Splendor Inside the Walls

By A.T. Baker

Old World treasures at the New World's newest gallery

Fitted into the triangular concourse of the new East Building is a big gallery for special exhibitions, with 17,000 sq. ft. of space. This week the entrance to that gallery is flanked by two life-size figures of armored jousting knights on horseback. They introduce the huge exhibition titled "The Splendor of Dresden," an assembly of objects borrowed from the East German city, which for centuries has been famed for its collections of art and other treasures. Observed one 19th century writer: "Heaven and earth were moved in order to bring together on the Elbe whatever could still be pried loose."

By the crass measure of money and quantity, the exhibition exceeds even the Tutankhamun show now touring the U.S., the Dresden reportedly being insured for $82 million vs. a mere $22 million for Tut, with more than 700 objects vs. Tut's 55. Negotiations for this loan were initiated by National Gallery Director Carter Brown even before the U.S. and the German Democratic Republic established diplomatic relations in 1974. Also involved were the U.S. museums to which the show will later travel, New York's Metropolitan Museum and the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums.

Over its 500 years of cultural eminence, Dresden ideally demonstrated the evolution of collecting. First there was the essentially private Kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities) of the Elector Augustus I (1553-86) and his successors. In special palace rooms, they assembled a kind of encyclopedia of the world's wonders, here painstakingly reconstructed from engravings and a 1587 inventory of objects. Since in their view, painters and sculptors were artisans like any other, bronze busts of earlier Electors, paintings of Adam and Eve, and a portrait of Martin Luther get no greater pride of place than the products of other craftsmen--a drinking vessel in the shape of an ostrich, an astronomical clock, a carpenter's jack plane or an ornate traveling tool kit.

The Saxon rulers prided themselves on their armories, and in Washington an airy gallery evokes the power and pageantry of their court. The gallery is dominated by a mounted knight in full ceremonial armor, flanked by armor for a six-year-old boy; the walls bristle with swords, crossbows and wheel-lock pistols, and are enlivened by four panels showing jousters at the moment of impact.

Although other Dresden rulers were avid collectors, none compared with Augustus the Strong, who was Elector of Saxony from 1694 to 1733 (and for some of that period, King of Poland as well). Rather than keep his multiplying profusion of treasures in the confines of his Kunstkammer, Augustus began to build other lavish settings especially to display them. Most elaborate was the famed Zwinger, a baroque masterwork designed as a U-shaped orangerie embracing a court for fantastic festivals and pageants of exotic visitors--Persians, American Indians and Chinese. In his so-called Green Vault was housed his tremendous collection of gold and silver artifacts. The exhibition simulates the vault's green-lacquered walls backed by mirrored embrasures, where the cornucopia of gold, silver, ivory and rock-crystal objects is reflected in a dazzle of whirls and whorls. Near by a glistening black statuette of a Moor displays a cluster of 16 uncut emeralds from Colombia, which the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V presented to Augustus I. Another room is devoted to small Renaissance bronze statues, capped by a Laocoon by Francesco di Giorgio. A nearly life-size figure, he dangles his undersized snake almost nonchalantly, seemingly rather annoyed than terrified.

Augustus the Strong also had almost a lust for Oriental porcelain. He once traded 600 dragoons to Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm for 151 Chinese vases, and in 1710 established Europe's first porcelain works in the nearby town of Meissen. His collections became so big that he built the Japanese Palace just to house them. He was particularly partial to the large statues of animals that were a Meissen specialty. A gallerygoer seeing a pathetic whippet writhing in the jaws of a bulldog can almost hear the howls.

Paintings were the passion of Augustus III (1733-63). Thanks to him the Washington exhibition includes the famous Girl at a Window Reading a Letter by Vermeer, a magnificent Duerer portrait, a twin portrait by Holbein the Younger, two big early Rembrandts, several Rubenses, a superb, brooding Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, and a full-length portrait of a Saxon duke by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Above his ceremonial clothes, painted as powerfully as if they were an abstraction in color, the duke glowers at the painter with the sulky "Let's get this over with" impatience of a man who has better things to do. The old town of Dresden itself is warmly evoked in canvases by the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto, who came to the city whose ramparts Goethe fondly called "the balcony of Europe" in 1747 and spent years recording its squares, spires and vistas. As the exhibition's organizers would readily admit, the traveling exhibition is only a sampling of the Dresden treasures that miraculously survived the devastations of numerous wars, including the fire bombing of the city by the Allies in 1945. Still, it is a dazzling show. And as an example of how the Old World's princes went about collecting, it is a happy choice to celebrate the opening of the newest and most splendid of the New World's museums.

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