The Bode museum is not only one of the most beautiful museums on museum island but it also has one of the more interesting collections because it stretches all the way from the end of
the roman empire through the nineteenth century.
Well actually the Bode Museum is as I think the most beautiful museum of all of them and um... it hosts one of the greatest collections of sculptures in the world, so it's easily to be named on the top list ehm of sculptures and ehm sculpture collections and there's also there's also been a great concept of Wilhelm von Bode, the first museum´s director, who said that it's a fault to ehm separate artworks by their genre, but he knew that context is one of the most important features of art.
I was actually, I was thinking what percentage of items in the museum or art collections were destroyed or partially damaged during the Second World War. Actually nearly half of the art works that has been here were already destroyed or lost and we do have records of the curators and the employees actually running through the burning house trying to rescue artworks as they could but a
heavy marble statue was out of the question for that.
This angel is made from a white marble. I don´t know if it's really Carrara marble but it's definitely a very white marble as you can see on the shoulders and as you can see there's not much left of this whiteness of the marble. I think, it´s an extremely important uh...artwork it does not only tell us
something about the early seventeenth century in Venice but it does tell us much more about the Second World War, about the history of this collection and about the history of the war in Berlin.
So, that´s what´s cool about museums: You really do see the piece in 3 D and so you`re not just looking at a picture in a book somewhere, a photo, because I always think that the feeling of approaching a piece is almost as important as...Yeah, it´s true.
And I always like this feeling that turning around the corner and then
there's a whole new universe, exactly, appearing just miraculously in front of your eyes.
Now i'm going to show you one of our crown jewels so to speak, it´s the dancer by Antonio Canova.
Canova particularly uh...traveled to Carrara to find a perfect stone for the statue and what he commissioned and bought was something else from the outside as it turned out to be on the inside because you can see that there's some black enclosure and well, there's a legend that Canover actually was near fainting or to fainting, when she was unwrapped in Vienna, but uh... the commissioner actually was an art-lover enough to see that with this tiny fault of the
black enclosure she's actually more perfect, because it´s not always about perfection.
There you go for this angel who´s actually going for the Beyonce movements. It´s really like out of the video " for all the single ladies"