Monday, November 16, 2009

Museum of Itself

The wonderfully restored, retained Neues Museum was our midday treat to ourselves today as we used our new annual tickets to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin there first. Destroyed in WWII and left to decay until the late 1980's, it's restoration was completed only a few weeks ago, preserving all that could be of the original substance and pitilessly showing the bare masonry where ornamentation was gone, bordering onto necessary replacment structural elements bare of any decoration. The effect, in this home of Egyptian, Roman, Greek statuary and other artifacts, of prehistoric archaeological finds, of Scythian and Merovingian pottery and adornment, of Charlemagne coins, is to make history open to history. We will return there and to the other museums of Berlin's wonderful museum island very often in the next year!

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