Travel Log | Berlim Day 3 - Highlights of the Bode Museum

The Bode Museum, from the River Spree

 

The Bode Museum is the home of medieval art, located at the very tip of the island (I had to walk around the construction works of the pergamon, get off island and back in again through a different bridge to get there). The Bode is also famous for its coin collection, but I had been walking for over ten thousand stepts at this point and barely gave a look to some of those coins. Something to return to another time, I suppose...

One of the rooms of the Bode Museum

 

1. The Pazzi Madonna

There were many works by Donatello in the Bode museum - I think I read somewhere there that someone connected to the Bode was particularly fond of the renaissance master, but sadly, I didn't keep notes about the connection. One of the most important pieces was this marble relief of the virgin and child. My experience with it was strange. It was as if I had seen this image a billion times before, but never quite like this, and I was drawn to how this seems more like a portrait of a woman and her child than an image of a God. The flattened profile of the baby is a bit weird though, and the side of his head is out of proportion (too small for his age), make it seem more abstract, more medieval than  renaissance, at least to my untrained eyes. The woman seems sad... I could imagine her struggling, financially perhaps, touching her head to the child and thinking "what will we do, my son?". I doubt that was what was in the artist's mind though... 

The Pazzi Madonna

The room where the Pazzi Madonna was had plenty of other versions of the Virgin and Child

2. Medieval Sculptures

Niederbayern: I was not familiar with the concept of a Palmesel prior to seeing this piece. A palmesel  is a sculpture of Jesus mounting a donkey with wheels, traditionally pulled along the processions of the Palm Sunday (Domingo de Palmas). I have very vague memories of going to church once with my mother and brother as a child, gathering palm tree branches on the way, but I am not sure if it relates to the same celebration. In any case, the palmesel at the Bode is a reconstruction, as the original donkey burned down in 1945 - this is a constant in Berlin museums, as one might expect. A lot of things were lost or destroyed around that time. Jesus' hand is in the traditional blessing pose - which in humans is not unlike the position of the hand of one who has a lesion in the median nerve. 

The reconstructed palmesel. It was in the same room as a very large and very tortured crucifix.

 

This head of St John the Baptist stroke me because of how realistic it was. The sculpture depicts the dead of St John as it would have seem on a plate as requested by Salome. It is made of oak wood and has a hollow in the back where there used to be a relic.

St Dionysius statue: This statue drew my attention because the saint is holding his own decapitated head. There's a whole genre of christian sculptures about people carrying their own heads: it's called a cephalophore. According to this source, st Dionysius was a martyr, beheaded after several different tortures, but after they took his head he simply picked it up and walked around town, until giving it to a pious woman and falling dead.

St Dionysius

Christ on the mount of olives (Christi gebet am Olberg, meister von rabenden)

This is St Barbara. Caught my attention because my grandmother used to talk about this saint all the time, but I don't know anything about her. I think she is "sincretized" with Oyá in afro-Brasilian religions. 

These are St Sebastian and St Florian... I wonder if there is more than one St Sebastian as the one I usually see is represented with barely any clothes and his body pierced by arrows... in any case, these statues were ridiculously enormous. I'm at least 5 metres away in this photo, trying to fit them both in the frame.

Head of the philosopher Seneca

St Wendelin