Picture gallery (Sanssouci)

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Picture gallery Sanssouci

The picture gallery in the park of the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam was built under King Friedrich II between 1755 and 1764. Its builder was Johann Gottfried Büring . It is located east of the castle and is the oldest preserved princely museum building in Germany . It forms the counterpart to the New Chambers on the west side of Sanssouci Palace.

history

The gallery room

Frederick the Great was a passionate collector of paintings. In his younger years he preferred contemporary French Rococo art . Pictures by his favorite painter Antoine Watteau adorned the rooms of his Sanssouci Palace.

After his accession to the throne in 1740, the king attached increasing importance to historical painting , which at that time was at the top of the hierarchy of image genres. They were works of the High Renaissance , Mannerism and Baroque , mainly by Italian and Flemish artists.

When the Altes Museum opened in Berlin in 1829 , around fifty pictures were given there, including a. the Leda by Correggio , three paintings by Rembrandt , some by Rubens , Anton van Dyck , Watteau and all marble sculptures.

In 1929/1930 the picture gallery was set up again and 120 of the 159 pictures listed in the catalog came back from Friedrich's acquisitions in Berlin.

During the Second World War , all the paintings were brought to Rheinsberg Palace in 1942 , of which only ten returned to Potsdam in 1946. Many pictures were lost. It was not until 1958 that a large part of the paintings captured by the Soviet Union came back to Germany. A number have remained in Russian collections to this day.

Exterior design of the building

Before that, there was a greenhouse in the place of the picture gallery, in which Frederick the Great let tropical fruits grow. Büring, who together with Jan Bouman was the head of the royal building authority and who oversaw many of the buildings designed by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff , replaced the greenhouse with an elongated, single-storey building painted in yellow, following precise instructions from Frederick the Great. For this purpose, he was guided by the New Chambers , built by Knobelsdorff west of Sanssouci , which together form a three-part building ensemble. The middle part of the picture gallery is emphasized by a dome with a group of eagles and snakes fighting by Benjamin Giese and Friedrich Jury. Based on Friedrich Christian Glume's crowning of the central risalit of the New Chambers, Benjamin Giese and Peter Benkert created a cartouche with the sun, putti, female figures with palette, bust and globe as allegories of art and science (left) and a descriptive plaque as allegory of poetry or historiography (right) made of sandstone . In the west, the king was able to get to his gallery via a staircase from the top terrace of Sanssouci by the shortest route. On the north side there is a corridor through which the northern picture wall could already be tempered during the time of Frederick the Great. On the garden side, between the floor-to-ceiling windows, there are 18 marble statues, most of which were made by the sculptors Johann Gottlieb Heymüller and Johann Peter Benkert . The sculptures are allegorical figures of the arts and sciences. The keystone heads above the long windows show portraits of artists.

Gallery inside

The magnificent design of the gallery room impresses with the richly gilded ornamentation on the slightly vaulted ceiling. The color of the floor is matched with a diamond pattern made of white and yellow marble of Italian origin. On the green-painted walls, the baroque-style paintings hang close to one another and on top of one another in gilded frames. Among many others the works The incredulous Thomas by the Italian Caravaggio , Anton van Dyck's Pentecost and from the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens The four Evangelists and St. Jerome . To the east, the elongated gallery hall is adjoined by the cabinet for small signs for small-format paintings, which is similarly richly furnished.

  • Peter Paul Rubens: Saint Jerome

  • Peter Paul Rubens: The four evangelists

  • Caravaggio: The incredulous Thomas

Use by Friedrich II.

The picture gallery in a pen drawing by Adolf Menzel (1856), with Friedrich as staffage and two of his greyhounds

Even before the construction of the gallery began, Friedrich began collecting the future exhibits. Art agents buy for the king all over Europe, especially in Paris, Amsterdam and Rome, works by Italian and Dutch masters of the Renaissance and Baroque were acquired. These had larger formats than the previously preferred French pictures with mostly Arcadian themes based on the fashion of the 18th century. When furnishing the picture gallery, Frederick II attached great importance to a representative collection on a par with the collections of other absolute rulers.

"... pretty large gallery paintings, but not dog-fictional saints that torture them, but pieces from fable or history."

In 1755 the collection consisted of almost 100 paintings bought for the picture gallery, as he wrote to his sister Wilhelmine in Bayreuth. In 1757, the “gallery inspector” Matthias Oesterreich, appointed from Dresden, published a catalog describing 146 exhibits. The second edition of the catalog lists 65 Italians, 96 Flemings and Dutch and seven French. However, some attributions had to be corrected later, taking into account more recent research.

In 1761 the Marquis d'Argens wrote to Frederick II in the camp:

“As far as the gallery is concerned, it is indisputably the most beautiful in the world after St. Peter in Rome . My surprise was extraordinary, and I would never have believed that this gallery would do half the impact it produces. It is now completely finished ... "

A later visitor wrote:

“Frederick the Great used to go there at eleven o'clock and stay there for an hour. Usually the gallery overseer would accompany him; but sometimes he slammed the door behind him as soon as he entered and was left alone. This happened when resentment clouded his forehead; but he never returned from this room other than with a cheerful eye and a benevolent expression. Here, among the masterpieces of art, he forgot his worries; and who could not forget them in these halls, where only the feeling is lifted but not depressed by any sad objects. It is really striking that in the whole gallery one finds neither battalions, nor martyr stories, nor any other subject that could bring forth a dull memory in us. At eleven o'clock in the afternoon Friedrich went to this gallery in order to forget his regent worries while looking at the art, and if an illness did not throw him on his bed, one could certainly count on him never missing this hour. "

Visitors could let the overseer guide them through the gallery. The park was open to all visitors and the rooms of the castle itself were made accessible to visitors when the king was not present.

exhibition

  • 2013: The most beautiful in the world. A re-encounter with the picture gallery of Frederick the Great. Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam. Catalog.

literature

  • Alexandra Nina Bauer: The most beautiful in the world. A re-encounter with the picture gallery of Frederick the Great. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin / Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-422-07184-1 .
  • Tobias Locker: The picture gallery of Sanssouci near Potsdam . In: Bénédicte Savoy (ed.): Temple of Art. The birth of the public museum in Germany 1701–1815 . Böhlau, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-496-01425-6 , pp. 349–384 ( online 1st edition)
  • Foundation Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg (Ed.): The picture gallery in Sanssouci. Building, collection, restoration, commemorative publication for the reopening in 1996 . Skira Editore, Milan 1996, ISBN 88-8118-128-2 .
  • Foundation Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg (Ed.): The picture gallery of Frederick the Great. History - context - meaning. Schnell and Steiner, Regensburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-7954-2958-4 .
  • Barbara Spindler, The Picture Gallery. A royal museum in Sanssouci Park, Prestel 2003, ISBN 3-7913-2895-6
  • Gert Streidt, Klaus Frahm: Potsdam. The castles and gardens of the Hohenzollern. Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-89508-238-4 .

Web links

Commons : Picture Gallery (Sanssouci)  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Astrid Nettling: The "Unbeliever Thomas" by Caravaggio. Deutschlandfunk , April 4, 2016.
  2. ↑ Tobias Locker: The picture gallery of Sanssouci near Potsdam . In: Bénédicte Savoy (ed.): Temple of Art. The birth of the public museum in Germany 1701–1815 . 2015, p. 362
  3. ↑ Götz Eckardt: The paintings in the picture gallery of Sanssouci . State Palaces and Gardens Potsdam-Sanssouci, 1975, p. 6 f.
  4. ^ Gerhard Büchner, Georg Dittrich: Rheinsberg and Sanssouci. Conviviality and friendship . Georg Kummer's Verlag, Leipzig 1931, p. 298
  5. ↑ Anton Zailonow, Russian writer, 1806. In: Potsdam in old and new descriptions . Selected by Inge Hoeftmann and Waltraud Noack. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1992, p. 143

Coordinates: 52 ° 24 ′ 13.8 ″  N , 13 ° 2 ′ 27.6 ″  E