The Pinacotheca of Munich. 621 



those objects of art that are represented on a flat ground, is divided 

 into nine large saloons which communicate with twenty-three smaller 

 apartments. The upper part of the building is exclusively devoted to 

 paintings ; the lower floor, not yet completed, is to contain engrav- 

 ings, original drawings of the old masters, enamels, mosaics, &c. &c. 

 The large saloons are lighted from above, while the smaller rooms, 

 which contain the smaller pictures, have a side light from the north. 

 The arrangement is entirely systematic ; for not only does each 

 school hold a particular locality, but the larger pictures are separated 

 from the smaller, in order to prevent that distraction of the eye which 

 makes it difficult to judge the merits of a smaller picture when in 

 juxta-position to one of much larger size : the saloons hold the large 

 paintings, the apartments that run out of them are the depositories of 

 those of smaller dimensions. A corridor, extending the whole length 

 of the building, communicates with the various saloons, which are 

 each of them devoted to the productions of separate schools. This 

 arrangement not only gives the student great facility in examining 

 and comparing the different chefs d'seuvre of different schools; but it 

 relieves the eye from that fatigue, which it necessarily encounters in 

 surveying a long and uninterrupted suite of paintings. 



The visitor enters the gallery by a spacious and lofty vestibule sup- 

 ported by marble columns, from which a double flight of steps con- 

 ducts him to the upper floor. The first room that he enters is an 

 antechamber richly decorated, but only with white and gold, called 

 the " Hall of the Founders :" it is adorned with six large portraits 

 of the princes whom we named at the commencement of this article, 

 and with a frieze by the celebrated Bavarian sculptor Schwarienthaler 

 illustrative of the national history. We now proceed to the collection 

 itself, which is thus divided. Five saloons and seventeen smaller 

 rooms hold the paintings of the German and Flemish schools : the 

 schools of France and Spain are contained in a single room ; and the 

 five remaining saloons and their apartments are devoted to the Italian 

 school. We shall name some of the more celebrated pictures that 

 hang in the different departments of the gallery. 



The first saloon of the GERMAN school contains the following pic- 

 tures by Albert Durer, all highly characteristic of that eccentric 

 master, the Apostles, the Chevalier Gotz of Berlinchingen, a Na- 

 tivity, and an Interment of Christ. In a smaller room is a portrait 

 of Durer by himself and another of Wohlgemuth his instructor, by 



sources than Mr. Wilkins. The latter gentleman will scarcely venture to say that his 

 employers prevented him from making that provision which was necessary for the ac- 

 commodation of such pictures as Raphael's Cartoons and Paul Veronese's Virgin and 

 Christ receiving Adoration from John the Baptist. Surely when building a gallery that 

 was to be a permanent repository of the property of a great nation, he might have con- 

 trived to make his walls more than twenty-two feet high. Why, the Munich walls are 

 ten feet higher than ours, and the pictures for which they are required are not nearly 

 so large as many which the English nation may justly expect to see in our gallery. 

 Whether Jour honest old king did really say or not that " it was a poking little hole,'' 

 we know not ; but assuredly there would have been much truth in the observation. 

 Mr. Wilkins, ere he contemplates another folly in the way of a picture gallery, had bet- 

 ter visit Munich and see the real galleries, and not again speak before the nation his 

 crude ideas drawn from looking at the imperfect designs. 



