Page - 388 - in Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums - Europäische Museumskultur um 1800, Volume 2

388 Meijers From an International Perspective From Dresden our British tourist would then have travelled to Munich to view Leo von Klenze’s pioneering work, the Glyptothek (1816–30) and the Pinakothek (1826–36). He would also have heard of Klenze’s New Hermitage in St Petersburg (1839–52), but viewing it would have been too ambitious for a single tour – the more so because his final destina- tion would have been Vienna. In the case of these German projects, all pre-1855, he would be confronted with mod- ern urban development projects, which reflected the new demands of bourgeois society. Within these projects the new museum buildings were all allocated important sites, more or less separate from the palace as the traditional seat of power.5 (Fig. 5) Of course, the situ ation varied according to the state involved: whereas in Berlin, Dresden6 and Munich clusters of museums arose relatively independently of the palaces, entering the public do- main instead, in St Petersburg (to Klenze’s rage) the museum had to be built on to the Hermitage. This imperial museum thus displayed a certain resemblance to that of Vienna. London, by contrast, was a very different story, due to the parliamentary form of govern- ment already in place in Great Britain. The National Gallery (William Wilkins, 1833–38) was built entirely on a citizen initiative and was situated in the city centre, on Trafalgar Square, to make it easily accessible to the public.7 His own experience in London and his museum tour through Germany would mean that our British traveller would now be familiar with recently built and usually centrally lo- cated galleries and museums. However, when he arrived in Vienna in 1855 to visit the Kai- serlich Königliche Gemäldegalerie, he would have had to go out of the town centre to reach it, at a location which ought, as he understood it, to have become unusual for the hous- ing of a national or imperial collection. (Fig. 6) And what he encountered there would have been equally striking: an early eighteenth-century baroque country estate in the form of a long, sloping park, closed off on its two short sides by, respectively, an encyclo- pedic museum and a picture gallery. Even so, a great number of visitors did manage to find their way to it despite its decentralized location – a development that was facilitated Fig. 5 Karl Friedrich Schinkel, View of the Lust- garten in Berlin with Royal Palace (right), Cathedral, Museum (left) and Arsenal (front left). Drawing, 1823. Berlin/Kupferstichkabinett