ALTE NATIONALEGALLERIE
Dear Caroline,
Class ended early today and I had the whole afternoon free. I figured I’d go finish the museum island and check out the national gallery. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a true gallery. I’ve been to the ROM back in toronto and there’s some paintings there, but I’ve never been to an actual gallery where the works of masters are on display.
The gallery is beautiful. Stone walls, marble staircases, all I was missing was a ball gown and I could have been a princess from long ago. The gallery had some Monet and Renoir works, they were beautiful. I’ve never seen one up close. All the pairings are protected behind glass but you can still get so close you can see the paint strokes. On a Monet you can see that the paint doesn’t cover the whole canvas, there are little pockets of canvas poking through.
On the top floor of the gallery there’s an other rotunda, similar to the one at the Altes Museum and Sanssouci Palace. The Germans really love a dome ceiling. It was a little more oval this one and the room was lined with marble statues. In another room, there were preserved frescos (religious paintings in churches) from a church in Italy. As I walked through the last few chambers of the gallery I was stopped by a security guard. He was enthusiastically pointing at me and at a large painting of a woman on the wall. He kept saying “Schau! Sie sind es!” I’m still a beginner in German, so here I was thinking I was getting in trouble, finally he realized I was having trouble understanding and said in English “look, it’s you!” The security guard thought I looked like the woman in the painting, he then started to ask the other patrons to confirm his observation. One by one strangers were telling me that I could have been the woman in the painting. It was quite the strange experience, though my whole life I’ve been told I have the vibe of a 17th venture noble woman.
After all that excitement I stopped for a hot chocolate and some carrot cake at the gallery cafe and headed home. An afternoon well spent.
