Designed to complement the major exhibition on Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) at the Berlin Museum of Prints and Drawings (Kupferstichkabinett), the exhibition The Romantic Middle Ages: Architecture and Nature in Painting after Schinkel at the Old National Gallery addressed the growing interest in nineteenth-century German romantic representations of medieval architecture. The exhibition hence focused on a genre that, despite its immense popularity among collectors of the time, received scant attention throughout the twentieth century and all too often remained hidden in museum storerooms.
Since the banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, whose private collection formed the founding stock of the National Gallery in 1861, was such a passionate collector of architectural paintings, the exhibition could resort to the museum’s own rich holdings.1 The displayed drawings were complemented by fine works on paper, such as Carl Blechen’s (1798–1840) light-flooded, filigree Gothic visions, and by architecture fragments from around 1500. Additional works...
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