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Following the Bode Museum, the Gemäldegalerie can now also be explored digitally in its entirety and in two languages – in a high-resolution 360° tour that covers 58 rooms, 112 panoramas and around 1,200 works of art with a wealth of background information. The National Museums in Berlin are thus publishing another virtual tour of one of their museum collections.
The virtual tour is deliberately oriented towards the museum tour on site and enables a realistic spatial impression of the Gemäldegalerie. Even when visiting the museum digitally from home, exciting cross-connections and axes of vision open up.
“I am delighted that we can now make the Gemäldegalerie’s collection, in all its splendour and significance, accessible to art enthusiasts all over the world,” says Michael Eissenhauer, Director General of the National Museums in Berlin. “For the first time, this digital offering not only presents all the exhibited works and explains them with background information, but also places them in a comprehensible context in terms of content.”
Julien Chapuis, Director of the Gemäldegalerie and Skulpturensammlung, continues: “This elaborate project would not have been possible without the close collegial cooperation between the Gemäldegalerie and the Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein. Our thanks go in particular to the extraordinary commitment of association members Wolfgang Gülcker and Marion Knauf.”
The tour, which has been in conception for a year and will be documented in summer 2020, opens up 58 halls and cabinets in 112 high-resolution 360° panoramas, starting from the Rotunda of the Gemäldegalerie. For each of the approximately 1,200 works on display, a click on the respective painting provides the most important information on its genesis and collection history. Introductions to the exhibition areas, an overview of the 200 collection highlights and an alphabetical list of artists provide additional orientation, as does audio and video content on large parts of the collection. Further links to smb-digital.de, the online database of the National Museums in Berlin, and the Gemäldegalerie page at Google Arts & Culture with numerous high-resolution digital copies complete the offer. All information is available in German and English.
Virtual tour through the Gemäldegalerie, smb.museum/gemaeldegalerie-360, © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
The Gemäldegalerie is one of the world’s most important collections of European painting from the 13th to the 18th century. The collection was assembled systematically and according to scholarly criteria from 1815 onwards with the aim of uniting painting in the entire range of its regional and art-historical schools. The result is an incomparable variety of masterpieces of all epochs and styles from the 13th to the 18th century, which can be studied in the Gemäldegalerie like in hardly any other museum of Old Masters. Special emphasis is placed on German and Italian painting from the 13th to 16th centuries and Dutch painting from the 15th to 17th centuries. Masterpieces from all art-historical periods, including paintings by Jan van Eyck, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel, Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Sandro Botticelli, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Jan Vermeer are exhibited here.
The Bode Museum can also be explored digitally as part of a tour also designed by Wolfgang Gülcker: 62 360° panoramas cover a large part of the entire ground and upper floors of the museum at the northern tip of Museum Island Berlin. The tour offers information on 850 works from the Sculpture Collection and the Museum of Byzantine Art, including masterpieces from the early Middle Ages to the late 18th century as well as late antique and Byzantine works of art and everyday objects from almost all regions of the ancient Mediterranean: smb.museum/bode-museum-360
The tour was initiated by Marion Knauf, member of the board of the Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein, the association that supports the Gemäldegalerie and the Skulpturensammlung. The tour was conceived and implemented in cooperation with the Gemäldegalerie on a voluntary basis by association member Wolfgang Gülcker. In 2022, the Kaiser Friedrich Museumsverein (kaiser-friedrich-museumsverein.de) will celebrate its 125th anniversary and is pleased that its long tradition of supporting the Old Masters will also be successfully carried into the future by enabling unique digital offerings.
smb.museum/gemaeldegalerie-360
Image caption cover: Virtual tour through the Gemäldegalerie, smb.museum/gemaeldegalerie-360, © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
