The famous Dresden Gallery and its collection

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Not every European city had such a glorious and tragic fate as the German Dresden experienced. This unique city has been inspiredly nicknamed Florence on the Elbe, and not only because of its magnificent geographical position in the Elbe Valley and magnificent Baroque architecture. The very air is saturated there with the spirit of art that hovers in the city's art museums. One of them is the world-famous Dresden Gallery, the official name of which is the "Gallery of Old Masters".

Pride of Germany

The art gallery, which stores the best examples of ancient European painting, is located in a three-story building with a dome. It is part of the residence of the Saxon imperial princes (electors) Zwinger and is part of the architectural ensemble that unites this palace and Dresden's theater square.

You can preview the history and collection,which the Dresden Gallery is so famous for: the museum website kindly provides the necessary information in German and English. Those who wish to visit the museum can get here on any day of the week, except Monday (day off). Children are admitted to the exhibition free of charge.

Exposure history

The Dresden Gallery began with a cabinet of curiosities - a cabinet of curiosities that collected various curiosities from the natural world and human inventions. Along with rare samples, the court collected paintings by famous masters. Frederick the Wise, who ruled at that time, ordered works from Dürer and Cranach. The works of these artists adorned the walls of the palace, and today they are the pearls of the exhibition, which the Dresden Art Gallery is famous for. More than one generation of Saxon electors acquired canvases, engravings, coins, porcelain, but the museum received a truly grandiose replenishment under Augustus the Strong. For several decades, the collection has grown so much that the castle was not able to accommodate all the exhibits. The gallery was transferred to a specially restored building of the royal stables.

The heyday of the princely collection

A descendant of the Elector August III completed his father's work, turning the court collection into the greatest repository of paintings, which constituted the golden fund of world art. August purposefully and persistently collected the best examples of European painting, not skimping on funds. He organized a whole network, whose employees visited all the sales and auctions in Europe, agreed onacquisition of both individual canvases and entire collections. In 1741, the Dresden Gallery was replenished with a large collection of paintings bought from the Duke of Wallenstein. A few years later, there was a collection of Francesco III d'Este with masterpieces by Velasquez, Correggio, Titian. In 1754, the great “Sistine Madonna” by Raphael was brought to Dresden from the monastery of St. Sixtus in Piacenza (the painting was bought for twenty thousand sequins). Almost all of Rembrandt's works were acquired at that time by the Dresden Art Gallery. The paintings reflected the tastes and artistic preferences of the aristocracy, among them there were many portraits and canvases of religious themes.

After the seven-year war

In 1756, a devastating seven-year war broke out, and the gathering activity was interrupted for a hundred years. In 1845, the city authorities decided to build a special building for the museum and invited the architect Gottfried Semper for this purpose, who proposed a project that harmoniously fits and complements the medieval Zwinger. The Dresden Gallery was opened in 1855, at that time it contained more than two thousand paintings. The collection began to be actively replenished with the works of the masters of the new time. However, in the 1930s, the paintings of the Impressionists and their followers were transferred to other museums, and only the masterpieces of the old masters remained in the Dresden vault.

The difficult fate of the gallery

Dresden was heavily bombed at the end of World War IIby American and British aviation. From the incomparable architectural ensemble of the Zwinger, only charred ruins remained. However, the collection was saved by being hidden in limestone mines. Despite the fact that the tunnels were equipped with ventilation and heating, the system failed, and the water entering the shelter significantly spoiled the paintings. When Soviet soldiers found the famous masterpieces, they needed urgent restoration. The best specialists of the Soviet Union were engaged in the restoration of the great cultural heritage. In 1955, at the insistence of N. S. Khrushchev, the salvaged works of art were returned to Dresden. The gallery was finally restored by 1964. Today, about three thousand paintings by recognized geniuses of painting are exhibited in fifty halls.

Masterpieces

The old canvases, which are carefully kept by the famous Dresden Art Gallery, make you freeze in mute delight (photos of some of them are presented in the article). Here is the canvas of the Early Renaissance artist Antonelo de Messina "Saint Sebastian", which depicts the Christian martyr in a stoically monumental perspective, which inspires the idea of a feat that overcomes suffering.

Here is the stunning Raphaelian Sistine Madonna in a host of angels, in front of whose radiant, divine beauty the Russian soldiers, who discovered a masterpiece in one of the boxes, silently took off their caps. This is a work of the High Renaissance. The unsurpassed painting by Titian "Caesar's Denarius" with amazing insight demonstrates an unexpected for the mundaneunderstanding the conflict of the moral choice offered by Christ.

An example of the Late Renaissance - the painting of the Parma painter Antonio Correggio "Holy Night" - tenderly and lyrically tells the touching veneration of the Magi to the newborn Christ. Netherlandish painting is represented in the Dresden Gallery by Jan van Eyck. The gallery exhibition is adorned with unsurpassed Dutch still lifes and landscapes.

Jakob van Ruysdael's painting "The Jewish Cemetery" is built on the antithesis of the ever-renewing nature and the inevitable finiteness of human life.

Decorate the exposition of the gallery and full of movement "hunting" paintings by the Flemish artist Rubens, and genre paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder. France is represented in the Dresden Museum by paintings by Nicolas Poussin. The famous "Chocolate Girl" Jean-Etienne Lyotard found a place here. Paintings by Murillo and Velazquez represent the Spanish school of painting.