine being and reveres their majesty, the untiring governor, who always takes to heart the care of the cult of Esagila and Ezida and is constantly concerned with the well-being of Babylon and Borsippa, the wise, the humble, the caretaker of Esagila and Ezida, the firstborn son of Nabopolassar, the King of Babylon.
Both gate entrances of Imgur-Ellil and Nemetti-Ellil following the filling of the street from Babylon had become increasingly lower.
Therefore, I pulled down these gates and laid their foundations at the water table with asphalt and bricks and had them made of bricks with blue stone on which wonderful bulls and dragons were depicted.This translation and more information about the Ishtar Gate can be found here.
I covered their roofs by laying majestic cedars length-wise over them. I hung doors of cedar adorned with bronze at all the gate openings.
I placed wild bulls and ferocious dragons in the gateways and thus adorned them with luxurious splendor so that people might gaze on them in wonder
I let the temple of Esiskursiskur (the highest festival house of Marduk, the Lord of the Gods a place of joy and celebration for the major and minor gods) be built firm like a mountain in the precinct of Babylon of asphalt and fired bricks.
Robert Koldewey excavated the Gate in 1902 to 1914 finding its foundations and a host of glazed bricks. In 1930, the Ishtar Gate was reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum but not completely. Size restrictions prevented the reconstruction of the larger second gate that originally stood immediately behind the Gate that we see today in the museum.
Even though this mosaic is about contemporary with the earliest Greek Ionic temples, I use this as an example of the Mesopotamian inspiration for the Ionic order. The eastern Ionian Greeks did a lot of business in Mesopotamia and would have seen a lot of buildings with ornament like this. The stylized palm trees in the center of the mosaic may be inspired by earlier examples that are the ancestors of the Ionic column.
The Roman Emperor Hadrian probably built this gate to replace an earlier Doric style gate to the city's agora or marketplace. Earthquakes repeatedly damaged the gate, and finally destroyed it in the 10th or 11th centuries.
Archaeologist Theodor Wiegand excavated the Gate in 1903 and shipped its pieces back to Berlin. In 1908, Wiegand presented models of the Gate to Kaiser Wilhelm II who was so impressed that he ordered the Gate to be rebuilt out of the surviving pieces. That was not accomplished until the 1920s. The reconstruction remains very controversial since it uses a lot of modern replacements for lost parts; replacements whose design was conjectural.
There were galleries filled with magnificent textiles.
In the spandrels above the top of the arch are inscriptions in Hebrew from Exodus 23: 25-26:
"So shall you serve the Lord your God, and He will bless your bread and your water. And I will take sickness away from the midst of you. No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days."
There is more information about this remarkable object here.
The Neues Museum
The Neues Museum re-opened in 2009 for the first time since it closed in 1939 for the duration of the World War II. The architect David Chippendale designed the renovation of a badly war-damaged building that had stood as a vacant and neglected semi-ruin for decades. Chippendale made the inspired decision to retain as much of the building's original appearance -- including the war damage -- as possible.
The Neues Museum returns to its original role housing Egyptian antiquities and other archaeological discoveries.
The Neues Museum forbids photography of Nefertiti without permission. I suspect that this is for commercial reasons rather than for security.
The Neues Museum's most famous resident.
Nefertiti was magnificent. She did not disappoint. In fact, the photos don't do her justice. She is the most famous work of Egyptian art -- and the least typical. There was nothing quite like her before in Egyptian art, or after. Even now, the vividness of her portrait is striking and apparently struck those who discovered her. The archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt found her in 1912 during excavations of the site of Akhenaten's capital city, Akhetaten at a place known today as Amarna. He found her amid the remains of a sculptor's workshop, an artist named Thutmose. She was the only finished work among several very striking portrait heads of the royal family in various states of completion.
Akhenaten, the "Heretic Pharaoh" who broke all precedent and closed the temples of the ancient gods in favor of his new religion of the sun, demanded that his artists likewise break with time honored Egyptian traditions for making art. The artists like Thutmose working at Amarna in the palace shops discarded much of the traditional template for making imagery. In ways that were unprecedented, and unrepeated, these artists pursued truth to appearances in their art, especially in portraiture. The most famous and most striking example is Nefertiti's bust.
The purpose of the bust remains unknown. Most scholars speculate that it was made to be a model for other works of art produced in the shop.
There is a tenon meant to fit in the socket of her crown to be made from another different material.
This spectacular looking museum was the original home of the German National Gallery, and now contains collections of 19th century and early 20th century art.
The Museum Island suffered very badly in the fighting for Berlin toward the end of World War II from Allied bombing and from Russian shelling. The Neues Museum was an abandoned ruin for over 40 years after the war ended. Bombing gutted the interior of the Altes Museum which was entirely rebuilt. The Bode Museum (the former Kaiser Friedrich Museum, renamed after the war for its first director Wilhelm Bode) lost a significant part of its painting collection in a fire in the last weeks of the War. The Pergamon Museum suffered significant damage from the fighting, and from a couple of years of abandonment after the war, especially to the Miletus Gate.
Since Reunification, the German government began a number of long term projects to repair and rebuild the Museum Island, returning it to something of its original glory. There are further plans renovate and expand the old museums, and even to build some new ones. Plans are being made to reconstitute and re-unite collections long divided by the Cold War. For example, there are long term plans to return the painting collection housed in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin to its original home in the Bode Museum.
You can read about those proposals and see detailed architectural models here.