The Lost Museum

The picture is one of the icons of the Kaiser-Friedrich- Museum. For one, we know that it was painted for one of the key figures of the Renaissance, Lorenzo de Medici, called The Magnificent, ruler of Florence. For another thing, it was a thoroughly magnificent yet puzzling picture, the meaning of which is difficult to interpret. It was a painting that one could return to a hundred times and discover something new every time.

Pan is the god of music. Here he sits surrounded by various naked figures. The younger ones play music, the older ones listen.

Probably the size of the picture was the reason it was destroyed. The Pan by Signorelli was so important that it was one of the first pieces that should have been evacuated from the Friedrichshain flak tower to Thuringia in March 1945. However, the pit cages in the Kaiseroda mine were too small for such large-format paintings, like many of the works shown here as reproductions. Luckily, one of the few colour photographs from before the war is of this painting.

The perspective and the portal direct the gaze of the viewer through the garden into the distance. The open garden is a metaphor for the conception of Jesus, since a virgin’s womb is compared to a “closed garden” in medieval theology.

The 1910 guidebook of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum states: “Tintoretto goes to extremes in his compositions with exaggerated movements, lurid lighting effects and heroic figures dramatically foreshortened. Despite such exaggeration, bravado and absence of deeper sentiments, he frequently achieves a powerful expression.”

Tintoretto seems to be a rather unsettled temperament; he worked out much, if not everything, idiosyncratically from his imagination. He was an excellent draftsman, whose font of inspiration lay not only in Venice. He familiarized himself with the works of Michelangelo and many other artists.

This Pictures shows the presentation of the Annunciation by Tintoretto in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in 1917. Presumed burnt in 1945.

Wilhelm von Bode considered this refined sculpture an early work by Michelangelo, for whom the execution of a young John the Baptist is documented. However, an attribution to one of the Pieratti brothers was already suggested in 1910. Moreover, the figure, which is holding a honeycomb, may not represent John the Baptist, but Aristaios, the Greek god of apiary.

Volker Krahn: “The dream of every museum curator is certainly the acquisition of a work by Michelangelo. In 1875 the attribution of a marble figure of John the Baptist made headlines, since this work, which at the time was in a private collection in Pisa, was attributed to Michelangelo. Wilhelm von Bode was also confident of this attribution. However, because there was some dissention during consultation over Michelangelo’s authorship of the work at a Michelangelo conference in 1875, the Italian government passed on a possible acquisition, so the statue could be exported and acquired for the Berlin Museums. When the Kaiser-Friedrich- Museum, today the Bode Museum, opened in 1904, the sculpture was prominently displayed. There was a gallery with the works of the Florentine High Renaissance in which it was centrally presented on a wall. Even during Bode’s lifetime, not only was the authorship of Michelangelo called into question, but the figure was also considered a work of a later era. Today it is thought highly probable that the work was produced in the first half of the 17th century by the sculptor Domenico Pieratti, who was active in Florence. Even as a work by this sculptor, this marble figure, which has been missing since 1945, would certainly be an important work in the Berlin collection.”

Of the paintings by Rubens and his pupils visible here, all except two portraits by Van Dyck are presumed to have been destroyed by fire in the Friedrichshain bunker in 1945.

On the walls one can see Rubens’ Coronation of the Virgin, the River God, the Raising of Lazarus, the Penitent Magdalene, the monumental Diana Huntress; paintings by Van Dyck also include the lost Lamentation.