Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Art museum in Dresden, Germany
The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister occupies the Sempergalerie, the neo-Renaissance wing closing the north side of the Zwinger. Its long facade of dark grey-brown masonry with sandstone trim has two tiers of tall round-arched windows, paired upper windows between flat columns, a roofline balustrade, and a round-arched entrance portal at the left end with a balcony above. Behind the main block rise curved and polygonal roof sections, and a slender dark domed tower with a lantern and spike stands at the left end of the roofline.
Augustus the Strong and his son Frederick Augustus II assembled paintings from across Europe between 1694 and 1763 to expand the Saxon court collection. The holdings returned from the Soviet Union in 1955 after being seized during the Second World War, with more than 200 works lost.
The name refers to the gallery's focus on paintings made before 1800. Since its reopening in 2020, wall colours group the schools: Italian works hang on red walls, German and Dutch paintings on green, and Spanish and French 17th-century pictures on blue. The 34 Spanish paintings form the most important such holding in a German museum.
The gallery occupies the Sempergalerie, the north wing that closes the Zwinger courtyard on Theaterplatz. Visitors enter from the courtyard side; the building is wheelchair accessible. Since the 2020 reopening the collection is shown in a new arrangement, with wall colours marking the schools: red for Italian works, green for German and Dutch, blue for Spanish and French paintings of the 17th century.
The Sistine Madonna came to Dresden in 1754 from the church of San Sisto in Piacenza, bought for the Saxon collection. It was already called Raphael's finest easel painting in the 18th century, when he was ranked the "king of artists". In February 1945 the paintings were evacuated; 154 burned when a truck carrying them was hit by a bomb in Dresden.
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