Puerta entre las rocas

This one was painted for a banker. Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener had it from Schinkel in 1818 as the companion to a landscape made for him the year before, and it hung in a Berlin house for the next four decades. In his will Wagener left his 262 pictures to the Prussian crown on the condition that they be used to start a national gallery, and when he died in 1861 the state took the offer and opened one within weeks. That collection is the seed of the museum this painting hangs in now. The scenery is not German. Schinkel worked it up from what he had seen crossing Friuli, in the north-east corner of Italy, on his first journey south more than a decade earlier, and he staged it in layers the way a theatre designer would, a rock arch in front, a gorge dropping away, a castle on a far peak in the evening light. Under the arch a monk kneels at a bell hung in a crack in the rock.