The Berlin Picture Gallery, or Picture gallery, is an art museum where the main selection of paintings belonging to the museums of the state of Berlin is on display. It contains one of the world's most important collections of European paintings from the 13th to the 18th century.
Here are exhibited masterpieces by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer.
The Gemäldegalerie was inaugurated in 1830 while the current building was only completed in 1998. It is located in the museum district Cultural forum, west of Potsdamer Platz.
The collection
The Gemäldegalerie prides itself on its scientific methodology for collecting and displaying art. Each room can be considered as a single exhibition of one or more artists of a certain period of time and of a certain style.
La German collection it is the most beautiful and the most complete in the world, comparable only to those of Vienna and Munich. Other particularly noteworthy rooms are the Rembrandt's octagonal room and a room that contains five different Madonnas by Raphael.
The building
La Berlin Picture Gallery is located in the southwest corner of the Kulturforum, a modern-style answer to the classic Museumsinsel, the Museum Island. The gallery was designed by architects Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler and the building consists of 72 rooms.
Al upper floor, where most of the works are exhibited, the rooms flow around a large central hall, known as "meditation room". The room is largely empty, it was in fact designed to allow easy passage between the rooms.
History
Unlike many major national European collections, with the exception of the National Gallery in London, the Gemäldegalerie of Berlin it is not essentially formed around the former dynastic royal collection, but was created by a process of acquisition by the Prussian government starting in 1815. Since its inception the museum has been designed to reflect the full range of art European, giving a different accent to that of older royal collections, including the Royal collection of Saxony.
La Berlin Picture Gallery it was moved in 1904 to the current building of the Bode Museum; in the following years the collection was sorted several times also among other museums in Berlin. Then when the Bode building was destroyed during the bombing of the Second World War, more than 400 paintings were destroyed.
During the years of the Berlin Wall, the collection was divided between the two parts of the city East and West, only to be reunited in the early 90s in the current building.
Useful Information
La Berlin Picture Gallery it is closed on Monday, while it observes a timetable from 10.00 to 18.00 all the remaining days, with opening until 20.00 on Thursday evening.
The closest U-bahn and S-bahn stop is Potsdamer Platz, on lines U2 and S1, S2 and S25 respectively. To get to the Pinacoteca you can also take tram M to Potsdamer Platz, depending on where you come from, there are different lines serving the area.
