Last Sunday I visited several museums - and Sunday is a good day since admission is only 1 EUR - and had a good time. There are some very nice collections. I accidentally took the wrong U-bahn train (the first time!) but this ended up being serendipitous, since I went to the Glyptothek first, the museum that I planned to visit last. It turned out to be my favorite. It's essentially a museum of ancient scupltures, with pieces like the "Barberini faun",
the Medusa (luckily I didn't turn into stone),
and statues from the West Pediment of the Aegina Temple. (Actually, the statues from both the West and East Pediments are on display.)
The Temple pays homage to the Greek goddess Aphaia, and was built in about 500 BCE on the island of Aegina. It's too bad that they are not back on the Greek island, because that is probably where they belong. But the display is very nice, and it has quite a bit of explanatory text (in German and English) that is nice. The way that the artist depicted the Trojan war, confined by the triangular space, is very cool.
Hmmm. The faun just looks like a dude. (No cloven hooves, etc.) Presumably you didn't turn into stone because you were looking at the Medusa through your camera, instead of directly. Lucky! And the pediment is *much* easier to see displayed like that, instead of way overhead, and with a marble backing the same color as the statue elements. Good luck with getting any museum to repatriate stolen works of art, btw. :-)
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe I got the wrong sculpture, but it appeared that the German text on the wall was referring to this statue in the center of the room.
ReplyDeleteI don't know when Bavaria "acquired" the pediment, but they have it displayed very nicely. They also have a lot of "portraits" of Greeks and Romans that are >2000 years old. I'm sure those countries would like some of them back, although the sculptors weren't always Greek and/or Roman.