Altes Museum

Stand on the wide lawn of the Lustgarten and look north. A long wall of pale columns rises above a broad flight of steps. Behind you, traffic hums along the boulevard. Pigeons settle on the grass. Ahead, the building is calm and almost severe, a straight horizontal line against the Berlin sky. This is the Altes Museum, the Old Museum, and it was the first building on what we now call Museum Island.

Count the columns as your eye moves across the front. There are eighteen of them, slender and fluted, topped with Ionic capitals. Ionic is one of the classical Greek orders, and you can recognise it by the soft spiral scrolls at the top of each column. There is no grand central doorway pushing forward, no dome bursting through the roofline. The whole façade is one long, even rhythm, like a temple laid on its side along the edge of a square.

The architect was Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the most influential builder in Prussia in the early nineteenth century. He designed the museum in the 1820s, and it opened to the public in 1830. At that time it had a different name. It was the Royal Museum, commissioned under King Frederick William the Third. Only later, when a second museum rose just behind it, did people begin calling this one the Old Museum. The name stuck, and it is still used today.

Think about what that opening meant. Before this period, great art collections in German lands usually belonged to princes. They hung in palaces, and ordinary people saw them only by permission. This building was different. It was planned from the start as a public museum, a place where citizens could walk in and learn from ancient art. Schinkel and his circle believed that looking at beautiful objects could educate and improve people. The building itself carries that idea in stone.

Lift your eyes to the band of lettering above the columns. It is written in Latin and names King Frederick William the Third. The inscription dedicates the museum to the study of antiquity of every kind and to the liberal arts. Here is a small detail many visitors miss — the inscription ends with a date in Roman numerals. That date marks a year during construction, not the opening. The words went up before the doors were ready.

Now consider the ground under your feet. This part of the island was once low and wet, crossed by water. Building here was not simple. The heavy stone museum needed firm support, so its foundations rest on a large number of wooden piles driven deep into the soft soil. You cannot see them, of course. But it is worth knowing that this calm, solid-looking building stands on a forest of timber hidden below the steps.

Before you climb those steps, look at the enormous stone bowl on the lawn in front of the museum. It is carved from a single block of polished granite, cut from a huge glacial boulder found outside Berlin. The bowl was finished in the early nineteenth century and was first meant to stand inside the museum. It turned out to be too large for the space. So it was placed outside instead, where it has stayed. Locals sometimes call it the soup bowl of Berlin.

On either side of the staircase, two bronze riders guard the entrance. One shows an Amazon, a warrior woman from Greek myth, on horseback, fighting off a leaping panther. The other shows a mounted man raising a weapon against a lion. Both sculptures were added in the middle of the nineteenth century. They bring energy and violence to a building that is otherwise very still. Walk around them slowly. The muscles of the animals and the twist of the riders are worth a close look.

When you reach the top of the stairs, turn around. Schinkel designed an open stair hall behind the columns, so visitors could pause here and look back at the city. From this spot you can see the Lustgarten spread below you. To your left, the great green dome of Berlin Cathedral rises. Straight ahead, across the square, stands the rebuilt form of the old royal palace. Schinkel placed his museum to face that palace directly. Art and power looked at each other across one open square.

Inside, the heart of the building is the rotunda. It is a tall round hall under a coffered dome, lit from an opening at the top. Schinkel took his inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome, the ancient temple famous for its round interior and its central eye of light. Around the walls stand classical statues of gods and heroes. A ring of columns supports a gallery above. Many visitors stop here and simply look up for a while. The hall was designed to quiet you before you meet the collection.

Today the museum holds a large part of Berlin's collection of classical antiquities. You will find Greek, Etruscan and Roman objects — marble sculpture, bronzes, painted vases, jewellery, coins and portrait heads. The Etruscans were a people of central Italy who flourished before Rome came to dominate the region. Take your time with the smaller pieces. Look at the fine drawing on the painted pottery, and at the faces of Roman portraits. Some of them look surprisingly like people you might pass on the street outside.

The building has survived hard times. During the Second World War, bombing and fire caused heavy damage to the museum and much of Museum Island. After the war, this area lay in East Berlin, and the museum was restored during the years of the German Democratic Republic. It reopened in the 1960s. In 1999, Museum Island as a whole was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The listing recognises the island as a rare ensemble of museums built over about a century.

As you leave, walk back down the steps and stand once more beside the granite bowl. Look at the long line of columns again. You now know what lies behind them — the round hall, the ancient faces, the wooden piles deep in the earth. Listen to the city around you, the trams and voices and footsteps on the paving. Then glance at the other museums nearby. Every one of them followed the path that this quiet colonnade opened first.