Director’s Choice

My name is Dagmar Hirschfelder. I am a specialist in Northern European painting from the 15th to 18th centuries. Since November 2021 I have been director of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. Our museum preserves one of the most spectacular collections of old master paintings in the world. Among them are not only numerous icons of art history, but also many surprising works that characterize the broad spectrum of the collection. I am happy to present some of my personal favorite paintings here.

Piero di Cosimo's painting unfolds a peaceful idyll before our eyes, filled with numerous lovingly depicted details. All of them revolve around the theme of love. In a summery landscape, the sleeping god of war Mars and the almost completely unclothed goddess of love Venus rest with their son Cupid. "Only love conquers war" - this is the message of the touching painting. Such panels were created in Renaissance Italy for weddings and served to decorate wedding chests or furniture.

Sofonisba Anguissola was arguably the most successful female artist of the Italian Renaissance. She worked as a sought-after portrait painter at the Spanish royal court. At the age of just 25, she created this impressive portrait of her mother, Bianca Ponzoni Anguissola. She confidently signed and dated it below the chair back. Bianca turns to us with an alert, self-assured gaze. I am fascinated by how expressively and vividly she is depicted. It almost seems as if we could speak with her.

The small painting on copper by Orazio Gentileschi is a jewel: breathtaking in its realistic, detailed, and yet very atmospherically conceived depiction of nature. One can almost feel the coolness of the water and hear the rustling of the trees. The landscape plays as important a role here as the figures. The painter depicted the latter with a humorous wink: he shows us Christ's insistence and Saint Christopher's reluctance to carry the child.

Rogier van der Weyden's masterpiece combines many achievements of Early Netherlandish painting. The artist continued Jan van Eyck's innovations regarding the close-to-reality  depiction of spatiality, body volumes, textures, and light effects. I am captivated by the richness of detail in this painting, the brilliant rendering of various materials, and the portrayal of the donor, who bears distinctly individual features.

Created around 1470, this portrait of a woman, with its clear forms and strong contrasts of light and dark, appears enigmatically timeless. It is one of the public‘s favorites in the Gemäldegalerie. The sitter appears both superior and fragile, her gaze distant and melancholic. Yet, despite her expressive face, her identity remains a secret to this day. It is astonishing that the painting apparently speaks to an ideal of our time, even though it is over 550 years old.

In March 1651, a catastrophe struck Holland: Amsterdam and its surroundings were hit by a massive storm flood. Several of the city's dikes broke, including the Muider or Anthonisdike depicted by Asselijn. The painter was himself an eyewitness to the event and captured it multiple times in his paintings. The dramatic composition illustrates the surrender of man to the forces of nature. At the same time, the painter transforms the terror into beauty through art.

Michiel Sweerts is one of the underrated Dutch masters of the 17th century. He is by no means as famous as Jan Vermeer. Yet, like Vermeer, he was a master at bringing his figures to life through the mimetic rendering of matter and light. In his character heads and genre paintings, he captures the individuality of his models in a strikingly realistic way. Sweerts's works are therefore particularly close to my heart.

In the Early Modern period, it was mostly women who were exposed to the viewer's gaze, naked and in erotic poses, to appeal to and simultaneously warn against male desire. In this painting, Rubens, the great virtuoso of the Flemish Baroque, presents a Saint Sebastian as a powerful youth, unclothed except for a brief loincloth. He heroically endures his martyrdom by arrows. The motif offers Rubens the opportunity to demonstrate his unsurpassed mastery in depicting the naked human body.

The painterly virtuosity of this painting immediately catches the eye. Nevertheless, to this day it cannot be linked to the name of a painter. The books, inkwell, and hourglass are depicted in such a haptically illusionistic way that one feels able to reach out and touch them. The books, as repositories of human knowledge, and the hourglass refer to the transience of all earthly things. By reducing the highly nuanced coloring, the painter intensifies the melancholic message of the image.

Anne Vallayer-Coster, whose works were sometimes mistaken for those of Chardin (1699–1779), made a name for herself in 18th-century France with finely balanced still lifes. In 1770, she was admitted to the Parisian Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. This painting captivates with its simplicity and at the same time painterly brilliance, as well as its focus on color harmonies of brown, white, and pink tones.