Bode Museum

Listen for a moment. The river Spree runs on both sides of you here, and its water slaps softly against the stone embankment. Above you rises a great rounded front of pale sandstone, topped by a dark green copper dome. The building seems to sit in the water like the bow of a ship. You are standing at the northern tip of Museum Island, in the heart of Berlin.

This is the Bode Museum. Its shape is not an accident. The island narrows to a point here, and the architect had to fit a large museum onto a triangle of land between two arms of the river. His answer was a curved front that follows the shoreline. From the bridges nearby, the dome and the rounded facade look as if they grow straight out of the water.

The architect was Ernst von Ihne, who designed buildings for the Prussian court. Construction ran from 1897 to 1904. When the doors first opened, the building did not carry its current name. It was the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, named after Emperor Frederick the Third, who ruled for only ninety-nine days before his death in 1888. His widow and his son both supported the idea of a museum in his memory.

The real driving force, however, was a scholar named Wilhelm von Bode. He was a curator and later the director of the Berlin museums, and he was famous across Europe for his eye. Bode had a clear idea. He did not want paintings in one room and sculpture in another, like objects in a warehouse. He wanted art from the same period shown together, in rooms that felt like the places where the art first lived.

That idea changed how many museums thought about display. Walk through these galleries and you will see it. Renaissance sculpture sits near carved wooden ceilings and old furniture. Altarpieces stand in spaces with the proportions of chapels. Bode wanted the visitor to feel the atmosphere of a Florentine palace or a Venetian church, not only to read a label. In 1956, the museum was renamed in his honour.

Now, step inside to the great domed entrance hall. In the centre stands a bronze rider on a powerful horse. This is the Great Elector, Frederick William, the seventeenth century ruler who built up the state that later became Prussia. Here is the first surprise. The statue is a copy. The original, made by the sculptor Andreas Schlüter, stands in front of Charlottenburg Palace in the west of the city.

Beyond the entrance, look for the long hall known as the basilica. A basilica is an early church form with a high central space and side aisles. This one was built to suggest an Italian Renaissance church. Along its walls you can see altarpieces and glazed terracotta reliefs in white and soft blue. Many of these come from the workshop of the della Robbia family in Florence, who made this bright, shining clay work famous.

Today the building holds three main collections. The largest is the sculpture collection, with works from the early Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Then there is the Museum of Byzantine Art. Byzantium was the eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, and its art includes ivories, icons, and early Christian carvings. The third collection is the coin cabinet, one of the largest collections of coins and medals in the world.

The coin cabinet leads to the second surprise. In March 2017, thieves broke into the museum at night. They took a giant Canadian gold coin called the Big Maple Leaf. It weighed about one hundred kilograms and was on loan to the museum. The thieves used a ladder from the nearby railway line, entered through a window, and pushed the coin away in a wheelbarrow. Investigators believe it was cut up and sold. It has never been found.

The twentieth century was hard on this building. During the Second World War, the museum was damaged by bombing. Many works were moved to safety in bunkers across the city. Some of these hiding places did not protect them. In 1945, fires broke out in the great flak tower in Friedrichshain, and a large number of sculptures and paintings stored there were destroyed or badly damaged. Some damaged fragments survive in the collection today.

After the war, Museum Island lay in East Berlin, under the government of the German Democratic Republic. The building reopened in stages, but full repair took decades. After German reunification, a major restoration began. The museum reopened in 2006 with its rooms restored and its collections brought back together. In 1999, the whole of Museum Island became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognised as a unique group of museum buildings.

As you walk through, notice the pace of the place. It is often quieter than its famous neighbours, like the Pergamon Museum. Light falls from high windows onto marble and wood. Footsteps echo on the stone floors. You can stand alone in front of a medieval Madonna and hear nothing but the distant rumble of the city trains that cross the island just south of the museum on their old brick viaduct.

When you leave, pause on the bridge outside and turn back to look. See how the dome sits above the curve of the river, and how the stone changes colour as clouds move across the sky. Watch the water moving below. Behind those walls, saints, emperors, and coins from many centuries rest in the half light. And outside, Berlin keeps moving, just as it always has, around this quiet point of stone.