A Visit to the Staatliche Antikensammlung (State Antique Collection)

On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon Deb and I headed out to visit yet another of the Munich art museums. On Sundays it is 1 euro day for the entrance fee at the museums in town and this is the best money spent on entertainment around here. This time we decided to head for the Staatliche Antikensammlung, or the State Antique Collection, an odd name for a museum that is housing mostly Greek and pre-Christian pottery, vases, and statues.

A few days beforehand, I was looking at an antique dealers web site here in Munich and came across the following graphic showing all of the museums in the Kunstreal (art area) of town. I had no idea that there are actually 15 different museums in this part of town. I think we have visited perhaps 5 or 6, so it looks like we still have a long way to go.

Here is a listing of the museums in this part of Munich:

1. Neue Pinakothek, 2. Alte Pinakothek, 3. Pinakothek der Moderne, 4. Museum Sammlung Brandhorst, 5. Museum Reich der Kristalle, 6. Türkentor 7. Palais Pinakothek im Palais Dürkheim, 8. Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, 9. NS-Dokumentationszentrum  10. Glyptothek 11. Paläontologisches Museum, 12. Städtische Galerie am Lenbachhaus 13. Siegestor, 14. Kunstbau, 15. Staatliche Antikensammlung, 16. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung.


I'll let you do the translations as needed.

The plaza where the Staatliche Antikensammlung museum is located is wide  open and looked somewhat broad and barren on a cold March day. I took a photo looking out from the stairway, across the plaza to the Glypothek. It captured the dark and dreary nature of the day, along with the orange sports car just passing by.

We arrived around noontime, and brought with us our brand new digital camera that we had just purchased here in Munich. It is a smaller bodied camera, made by Lumix, and is a nice 2 tone color of maroon and black. It is handy due to its size and does all the fancy HD picture, video, etc. After dropping our coats at the coat rack I swung the camera over my shoulder only to find I had not properly attached the shoulder strap. The camera went flying and smashed into the stone floor making a resounding noise and sending the strap parts flying. I was aghast thinking I had only taken 2 pictures with the camera and now I had smashed it to pieces. The museum attendants came over and helped us find the strap and other pieces and I scurried away to a staircase so I could sit and see how bad the damage was.

Upon first look it seemed fine but as I tried to remove the lens cover I found I couldn't get it off and this really set me to worrying. After pulling and squeezing and prodding I was finally able to get the plastic lens cap off, only to find that the UV filter I had bought, at the suggestion of the salesperson because it would “help to protect the lens” was shattered into dozens of pieces.  My heart sank but I kept on and was finally able to remove this filter, get all the glass shards out, and turn the camera on. The power came on, and thank my lucky stars everything worked just fine. The camera had fallen directly on the edge of the lens caps, had cracked the plastic lens cap, and shattered the UV filter. But luckily, these dispensable parts took the brunt of the force and I guess saved the camera. The lens cap still does not fit quite right, but the camera works!

So after this embarrassing start to our museum visit we then proceeded through the museum. This is one of those museums, unfortunately, that does not include descriptions in English, so you need a dictionary and a lot of patience to get through. Additionally I must admit that this style of art, while wonderful and amazingly beautiful and complex for the time, is not the art I am most interested in. The statues and figurines hold my attention, but the pottery seems to all blur together after a while.

Here is a picture of Deb trying her best to decipher the description for one amazing vase that was in the center of one display room.

And here is what she was trying to decipher.

I came across this interesting vase in the same room that appears to show someone playing a game with a ball that looks like basketball. The text did not state much, but I thought it an interesting piece.

We then came across a truly remarkable set of deity figure from the Cyclades culture of the southern Greek islands. The first figure was quite arresting as it was rather tall and so well executed. These figures date back to as far as  2700 BC.

While the style of the pottery, with the predominant black and orange colors can get tiring, the variety of the scenes and the amazing detail therein on the pottery was quite intriguing. As we went through the museum I noticed time and again that the warriors had shields with a variety of emblems. Some were crabs, some were faces, some were other items. The one that really caught my attention though was this one, where the symbol on the shield is clearly a shapely woman’s leg. It really made me wonder who, and what these people were fighting for.

We really did not want to spend an entire day at the museum so we were sort of hurrying through in order to be able to get home at a reasonable hour. It was a gray, dreary day, and one that you most likely would prefer to spend in your warm, cozy flat. As we were about to leave though, Deb suggested that there was a downstairs exhibit and that we ought to spend at least sometime down there seeing what there was.

Well, what the was down in the basement was a collection of jewelry and gold artifacts that just boggled the mind. The detailed workmanship, and the fact that these incredibly delicate items had survived over several thousand years just left me speechless. We came across these beautiful earrings, this amazing delicate necklace with little ducks, acorns, and ears of corn, and then two amazing gold headdresses that just left you in awe. It was a good choice to go into the lower level to see what might be down there.

As we left, we went back upstairs to the main entrance and started to look at the postcards and other paraphernalia that you always see in the museum gift store. To our amazement there was an English language brochure that explained almost every piece in the museum. Somehow we had missed this going in. I am not sure if it was good or bad (we took a copy with us and read in on the U-Bahn going home). Perhaps if we had it at the beginning we would have been there all day!

The ultimate surprise though was again at the end, as we were reading more (yes there were more) English language documents for the museum, only to find out that the museum contents represented the collection of the Wittlebach family, who in the 1800’s began to collect this art and to purchase other people collections, eventually leaving it all to the Bavarian and German people.