Having only got through a third of the Gamäldegalerie two Sundays ago, and having completely fallen in love with the Renaissance religious art, I couldn’t imagine going to any other museum or gallery this weekend. I also knew I wasn’t going to try and see all the remaining two-thirds, and that I was going to plonk down €100 and get a Jahreskarte. There’s three different Jahreskarten, from €25 for the Basic to the Classic Plus, which is what I got, which gives me access to all the permanent and temporary exhibitions with bonus “jump to the head of the queue” special powers (if you saw the photo of me on the card, you’d want to get me away quick as possible also) — very necessary for Museuminsel on the weekend.

I decided to walk through the first third again, to remind myself what I’d seen and where I was up to, and yes, my heart did indeed leap with joy on entering the first room. It’s fucking phenomenal; there’s no superlatives that can convey the quality and breadth of the works on display, nor the endlessness of it, more rooms, bigger and smaller, yet more again, and more further still. So, starting where I got up to last time, with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Das Martyrium der hl. Agathe from 1755.

If the first third was transcendent, the second was … well, even better. I was over half-way through before I realised I was going back in time, from the late-18th century, working my way room by room back to the 13th, each side of the double horseshoe mirroring the other, rather than a linear progression, which pleased me no end, to finish with a sublime number of rooms of heavily gilded altarpieces. The coda to all that was a room of Botticelli. There’s no point wasting insufficient words on it.

Unlike last time, I remembered to turn off the filter on my camera, so it actually worked, though the glare from the atrium ceiling in the larger rooms smeared everything. Most of the paintings have a highly glossy finish, or are protected with glass, and many of them suffer from glare, particularly the darker ones, where any detail is lost from the unsympathetic light gushing down. What sucks for camera is just sad and disappointing for viewing. As for the glass, a couple looked like visitors had been rubbing their greasy heads against it. Some of the works are so massive, 4 or 5 metres high, you really need a ladder to appreciate them, or just grasp their vastness.

So, whereas the first third (which I previously saw) was German, Netherlands, and Flemish art from 13th to 17th centuries, followed by the several rooms of 17th century Netherlands art, the entire left side (ok, it’s not really a horseshoe, more of a ‘Q’ with a hole where the tail should be) is Italian art from 13th to 18th centuries across 23 exhibition spaces. There were many, many Mary with Childs, Hieronymouses, various martyrdoms, Jesuses (alive, dead, reborn), important and not so important apostles and holy people, so many more Marys it’s like that’s the only chance they got to see and be near a woman. Yes, they are beautiful, and seeing them all together helps me understand the monumental shift in art and culture over a few hundred years, but I was often far more attracted to the unknown portraits of men and women, real people with distinct faces, bodies, postures, the gazes of some of them, like Diego Veláquez’ Bildnis einer Dame, Charles Mellin’ Bildnis eines Mannes, Giovanni Battista Moroni’s Don Gabriel de la Cueva, Herzog von Alburquerque spanischer Gouverneur von Mailand, or Georges de la Tour’s Erbsen essendes Bauernpaar which is so magnificent I would steal it in an instant — actually I’d steal pretty much all of the ones I photographed if I had somewhere big enough to put them — the beauty and profundity of them makes me ache; let there never be an end to such art.

I am now two-thirds of the way through, more really, four-fifths, with ‘only’ the temporary exhibitions to go. I got a bit carried away with photos; I couldn’t decide which to show, so I end up with about half of them here. They do the paintings no justice. The depth of the light, the pigments, the brushwork, the frames also, the shift and change when moving closer or further away, the actual colours, hues, tones, shadows, the direction of the light especially, all this is only partially and incompletely, inadequately captured and seen in a photograph. The Gemäldegalerie, yes, worth going three times in a month. It’s going to be very difficult to see a museum better than this (yes, I have no critical perspective when it comes to museums, I love them all, but still …)

Oh yes, the audio guide! Brilliant! It’s why it takes so long to get through all the rooms. I only wish there was more. And the shop is rather good also, though it didn’t have many posters and I was hoping for at least a half dozen of various works to take home.

It’s Sunday again and so off to a museum! Or for today, to a gallery, which is also a museum. The Gemäldegalerie is one of the nineteen of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the big ones, the Museuminsel ones. It’s located in the Kulturforum district, west of Potsdamer Platz and right under Tiergarten, and I’ve biked past it many times on my way from north to south and back. It’s built of lots of slabs of stone-embedded concrete, sloping angularly upwards, somehow reminding me of the Auckland’s Aotea Square and Centre. Inside, it’s vast, light and airy, like a high-modern interpretation of classical architecture.

So, arrive, pay, audio guide! It’s 10€ with the guide inclusive, on the verge of expensive; enough to make it worth having an annual card for SMB, especially because there’s no real way to get through the Gemäldegalerie in a single day. Yes, that vastness is vast. A central atrium runs the length, with the exhibition rooms forming a double horseshoe around it. The atrium itself is on the scale of science-fiction monumental, with a long gently burbling fountain of rectangular blocks midway along. It’s necessary. The gallery is a feat of endurance and people even carry folding chairs with them on the trek.

The rooms themselves are colour-coded, which the audio guide informed me is important, however I forgot this, as the only map I had was in black and white. Nonetheless, following the two horseshoes counterclockwise is an improvised embroidery, looping back and forth slightly as one goes from inner to outer and back. The inner rooms are numbered in Roman numerals, while the outer are in Arabic. This is also important. Once again, I forgot exactly why. Nonetheless again …

It begins with German painting from the late-High and early-Late Middle Ages. Much religious art of the life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt, Jesus crucified and risen, all very literal, and quite a lot beautiful, often with gilt, fine typography, and a combination of brush- and line-work. I’d been reading recently about African and Arabic people represented in Mediaeval art and literature (around the time of Parsifal), and so was very happy to see what I’d been reading in the art. Interesting also, the further through the Renaissance I went, the whiter the subjects became, until by the Enlightenment they’d vanished entirely.

Back and forth between the rooms, Netherlands artists making their first appearance, then Flemish artists. A lot of this. As the audio guide said, over the course of Amsterdam’s power some five million paintings were made. The subject matter shifts from religious to mercantile, the great families of Italy, an increasing number of representations of Greek myths and the pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, Rembrandt shows up. As do a number of paintings I’ve seen countless times in magazines and books, and very unexpectedly, they are here. Entering each room is a thrill, discovering the artists, their subjects, the country or city in which they worked, the progression of themes, the refinement of techniques, the schools and styles.

The gallery is primarily Northern European art, Germanic and Dutch in particular. To be honest, not all of it is remarkable to me, though I do appreciate for someone with say, a love of Dutch art of a particular period, the quantity of works on display would be a joy to see. And it is a quantity. Many of the exhibition rooms are massive, and the smaller ones are no less than half their size. It’s possible to enter a room with multiple works of meters in length each and not feel things have been squashed in. Oh, and then there’s those 17th Century Flemish still lifes. Walls of them.

As for the audio guide, each room has at least a couple of works with audio accompaniment, which is usually 2 or so minutes, and there’s 70 rooms, so even concentrating only on these works is half a day of gallery-ing. I would have liked something to educate me on the paintings without accompaniment though, as I often ended up paying less attention to them unless they specifically caught my attention. Actually, some of them were pretty unmemorable, of the lesser works by lesser artists of a lesser school type. On the plus side, this meant there were one or two rooms I got through quicker. Not many though, every room had at least two pieces I could have stared at for ages. Lucky most rooms have (very large, wooden) benches in them, so I plopped my arse on them while audio-guiding.

Four hours later, and I’m turning the U of the horsehoe and it’s time to get kicked out. I’d seen a little over a third, realised there was no way I could steal all the works I’d fallen in love with (nor do I have big enough walls for most of them), and was part-way through listening to the story of the Martyrdom of Saint Agatha of Sicily, who was tortured, and had her breasts cut off for refusing to give up her faith.

I took a lot of not so good photos. I was wondering why, when the aperture was wide open I was still only managing a pathetic half- or quarter-second shutter speed. Turns out I’d left the ND filter on, which reduces light by about half. Idiocy abounds. As does blurriness. Still, I have to go back to get through the other two-thirds, so in the meantime …