In 1821 the Prussian state bought some 3,000 paintings in one go from an English merchant living in Berlin, and with them it acquired almost all the side wings of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece. The central part of the altarpiece had stayed in Ghent the whole time, in the cathedral of St Bavo. In 1920, under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany handed the wings over to Belgium.
The Prussian kings left no collection like the one the Saxon electors had built up in Dresden, so the picture gallery that opened in 1830 in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum was put together from purchased collections and paintings taken from the royal palaces. About 1,200 paintings were hung there by schools, as a history of painting. After that the museum bought whole collections at other people's sales, lost some 585 works in 1945, spent almost half a century divided between West and East Berlin, and on 12 June 1998 came together again in a new building at the Kulturforum.
Before the museum (1755–1815)
1. Leda and the Swan — Correggio, c. 1530–1532
Louis d'Orléans, son of the Regent of France, grew so devout in later life that he took a knife to Correggio's Leda from the family collection. He destroyed Leda's head, and the canvas came apart in three pieces. Correggio had painted the picture for Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, as part of a cycle on the loves of Jupiter, and after long wanderings around Europe it was bought in 1721 by the Regent, Philippe d'Orléans, for his own collection.
In 1753 the mutilated canvas was bought by the Paris collector Pasquier, who commissioned the painter Delyen to paint a new head. Two years later, at the sale of Pasquier's collection, an agent of Frederick the Great paid 21,060 livres for the picture, and Leda went to the palaces at Potsdam. In 1806 Napoleon took her to Paris, where Prud'hon repainted the head. After Napoleon's fall the painting returned to Prussia, in 1829–1830 it was transferred from the palaces to the new museum, and in 1834–1835 the Berlin restorer Jakob Schlesinger painted Leda's head once more.
Leda sits naked on a low rocky bank, on a pale lilac cloth. The swan stands between her thighs with its neck rising at her breast, and its beak touches the base of her neck by her left shoulder. On the bank to the left a winged Cupid plays the lyre, and in the lower corner one of two plump putti blows a long curved horn. On the right, beyond a rock, an old woman in a blue veil watches Leda, a maid in red holds up a white cloth over a companion stepping out of the water, a girl at the very edge stands waist-deep in the water beside a swan, and above the trees another swan flies away.
Leda's head is bent to her left shoulder, her eyes lowered and almost closed, a faint smile on her lips, and all of it was painted by Schlesinger. According to the museum, he changed the look of the lost head and took away some of the sensuality Correggio had given the scene.
2. Amor Vincit Omnia — Caravaggio, 1601–1602
The German painter and biographer Joachim von Sandrart lived in Rome in the 1630s and worked for the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani. In a book published in 1675 he wrote that it was he who advised his patron to cover the Amor with a dark green silk curtain and show it to guests last, once everything else had been seen, because beside it the other 120 paintings in that room looked insignificant.
Caravaggio painted the picture for Giustiniani in 1601–1602, soon after he had made his name with the large canvases for the Contarelli Chapel in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi.
An almost life-size boy stands naked against an almost black background, and the light falls on him sharply from the upper left. Dark brown eagle's wings rise behind his back, he holds two arrows in his right hand, and he has drawn up his left leg and rests the knee on a crumpled white sheet. He looks straight at the viewer and laughs with his mouth open, and the tip of his left wing lies against his raised thigh. Scattered at his feet are a lute, a violin with its bow, an open music book, a set square and a pair of compasses, a written sheet under a sprig of laurel and dark armour, with a gold crown and a sceptre at the right edge. A blue globe with gold stars peeps out from under the sheet. The museum links the title with Virgil's line “Love conquers all” and reads the painting as earthly love mocking the sciences, the arts, fame and power.
In 1815, after Napoleon's defeat, King Friedrich Wilhelm III bought in Paris the Giustiniani collection, which the Paris dealer Féréol Bonnemaison had been unable to sell since 1812. The king paid 540,000 francs, and about 160 paintings came to Berlin, five of them by Caravaggio. Three of the five were destroyed in 1945 (more on them in the entry on Saint Matthew), and of the two that survived only the Amor is in the Gemäldegalerie. The other, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, is in the Picture Gallery at Sanssouci in Potsdam.
The collection of the merchant Solly (1821–1830)
3. Portrait of a Young Girl — Petrus Christus, c. 1465–1470
In May 1819 August von Goethe, the poet's son, visited Edward Solly's house on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin and counted 8,000 or 9,000 paintings there, although in fact there were about 3,000. No more than 400 were hung, and the rest stood stacked in 30 or 40 rooms, kitchens and coach houses, so that, as he put it, one could get completely lost among them.
Solly, an Englishman who had grown rich trading Baltic grain and timber, lived in Berlin from 1813 and in five years assembled more than 3,000 paintings. He bought Italian masters of the 14th and 15th centuries and early Netherlandish painters, among them Giotto, Botticelli and Jan van Eyck, at a time when few people cared about those schools. In 1821, after long negotiations, the Prussian state bought the whole collection, and about 677 of its paintings formed the core of the future gallery.
On a small panel the girl has turned three-quarters to the left and looks straight at the viewer. She wears a tall black velvet bonnet shaped like a truncated cone, a black band of the same fabric runs under her chin, and along the edge of the bonnet at her hairline goes a narrow ribbon set with tiny pearls. Her brown eyes are not quite level. Her dress is dark blue with a broad white fur collar, the neckline is filled with a black insert, and at its upper edge a single gilt pin holds a transparent veil. Round her neck are three strands of dark links with gold and pearls, and behind her is one plain wall, grey-brown above and panelled in dark wood below. According to the museum, this is the only known female portrait by Petrus Christus.
When the portrait arrived in Berlin it still had an old frame with an inscription. In 1825 the young scholar Gustav Waagen, later the gallery's first director, recorded the signature on it as “Opus Petri Christophori”, “the work of Petrus Christophori”, and the attribution of the portrait has rested on that record ever since. He also reported that the frame called the sitter a “niece of the famous Talbot”, the first Earl of Shrewsbury. The historians Lorne Campbell and Joel Upton suggested that Waagen had translated the Latin nepos as “niece”, although the word also means “granddaughter”. In that case the girl could have been a granddaughter of Talbot who came to Bruges in 1468 for the wedding of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. The museum leans towards this version, though there is no proof of it.
The art historian Passavant, who published the portrait in 1833, noted that the frame had been lost. By Upton's reckoning it disappeared between 1825 and 1833, when the portrait already belonged to the museum.
4. Portrait of the Merchant Georg Gisze — Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532
At the top centre of the panel a note is stuck to the wall with red wax, bearing a Latin couplet, “The image you see shows Georg's features, so lively are his eyes, so are his cheeks”, and below it “aged 34, in the year of our Lord 1532”. Holbein wrote praise of the likeness straight into the portrait.
Georg Gisze, a merchant from Danzig, was ennobled in 1519 by King Sigismund I of Poland, and from 1522 he lived in London at the Steelyard, the walled compound of the Hanseatic merchants on the bank of the Thames. Holbein returned to London in 1532, and his first clients there were the German merchants of the Steelyard. The museum believes that Gisze commissioned the portrait to send home to Danzig before his marriage, and the carnations in the vase probably hint at an engagement.
He stands behind a table covered with a red, black and white carpet, in a black beret and a wide black cloak over shining pink-red silk sleeves, and holds a letter with a torn flap in both hands. In the address the Low German words “to lunden” and “broder to handen” can be made out, “to London” and “into the hands of the brother”. On the table stand a glass vase of carnations, a gilt drum-shaped clock and a pewter stand with gold coins, an inkwell and quills, and beside them lie scissors, a seal and a book bound in straps. From the wall and the shelves hang small scales for weighing coins, a seal on a long chain and a bunch of keys, and letters with red seals are tucked behind the battens. On the wall at the left his motto is written in white letters, “Nulla sine merore voluptas”, “No joy without sorrow”, with “G. Gysze” below it.
The portrait reached Berlin by way of the same Orléans collection in which the Leda was cut up. By 1727 it already belonged to the dukes of Orléans, and when their pictures were sold in London in 1792–1793 after the Revolution, the “Portrait of Gysset” went for 60 guineas to the Basel engraver and dealer Christian von Mechel. Solly bought it later, and in 1821 the portrait entered the gallery with his collection.
The Reichsbank's 100,000-mark note, issued on 1 February 1923, bears a medallion with Gisze's head, which the engraver Gustav Eilers made after this painting.
5. Venus — Sandro Botticelli and workshop, c. 1490
Around 1490 Botticelli had a large workshop in Florence that repeated the master's successful compositions, Madonnas and tondi, because there was a demand for them. In the museum's view, this is how this Venus came about. Her figure was taken from the Birth of Venus, now in the Uffizi, and painted on its own on canvas, without the sea, the shell and the winds. Three such versions are known, in Berlin, in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin and in a private collection in Switzerland. Berlin considers its version the best, Turin says the same of its own, and the Berlin attribution reads “Botticelli with workshop”. In the summer of 2016 the Berlin Venus, which had come to the gallery with the Solly collection in 1821, was taken to Turin and hung beside the Turin one so that the two versions could be compared side by side.
The museum writes that the goddess here has been stripped of her history, and that for the first time since antiquity a female nude seemed worthy of being painted for its erotic appeal alone. Venus stands full-length against a flat black background on a narrow grey stone ledge, in the pose of the Venus Pudica, the modest Venus known from ancient statues. With her right hand she covers her breast, and with her left she holds a thick lock of her own hair over her lap. Her head is tilted slightly, and her light brown eyes look at the viewer. Her golden-blonde hair falls in long waves on both sides of her body down to her hips, and the strands are drawn in fine strokes of gold that glint in the light. Within that mass it is easy to miss two thin braids that run down from her temples onto her breast.
6. The Fountain of Youth — Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546
The old women are brought to the bath by whatever means come to hand. In the left third of the panel they arrive in a horse-drawn cart, ride pillion behind a horseman, are lifted down from a horse, and are carried on a litter and on the back of a bearded man, and in the lower left corner a man in red pushes one along in a wheelbarrow. At the edge of the pool a man in a long red robe, with a book under his arm and spectacles on his nose, bends over a naked old woman and examines her, shading his eyes with his hand. The museum calls him a doctor who casts “one last, hopeless look” at his patient.
In the grey stone pool the women on the left are grey-haired and flabby, and as they cross the water to the right they become young, with long fair and red hair. Only women bathe. The fountain column is crowned by a small naked Venus with Cupid, so the fountain of youth, as the museum remarks, turns out to be a fountain of love as well, and the men, it adds, are rejuvenated perhaps by the company of young ladies. On the right a courtier in a light slashed costume gives his hand to a woman stepping out of the water, another woman goes into a red tent where she will be dressed, and higher up under a tree a drummer and a piper play, couples dance and a table is laid. At the bottom centre, below the edge of the pool, is a tiny winged serpent, the mark Cranach's workshop signed with, and the date 1546.
In the early 19th century the painting belonged to the Prussian kings, and the back of the panel shows numbers written in white chalk and a black stamp with the royal palace seal, “I. 659”. In 1829–1830 it was transferred from the palaces to the new museum, and it is one of the few famous paintings the gallery received from the kings.
The museum considers the painting the work of Cranach the Elder, although in the 20th century it was more than once given to his son, Lucas Cranach the Younger, who by the 1540s had become his father's partner. That is how it was labelled at the Berlin exhibition of 1937 and in Basel in 1974. The art historian Hartlaub published a small book on it in 1943 as a painting by Cranach the Elder, and in 1958 he brought out a second one, this time under the name of the Younger.
Other people's sales (1850–1874)
7. The Miraflores Altarpiece — Rogier van der Weyden, before 1445
In 1445 King Juan II of Castile gave the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores near Burgos a small altarpiece of three panels. The monastery's record of the gift is known only from the copy that Antonio Ponz published in 1783 in his Journey through Spain, and it says in Latin that the altarpiece was “painted by Master Rogel, the great and famous Fleming”. In Castile Rogel was the name for Rogier van der Weyden, the city painter of Brussels.
The three panels are the same size and rounded at the top, and each scene stands inside an arch painted as a carved portal in warm brown with small grey sculpted groups. Above each arch an angel hovers with a gold crown and a banderole bearing an inscription, and, as the museum explains, the banderoles name three virtues for which Mary receives three crowns. The left panel shows the Nativity, with Mary in a pale blue cloak kneeling before the Child and Joseph dozing on the right, his hands folded on his staff. In the centre Mary in bright red holds the dead Christ on her lap and presses her cheek to his head. On the right the risen Christ in a red cloak appears to his mother, who is in dark blue, and in the tall windows behind him he can be seen again, very small, stepping out of the tomb beside an angel and the sleeping guards. Gold letters run along the border of Mary's cloak, and the museum recognises words from the Magnificat in them.
The altarpiece stayed at Miraflores until the early 19th century and left Spain during the Napoleonic years in circumstances historians have not established. It later belonged to King Willem II of the Netherlands, and in 1842 the painter Huib van Hove put it, tiny, into a watercolour of the Gothic Hall of the royal palace in The Hague. Willem II died in 1849 with enormous debts, among them a loan of a million guilders from the Russian Tsar Nicholas I secured on his paintings, and in August 1850 his collection was sold at auction. That is where the altarpiece was bought for Berlin.
In 1853 the same Passavant declared the Berlin panels an old copy, and in 1908 the Spanish historian Gómez-Moreno published a matching altarpiece from the Royal Chapel in Granada and named it the original. For about 70 years almost everyone agreed. In 1981 infrared photography found large changes made to the Berlin panels in the course of painting, and dendrochronology showed that they could have been painted as early as the 1430s, whereas the wood for the second altarpiece was felled no earlier than the very end of the 15th century. After that the Berlin altarpiece was given back to Rogier.
The Granada altarpiece is now considered an exact copy, commissioned in the 1490s by Juan II's daughter, Queen Isabella the Catholic. Two of its panels remained in Granada, and the third later went to the Metropolitan Museum.
8. The Madonna in the Church — Jan van Eyck, c. 1437–1440
Barthold Suermondt was born in Utrecht, worked as a young man as secretary to the industrialist John Cockerill at his works in Seraing in Belgium, and after settling in Aachen owned coal, zinc and lead mines, a steelworks and a share in a bank. From the early 1850s he collected paintings, above all Dutch pictures of the 17th century. In 1873, during the stock market crash, the bank in which he had invested could not pay its debts, and Suermondt decided to sell his old masters. In the winter of 1873–1874 he exhibited most of his paintings in Brussels, and in the spring negotiations began there with the director of the Berlin picture gallery, Julius Meyer, and his assistant Wilhelm von Bode. Bode, later director of the gallery and from 1905 to 1920 director general of the Berlin museums, insisted that the collection be bought whole. In 1874 Berlin bought more than 200 of Suermondt's paintings, and on 10 March 1875 they went on show to the public.
The panel is rounded at the top, as tall as a sheet of writing paper and half as wide, and a whole Gothic cathedral fits inside it. The Virgin, in a tall gold crown set with blue and red stones, stands in the middle of the nave, too large for the building, in a red dress and a wide blue-green cloak. The Child on her arm holds the embroidered neckline of her dress with both hands. Behind her is a stone screen, and in its niche, on an altar between two burning candles, stands a small gilded statue of the Virgin and Child, which, as the museum notes, repeats the living Madonna in front of it. In the opening of the screen two angels sing from a book. Gold letters run along the hem of the red dress just above the floor, and among them “SOL” can be read clearly. To the right of her skirts two bright patches of sunlight lie on the floor tiles. The art historian Erwin Panofsky pointed out that in a church with the usual orientation the light here would be coming from the north, and he took it to be symbolic. The museum follows him and writes of an eternal light that follows neither the course of the sun nor that of the stars.
The historian Elisabeth Dhanens, a scholar of van Eyck, writes that the panel was stolen in 1877 and came back a few days later without its original frame. The frame, painted to look like stone, was never found, and its inscription is known only from older records. Around the frame ran the words “Mater hec est filia, pater hic est natus, quis audivit talia, Deus homo natus”, “This mother is the daughter, this father is born, who has heard of such things, God born a man”, and at the bottom “Flos florum appellaris”, “You are called the flower of flowers”.
9. Malle Babbe — Frans Hals, c. 1633–1635
In 17th-century Haarlem people knew a woman they called Malle Babbe, from “malle”, mad, and “Babbe”, a pet form of Barbara. In 2013 Floris Mulder of the Haarlem museum Het Dolhuys found her real name in the archives, Barbara Claes, and established that in 1646 she was placed in the city workhouse, which was at the same time an asylum for the insane, an almshouse, a prison and a house of correction. She lived there for some 15 years and died in 1663.
Hals painted her before that. The museum dates the picture to 1633–1635, a recent study moves the date to the early 1640s, and on either dating the portrait was painted before Barbara Claes was shut away.
She sits half-turned to the right, has twisted sharply round over her shoulder the other way, and laughs with her whole mouth so that her upper teeth show, her cheeks red and her eyes narrowed to slits. Hals modelled the face densely in yellow, pink and grey, dashed off the white cap and the untidy collar in quick zigzags, and painted the dress and background in broad open strokes through which the ground shows in places. In the lower left corner stands a tall pewter tankard with its lid thrown back, and on her shoulder, on the right as we look at it, sits a light brown owl staring straight at us. The museum explains the owl by the Dutch saying “drunk as an owl”. Earlier the owl was taken for a witch's companion, and for a long time the painting was called the “Witch of Haarlem”.
In 1869 the painting belonged to Suermondt, who lent it to the international exhibition in Munich, and there Gustave Courbet made a copy of it. That copy is now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In 1874 Berlin bought Malle Babbe with the rest of the Suermondt collection (that purchase is told in the entry on The Madonna in the Church).
Years after Hals painted the picture, his son and his eldest daughter were placed in the same Haarlem institution.
The museum buys from families and English houses (1884–1918)
10. Portrait of Hieronymus Holzschuher — Albrecht Dürer, 1526
The portrait is set in a frame with a sliding lid that runs in a groove between a dark inner frame and a light outer one, and when the lid is closed the face cannot be seen. At the top of the black lid the year is written in gold Roman numerals, MDXXVI, and below it, in a wreath of dark leaves, two gold shields lean towards each other under a single helmet. On the left shield is a black shoe with a wooden sole and two heels, the arms of the Holzschuher family, whose name means “wooden shoe”. On the right shield is a black column entwined by a snake, the arms of the family of Holzschuher's wife, who was born a Münzer. Above the helmet rises the bust of a Black man in a red robe and a tall red hat with a gold brim.
Under the lid a large head fills almost the whole panel. Holzschuher is turned to the left while his grey-green eyes swivel sharply to the right, which gives him a sidelong, wary look. His face is red and heavy, there is a short vertical crease between his brows, his fair, greying curls reach to his ears, and each strand is drawn as a fine light loop. His grey beard is curled so tightly that it looks woven from fine wire. On the blue-green background at the upper left, gold letters give his name, the year 1526 and his age, 57, and on the right stands Dürer's monogram.
Hieronymus Holzschuher was a Nuremberg patrician, a burgomaster and, from 1514, one of the seven men who governed the city, and Dürer, according to the museum, was his friend. Dürer painted the portrait two years before his own death.
The family kept the portrait for more than 350 years. In 1651 Sandrart, the same man who advised Giustiniani to hide the Amor behind a curtain, tried by his own account to buy it from the Holzschuhers and was refused, and in his book of 1675 he wrote that in Nuremberg it was shown “with great wonder”. Around 1812 the collector Sulpiz Boisserée took the portrait for a forgery, because Dürer's devices seemed to him packed into it too densely, and he wrote to his brother that a “first-class rogue” had been at work. Documents later confirmed that Dürer painted it. In 1884 Berlin bought the portrait from the Holzschuher family together with its lid and frame.
The museum puts the unusually good condition of the panel down to its having been kept under the lid.
11. The Mennonite Preacher Cornelis Anslo and his Wife — Rembrandt, 1641
In 1641 Rembrandt was one of the most sought-after portrait painters in Amsterdam, and he painted the wealthy cloth merchant and Mennonite preacher Cornelis Anslo together with his wife, Aaltje Schouten. The left part of the wide canvas is taken up by a table covered with a golden-yellow cloth and a red-brown carpet with a long fringe. On it a huge open book stands on a lectern, the brightest spot in the picture, a second book with dog-eared pages lies in front of it, and behind them is a candlestick with a single white candle and a pair of snuffers on its tray. Anslo, in a tall black hat and a cloak with a broad fur lining, has turned to his wife with his mouth slightly open, and he holds out his left hand towards her, palm up, with the index finger raised. According to the museum, this gesture stands at the centre of the whole composition. His wife sits on the right in profile, in a lace cap and a broad flat collar, looks at his hand and his face and holds a crumpled white handkerchief in her lap. Neither of them looks at the viewer.
In the same year Rembrandt made an etching of Anslo, and the poet Joost van den Vondel wrote a quatrain on the preacher's portrait. According to the historian Michiel Franken, there is no way of telling from the poem whether it is about the etching or the painting. Vondel addressed the artist like this: “Rembrandt, paint Cornelis's voice. The visible part is the least of him, the invisible is known only through the ears. Whoever wants to see Anslo must hear him.” The painting is often read as Rembrandt's answer to that challenge.
In 1894 Bode bought the painting for Berlin from Lord Ashburnham in London, and a year later he published it in the yearbook of the Prussian museums. The museum's report on the purchase lists it as “Cornelis Anslo consoling a widow”, the title it had been known by in England.
12. St John the Evangelist on Patmos — Hieronymus Bosch, early 1490s
Hieronymus Bosch took his surname from his home town of 's-Hertogenbosch, and in 1487–1488 he joined the small circle of sworn brothers of the Illustrious Brotherhood of Our Lady, which had its own altar in the town's church of St John. This panel is most likely one of two small outer wings that Bosch painted for that altar, and the other, St John the Baptist in Meditation, is in Madrid, in the Lázaro Galdiano Museum. The brotherhood's accounts, detailed in everything else, record no payment to Bosch. Researchers consider the signature “Jheronimus” at the lower right the earliest known signature of Bosch, and dendrochronology has shown that the panel cannot have been painted before 1491.
John, young, with long reddish-chestnut hair and a loose pink cloak, sits on a hill with an open book on his knee and his pen raised, and looks up. There, in a pale disc of sun, sit the Virgin and Child, crowned with stars, above a thin crescent moon. On the top of the hill behind John stands an angel, all in white and blue, whose wings are covered with dark “eyes” like peacock feathers. Down on the left a falcon, which Bosch put in place of John's eagle, watches over an inkpot and a pen case dropped on the ground. In the lower right corner sits a demon with a pale old man's face in round spectacles, a burning ball on his head, a round body pierced by an arrow and a lizard's tail. The museum writes that the demon wants to make off with John's inkpot and pen case, and the falcon is guarding them. Beyond the hill flows a broad river, where a ship is burning and a boat has capsized beside it, and on a headland stands a tiny wheel on a pole, a wheel for executions, according to the museum.
The back of the panel is painted too. On a black ground is a light disc, painted almost entirely in brownish grisaille, with a smaller bright circle in the middle, and together they look like an eye. In the centre, on a steep rock, a pelican spreads its wings over its young, and the museum describes how it tears open its breast with its beak to feed them with its blood. Scenes of the Passion run clockwise round the ring, from the Agony in the Garden to the Entombment, and in the black field beyond the disc demons can barely be made out.
In 1907 Berlin bought the panel from London art dealers. The Madrid wing was later cut down on all sides, thinned and reinforced at the back with a wooden cradle, and its reverse was lost.
13. The Adoration of the Magi (The Monforte Altarpiece) — Hugo van der Goes, c. 1470–1475
In 1890 the German art historian Carl Justi found a large early Netherlandish panel by an unknown painter in the Galician town of Monforte de Lemos. It stood in the church of a college founded in 1593 by Cardinal Rodrigo de Castro and run since 1873 by Piarist fathers. The panel had reached Spain in the 16th century by a route nobody knows.
In 1910 the college, with the consent of its patron, the Duke of Alba, put the panel up for sale by tender in Madrid, and an agent of the Berlin museums won it. The export dragged on for three years. In Spain a public subscription was raised to keep the painting in the country, and the painter Sorolla gave 1,000 pesetas to it, but in September 1913 the sale was declared lawful. Berlin paid about a million marks, and the gallery's curator Stephan Kemperdick calls it the highest price the Berlin collections have ever paid for a single painting. The panel reached Berlin at Christmas 1913, and on 2 January 1914 it was shown to the public for the first time.
Hugo van der Goes was a Ghent master who in the mid-1470s, at the height of his success, entered a monastery near Brussels. No documents linking this panel with his name have survived, and it is attributed to him on grounds of style. The art historian Heinrich Wölfflin is said to have thought it too late for Hugo.
On the left the old Joseph, in pink-red, kneels with a brown hat held to his chest, beside him sits Mary in a dark blue cloak, and the naked Child on her lap reaches out to the eldest king. He kneels in profile with his hands joined, in a huge red cloak, and on the floor in front of him lies his fur hat with a gold crown, and a gold vessel stands on a stone. To the right is the second king in a red beret with a crown, and at the right edge stands the Black king in a green robe and a red and gold mantle, a gold cup in his raised hand. Onlookers peer over a wooden fence, shepherds can be seen on a sunny slope through a breach in the wall, a painted jug and an earthenware bowl with a wooden spoon stand on the windowsill at the upper left, and blue irises and purple columbines grow along the bottom edge.
The wings of the altarpiece were lost even before it came to Monforte. In 1666, when a small frame holding a painting of St Francis Borgia was set on top of the Spanish retable, the central part of Hugo's panel, which rose above the rest, was sawn off flush with the frame.
14. Netherlandish Proverbs — Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559
Just left of the centre of the picture a young woman in a red dress throws a turquoise-blue hooded cloak over a stooping old man, and this is the brightest patch of colour in the whole village. To hang a blue cloak on your husband meant to deceive him, and in Antwerp the subject was known as “The Blue Cloak”. That is the caption of Frans Hogenberg's print of 1558, with the same couple in the centre. A year later Brueghel gathered more than 100 proverbs on one panel, by the museum's count, and spread them through a village seen from above, with an inn under a steep roof on the left, a pavilion with turquoise tiles in the middle, a brick tower and a bridge at the top, and the sea with a sailing ship on the right.
On the wall of the inn a blue globe hangs from a bracket with its cross pointing down, a sign of the world turned upside down, and the museum considers it the key to the whole picture. The roof of the inn is laid with round tarts instead of tiles. In the lower left corner a woman in red, one knee on a cushion, is tying up a small horned devil, a little to the right a man in a white shirt with a bib is running his head against a brick wall, and on that same wall a knight in armour is hanging a bell on a cat. Below them one man shears a sheep and another a pig, at the bottom centre a well is being filled in after a calf has already drowned in it, and further right, in a shelter, a monk ties a flax beard on a seated Christ. On top of the tower a man in red hangs a black cloak out to the wind. In the lower right corner a man stretched out on a board cannot reach from one loaf of bread to the other, that is, he cannot make ends meet, and there too, in light letters, is the inscription “BRVEGEL 1559”.
The museum bought the panel in 1914 from an English owner, while Bode was still director general of the Berlin museums.
15. Venus with the Organ Player — Titian, c. 1550–1552
Carl Moll was a Viennese painter, one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, from 1904 the artistic director of the Galerie Miethke, and later a dealer in old masters for wealthy clients. During the First World War Titian's Venus with the Organ Player came to Berlin through him, and the buyer, for the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, which had opened in 1904 and is now called the Bode-Museum, was Wilhelm von Bode himself. The museum writes that the painting shares its history of ownership with the Venus and the Lute Player in New York: both belonged to the Pio di Savoia, princes in Rome.
Titian painted the reclining Venus with a musician several times, for different patrons and with the help of his workshop, and the museum places the Berlin version among the pictures made after his second journey to the court of the Emperor Charles V in Augsburg in 1550–1551. Venus lies full-length on dark red velvet, from the middle of the canvas to its right edge, with a transparent veil over her hips, a pearl earring, a thin gold chain on her breast and bracelets on both arms. On the left the organist, a young man in a dark red velvet doublet, sits with his back to us and has twisted round on the bench so far to look at her that neither his hands nor the keyboard can be seen. Her bare right foot rests against his thigh. Behind her shoulder Cupid presses his face to her cheek and lays a hand on her breast, while her eyes slide down and to the left, away from Cupid. In the lower right corner a shaggy little white dog with its mouth open looks at the viewer, at the upper left the silver pipes of the organ gleam, and beyond the parapet stretch brown hills where a white horse pulls a tiny cart.
The historian Charles Hope considered the Berlin painting a weak product of the workshop, and in reply the museum points to the quality of the painting and to the artist's own corrections in the figure of the organist.
In the two versions of this composition in the Prado the organist is playing, and one of them has the dog and no Cupid, while the other has Cupid and no dog. The Berlin canvas has both Cupid and the dog.
Spring 1945
16. Woman with a Pearl Necklace — Johannes Vermeer, c. 1663–1665
The order to pack 202 paintings from the Berlin museums and ship them to the United States “for safekeeping” reached Captain Walter Farmer of the US Army, head of the Central Collecting Point in Wiesbaden, on 6 November 1945. In the spring of 1945 the gallery's smaller paintings had been taken out of Berlin to mines, among them the Kaiseroda potash mine at Merkers in Thuringia, where the US Third Army found them in April, and from there they were moved to Wiesbaden. Officers of the American service for the protection of monuments answered with a protest that became known as the Wiesbaden Manifesto. It said that “no historical grievance will rankle so long … as the removal for any reason of a part of the heritage of any nation”.
The Vermeer was among the 202. On the left of the picture is a dark mass, a tall black-blue lidded vase, a table and a dark blue cloth heaped on it, on the right a young woman in profile, and between them an empty light wall lit from a window in the upper left corner. The pearl necklace is already round her neck, and she holds the ends of its yellow ribbons at the level of her throat, one at her chin, the other in her raised hand, and looks to the left, towards the window and a small mirror in a dark frame that is seen almost edge-on. She wears a short yellow satin jacket trimmed with white fur and black ermine tails, a pearl earring and a red bow in her hair. In the 19th century the painting belonged to the critic Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who rediscovered Vermeer for the public, and then to Suermondt, and in 1874 it came to Berlin with his collection (that purchase is told in the entry on The Madonna in the Church).
On 6 December 1945 the ship carrying the paintings passed the Statue of Liberty, and for more than two years they lay in storage at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In the spring of 1948 the gallery showed them to the public, and in 40 days almost 965,000 people visited the exhibition. The paintings then toured 13 more American cities, where about two and a half million people saw them in all, and in 1949 they returned to Wiesbaden. After that the Vermeer went on to exhibitions in Amsterdam in 1950 and in Paris in 1951, and it came back to West Berlin only in 1956.
17. Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter — Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1613–1615
Around 1613–1615 Jan Brueghel the Elder, a close friend of Rubens, commissioned a painting from him for the tomb of his parents, Pieter Brueghel and his wife, in the Brussels church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle, where the painter had been buried in 1569. St Peter was Pieter Brueghel's patron saint, and Rubens painted Christ handing Peter the keys.
On the left stands Christ, bare to the waist, with thin golden rays round his head, and a bright red cloak falls in large folds from his far shoulder right down to the bottom of the panel. He has raised one hand high with the palm open towards us, and with the other he holds out two keys downwards, one gold and one silver. The old Peter, bald and white-bearded, in a heavy golden-yellow cloak, bends towards him and takes the keys by their rings into his upturned palm. Behind Peter the heads of four apostles are crowded together, and a grey-bearded old man among them looks straight at the viewer with wide-open eyes.
In 1765 the church council sold the panel to a buyer in Amsterdam on condition that he pay for a copy for the tomb. The painting passed through several owners and in the 20th century came to the Munich collector Marczell von Nemes, who died in debt in 1930. After that it was with the Dresdner Bank, among the works the bank held as collateral for loans. On 15 August 1935 Prussia bought about 4,400 works from the bank for 7.5 million Reichsmarks, and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation calls this the largest art deal of the Nazi years.
In May 1945 ten of Berlin's paintings by Rubens burnt in the flak tower at Friedrichshain. After the war about two thirds of the collection ended up in the West and was shown at Dahlem, a district of West Berlin. The Soviet Union kept the rest until 1958, in the autumn of that year about 200 paintings were returned to East Berlin, and from the 1960s they were shown in the Bode-Museum. This panel by Rubens belonged to the eastern part. On 12 June 1998 the two parts came together in the new building at the Kulturforum, designed by the architects Hilmer and Sattler, and the gallery's former director Jan Kelch recalled that the large paintings from the Bode-Museum made the war losses a little easier to bear there, in precisely the large formats.
Among them Kelch named Cranach's Last Judgement, Paris Bordone's Madonna Enthroned, this panel by Rubens and Gainsborough's life-size portrait of John Wilkinson.
18. The Dance (Iris) — Antoine Watteau, c. 1718–1721
On 14 October 1941 the former Crown Prince Wilhelm wrote that he was glad to hand a painting by Watteau over to the Führer at the estimated value of 900,000 Reichsmarks. Four months earlier his father, the former Emperor Wilhelm II, had died in exile at Doorn in the Netherlands, and the painting, which was at Doorn too, had passed to the son. The negotiations were conducted by Hans Posse, director of the Dresden gallery and Hitler's special commissioner for the museum in Linz, the Berlin dealer Karl Haberstock acted as go-between, and in December 1941 the Hohenzollern property administration approved the deal. According to Posse's diary, the painting arrived at Dresden's main station on 13 February 1942, twelve hours late.
Before that, The Dance had belonged to the Hohenzollerns for more than a century and a half. According to the record of the federal agency that now administers the painting, it was bought for Frederick the Great in Amsterdam in 1766, when the collector Gerrit Braamcamp sold part of his collection, and the first reliable mention of it is in the 1802 inventory of the estate of Frederick's brother, Prince Henry. After 1918 it stayed with the family.
On the right, alone on an open meadow, stands little Iris in a long dress with pink and green stripes and a white apron, with a yellow bow and pink flowers in her high hairstyle, and she looks at the viewer with a slight smile. On the left, in the shade of a big tree, sit three children in shepherds' costume, a boy in a red jacket with a long shepherd's crook, a girl looking at Iris, and a boy in lilac-grey playing a small flute. By his foot a white dog in a copper collar is asleep, behind it stands a basket of roses, and in the lower left corner, on a pink cloth, lie an ornate silvery object with scrollwork and an arrow. The museum reads the arrow and the roses as love and heartache, and as a hint that the girl will soon outgrow children's games. The name “Iris” comes from the verses under Charles Nicolas Cochin's engraving of the painting, which begin with her name.
After the purchase the painting was sent to Munich, in 1944 it was evacuated to a salt mine in Austria, and in 1945 American troops found it and handed it over to the Central Collecting Point in Munich. In 1960 it became the property of the Federal Republic of Germany under Article 134 of the Basic Law, and the gallery received it from the federal government on permanent loan. The federal agency writes that a seizure of the painting from owners persecuted by the Nazis can be ruled out.
The painting's Berlin inventory number, Mü.3644, repeats its number at the Munich collecting point.
19. Saint Matthew and the Angel (first version) — Caravaggio, 1602
Bellori, a biographer of artists, was writing 70 years after the events. According to him, the priests of San Luigi dei Francesi took this painting down from the altar of the Contarelli Chapel because the figure had neither decorum nor the look of a saint, with Matthew sitting cross-legged and his feet rudely thrust out at the people. Caravaggio was in despair, and then the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani took the painting for himself and had him paint another. The museum adds that Giustiniani bought it from the priests on condition that Caravaggio paint a second version. In 2017 a group of Italian researchers suggested that the painting was never meant for the chapel at all and that Giustiniani had commissioned it for his own rooms from the start, because it is almost square and much shorter than the second version.
The painting survives only in a black-and-white photograph. The old, bald Matthew, with a deeply furrowed brow and a dark beard, sits on a folding stool with his legs crossed and holds a huge open book on his thigh, and the foot of his raised leg turns its sole straight towards the viewer. A curly-haired angel in a thin, clinging white garment leans against his shoulder, its cheek almost touching his temple, and with a small hand guides Matthew's hand holding the pen. On the page turned towards the viewer are four lines of Hebrew letters, and the museum explains them by the fact that Matthew, as early sources report, wrote his Gospel in Hebrew.
In 1815 the painting came to Berlin with the Giustiniani collection. When the gallery's paintings were sent to the mines in the spring of 1945, about 430 large canvases would not fit down the shafts and stayed in the flak tower in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, and this canvas, taller than a man, was among them. On 2 May 1945 the tower was surrendered to the Red Army, and in May two fires broke out in it, on 6 May and between 14 and 18 May, both after Berlin had capitulated. The museum writes that the painting was “probably” destroyed in May 1945 in the fire-control tower, and nobody has established which of the fires destroyed it or how they started. The historian Günther Wermusch believed that the paintings in the tower were looted. Two more paintings by Caravaggio from the Giustiniani collection, the Portrait of a Courtesan and Christ on the Mount of Olives, were in all likelihood lost in the same tower, together with Signorelli's School of Pan.
The photograph was taken by the museum photographer Gustav Schwarz, who from 1925 to 1944 photographed the whole gallery on glass negatives, and the negatives survived the war in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. In 2026 the museum re-photographed about 430 of these negatives, and the picture of Matthew went into its online collection.
The museum takes a picture away from Rembrandt (1985–1998)
20. The Man with the Golden Helmet — Circle of Rembrandt, c. 1650–1660
In November 1985 Jan Kelch, curator of Dutch and Flemish painting at the Gemäldegalerie, announced that the gallery's most famous “Rembrandt” had been painted by another artist. Kelch worked together with the Rembrandt Research Project, founded in 1968, and in 1986 the attribution was officially withdrawn. Kelch said that the painting was no fake and remained a great, masterly work.
In 1897 the picture was bought as a Rembrandt from the London firm of Colnaghi by the Kaiser Friedrich Museum Association, founded that same year, on Bode's initiative. The Association still owns it, along with about 110 other paintings that it lends to the gallery. For a long time the sitter was thought to be Adriaen, Rembrandt's brother, and under that caption the picture toured America in 1948–1949 as one of the 202, until the idea was abandoned. In West Berlin, at Dahlem, it became the most famous “Rembrandt” in Germany.
The tall rounded helmet with its sharp crest and broad downturned brim is painted in thick, raised paint, with scrolls standing out from it, a cartouche with a small bearded mask and a row of rivets round the rim. The face under the helmet is painted thinly and smoothly, the weave of the canvas shows through the paint, the eyes are lowered and almost closed, and the forehead lies in the shadow of the brim. Light falls on both the helmet and the face from the upper left, yet the helmet is lit far more brightly. As the newspaper Tagesspiegel reported in 1998, the 1986 documentation described this difference as if the helmet and the face were lit by two different sources. The same documentation noted that the paint on the helmet lies thicker than anywhere else in the picture, and neutron autoradiography showed that the preparatory layer consists of a few simple strokes.
In 1998 the painting moved to the new building at the Kulturforum labelled “Circle of Rembrandt”, and the Association and the museum went on showing it together.
On the backs of Malle Babbe and the Holzschuher portrait are tacked identical American labels with the owner's name, “Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin”, the artist's name, the title and the line “National Gallery of Art”. The label on Malle Babbe calls the painting “Hille Bobbe”, the name it was known by in the 19th century.
What else to see
Besides the Anslo, the gallery holds Rembrandt's Moses with the Tablets of the Law from the royal collection, his Self-Portrait with Velvet Beret and his Susanna. The gallery's second Vermeer, The Wine Glass, came in 1901 with the Hope collection. Of the several Madonnas by Raphael, the Terranuova Madonna was bought in 1845 by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Among the Italians of the 15th century, Mantegna's Presentation at the Temple, Giovanni Bellini's Dead Christ and the panels by Masaccio are worth seeking out, among them panels from the predella of the Pisa Polyptych and a painted birth tray. Giotto's Dormition of the Virgin was bought by Bode in 1914, his last purchase of Italian painting of the 14th century, and after the war it too went through the mine and America and came back in 1950.
