Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Neil McGregor, former director of the National Gallery and now chair of the advisory board of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, was interviewed by Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection to mark the Wallace Collections showing the painting, on loan from the Berlin gallery.
They began by talking about the picture itself with Bray sharing that the gallery was not allowed a poster of the painting for the show unless they put the label over the boys genitals. They talked about the Giustiniani brothers who commissioned the work and about other works by Caravaggio which they owned.
They then discussed hat happened to the collection when it was sold in Paris in 1812 and how it was shown there for a number of years almost as a public show and how it influenced French artists of the time.
We then went into a rather complex discussion of Frederick William III, King of Prussia, and his wife Louisa, and how they in exile he prepared for his return to Berlin and rethought how a state would function with an emphasis on education leading to a plan to build a university system, libraries and museums. As he started to build he purchased the Giustiniani collection in the 1830s for the Altes Museum. I must admit at one point I wrote “I am lost” in my notes!
They discussed how the painting was stored in a salt mine in the Second World War but how that was in the Soviet zone after the war but the paintings were liberated by the Americans. The Berlin museums were also in the Russian zone of Berlin. A new museum was therefore built, the Gemäldegalerie, in the suburbs for the paintings which opened in 1998 despite the reunification of the city.
I must admit at
times this talk felt quite muddled but as I typed it up it started to fall into
place more although I’m still not sure how they ended up talking about Babylon
at one point.
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