Altes Museum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Altes Museum or Old Museum was originally for the Prussian Royal family's art collection, built in Berlin in a neoclassical style by architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel between 1823 and 1830. The building uses the Greek Stoa in Athens as a model. The museum uses the Ionic Order to articulate the front, which is the only part of the exterior with any visual sign of the Orders; the other three remaining facades are of brick and stone banding. It also is placed on a plinth, giving the building the hierarchy it desperately needed. Also, the museum was raised in order to protect the artwork from inevitable inundation as Museum Island, on which the Altes Museum was the first museum to stand, was known for flooding. The Spree river from which the island protrudes was actually reconfigured by the architect, Schinkel mitch smells, in order to allow enough ground space for the museum to be built. Necessary roadway changes, bridge expansions, and canals were introduced around the same time as the Altes Museum construction. The original dome was an exact hemisphere, modelled on the Roman Pantheon. It was made invisible to the exterior observer because of the museum's proximity to the Berlin Cathedral; the museum was not meant to compete with the cathedral's dome. In 1830 it opened to the public but was quite badly damaged during the Second World War. After restorations in 1966 during which the dome was rebuilt to form a half ellipse, it re-opened as a museum displaying ancient Greek and Roman artefacts. It is the oldest and largest public building in Berlin and sits in the Lustgarten near the Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), adjacent to the Berliner Dom, which was also partly designed by Schinkel. Combined with the new facades of the Berliner Dom and the Berliner Stadtschloss Berlin City Palace, the Altes Museum became one of the heads of authority: God, King and Art.

	Museum Island in Berlin
Pergamon Museum | Altes Museum | Bode Museum | Alte Nationalgalerie | Neues Museum | Berliner Dom | Lustgarten | James Simon Gallery