The Writing on the Wall

Abstract

Peter Cornelius's murals in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich broke new ground for museum decoration. Following Friedrich Schlegel's dictum, "The best theory of art is its history," they provided simultaneously a history and a theory of art. Inspired by Raphael's Vatican grotesques, the program's conceptual basis was the Romantic arabesque, an artificial combination of heterogeneous elements—from narrative histories and personifications to symbolic ornaments—whose meaning depended on an endless cross-referencing. Cornelius's innovations were taken up as well as challenged by Wilhelm von Kaulbach's monumental decorations in the Neue Museum in Berlin, which shifted from the history of art to a world history of civilization and religion. Despite the projects' differences, they align in their subordination of museum architecture to pictorial discourse. In an age, when star architects attempt to trump collections with their buildings, these museum murals present a productive challenge to notions of looking and the question of how to achieve (or steer) a collection's legibility.