Bode Museum Article Review

Presentation:

Bode Museum was originally named “Kaiser-Friedrich Museum” after the Emperor Friedrich III. Later, in 1956, the museum was renamed in honor of the spiritual founder and first curator of the museum, Wilhelm von Bode. The building of the museum is historically preserved. Bode believed in mixing of art collections. In line with the spirit of Bode’s ideology, the museum is a collection of Byzantine art, sculptures, medals, and coins. The Museum only became possible due to “Bode’s aggressive acquisition policy”. This was the reason that Bode developed a reputation of a “museum imperialist”. His favorite areas for collection were Seventeenth century German art, Dutch art pieces from Seventeenth century, and Renaissance art of Italy.
The art is presented in the museum by dividing the artworks in both the chronological and regional divisions. The art belonging to Northern and Southern Europe are displayed discretely on the first floor of the museum. On the second floor, Baroque and Renaissance artworks can be seen to have similar regional divisions.
Bode Museum is the home of two major collections: The Numismatic Collection (The Münzkabinett) and The Sculpture Collection (Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst). The Sculpture Collection also has a section of The Museum of Byzantine Art.
The Numismatic collection is one of the world’s largest collection of its type. It has over five hundred thousand objects. The collection has is within the range of beginning of seventh century BC up to today. The collection serves as an exceptional archive in the historical research.
The Sculpture collection has the collection sculptures from Ravenna and Byzantium, early Renaissance, Middle-Ages, Christian Orient, the Italian Gothic, etc. Sculpture collection is also one of the World’s largest. The collection features many great sculptures including ‘Dancer’ by Antonio Canova, ‘Pazzi Madonna’ by Donatello, and numerous other German sculptures by Ignaz Günther and Tilman Riemenschneider.
The department of Byzantine art in the museum has one of the most ancient and unparalleled collection of Byzantine and late-antique works of art. The collection holds artworks dating back as early as third century to the early fifteenth century. Almost all of the artworks in the collection come from the ancient Mediterranean region. The main focus of the collection is on Christian and Pre-Christian sarcophagi from Rome.
All in all, the museum has a diverse collection in Byzantine art, Numismatics, and Sculptures. It is a perfect place for research in Renaissance art and Sculptures.

Summary of First Article: Antiquity on Display

Bisel, in this article, examines the building which was designed by Alfred Messel in 1907 known as the container. The building replaced the first structure built to the house of Pergamon reliefs. In this part, Bisel discusses in detail the tastes and works of the well-known personalities such as Bode and Messel.
Regarding Messel’s work, the author suggests that Messel has fulfilled in architectural, if one judges his work in the complicated tripartite structured organization of art with Byzantine, German, and Greek artwork.
Summary of Second Article: "Collecting Is the Noblest of All Passions!": Wilhelm von Bode and the Relationship between Museums, Art Dealing, and Private Collecting
This article is about the heritage in the world that is constituted by five art museums such as the Old National Gallery, the New Museum, the Pergamon Museum, the Bode Museum and the Old Museum. The article focused on the conceptualization of the museum and how the damage to landscape of berlin affected the city’s art heritage. It is identified that there is combination of study of facades, interiors and the placements of individual works. This article examines the Bode acquisition activities and his concept of the style room. In 1872 Wilhelm Bode began to work in the Berlin Royal Museums where he was named right hand of the Department of Sculpture. The main business trip took him to Italy where he was accused of the errand of making an accumulation of mortar throws to invent the most imperative figures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
The article also suggests that the Bode Museum was only possible due to von Bode’s policy of aggressive acquisition in order to obtain artworks that he wanted to be the part of his museum. He used to buy paintings, coins, art pieces and sculptures from different people’s private collections too, in order to acquire them for the museum. However, sometimes in failed in acquiring the art pieces from the private collections.
Touching base in Italy Bode promptly perceived the emerged chance of exploiting the gigantic measure of unique models offered by the business sector and as opposed to requesting throws as he was concerned to get the first art. It is identified that investigation of the sections empowered exposure of more than hundred craftsmanship merchants, and very nearly seventy private authorities Bode was keeping up contact with. The majority of the merchants were spread crosswise over Italy, where Bode was obtaining Italian Renaissance form for the most part in Florence, Rome, Venice and Milan, additionally crosswise over Southern Germany, where he created relations to number of merchants exchanging Late Gothic and Early Renaissance figure beginning from Bavaria, Swabia and Tirol.
Additionally, Bode worked with the merchants in the urban areas of Frankfurt and Cologne where the greater part of the Rhenish medieval model came into business sector, and also in Strasbourg in at the time German Alsace. Further, merchants he was acquiring from spread over from Berlin and Vienna to Paris and London, all of which constituted the significant markets for the Old Masters form in the most recent years of the nineteenth century. Throughout the span of years Bode acted as an eminent and looked for after craftsmanship consultant for more than twenty private authorities.