Together with the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Bode Museum, and the Pergamon Museum, the Old National Gallery, or Alte Nationalgalerie as it’s called in German, is part of the museum complex that makes up Berlin’s world-famous Museum Island, an island famous for its cultural institutions in the Spree river that became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. With its vast collection of painted masterworks, the museum attracts visitors from all over the world and has become one of the German capital’s most famous and popular destinations for lovers of the arts.
Since its grand reopening in 2011, the Alte Nationalgalerie fascinates its visitors with one of the most significant collections of painted masterworks from the most impactful schools of art of the 19th century. Visitors may marvel at the famous works from a wide range of schools of painting, such as Romantic, Impressionist, Biedermeier, early Modernist, and Realist artworks from German and international artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Arnold Böcklin, Claude Monet, and Édouard Manet, whose artworks continue to resonate with and make a deep impression on their audience to this day.
In total, the museum owns a collection of around 2000 pieces that predominantly consists of paintings and sculptures. Of those, around 400 paintings and 100 sculptures are on display throughout the museum’s three levels in exhibits that revolve around a variety of fascinating topics and thematic issues, designed to provide visitors with new and fresh perspectives on these artworks.
What’s more, these art treasures are exhibited in a setting that couldn’t possibly be any more fitting. The neo-classicist architecture of the museum, originally built between 1866 and 1876, is reminiscent of an antique Grecian temple, turning the Alte Nationalgalerie into a veritable temple of the arts whose exterior corresponds with the artworks displayed in its interior in fascinating ways.
How to get here:
The Museum Island with the Alte Nationalgalerie on it is stop 4 on line 1 of our Hop On – Hop Off sightseeing buses.
