GERMANIC MUSEUM FINISHED

The finishing touches to the new Germanic Museum are now nearly completed, so that the work of removing the collection from the old building to the new will soon take place. Apropos of this installation, Professor Kuno Francke, the curator of the Museum, has written as follows in the current number of the Graduates' Magazine.

". . . . . This museum is not so much a museum of art--although it is this also--as an aid to historical instruction. It is to bring out, concisely and palpably, the great epochs in the artistic development of the Germanic nationalities which in the Middle Ages made up the bulk of the Holy Roman Empire: the Austrian, Swiss, South German, North German, Dutch and Flemish peoples. It is to follow out this development from the age of the Migrations, the Merovingian Monarchy, and the Karolingian Empire on, through all its most important phases down to our own time.

"The limitations of space in the little building which thus far has been at our disposal prevented even a moderately satisfactory realization of this idea. The new building goes a long way toward its fulfilment. Indeed, the genius of its architect, Professor Bestelmeyer of Berlin, has made this building in itself a condensed epitome of the course which art has taken in Middle Europe during the last nine hundred years. Without in the least laacking an organic unity or monumental impressiveness, the exterior of this building shows a rich diversity of structural detail, suggesting rather than copying motifs of numerous styles, from Karolingian austerity to Rococo playfulness. And the three main halls--the Romanesque, the Gothic, and the Renaissance halls--into which the interior is divided are conceived in the same large, comprehensive spirit. Each of them is of distinct individuality and brings out the fundamental features of the particular style of architecture which it represents, but only, so to speak, in sublimated, idealized form; while gradual and soft transitions of ornament and structure lead from one of these halls to another and make them all part of one noble unified whole. We shall therefore be able in this building to give all our objects a suitable historical setting. . . . . . I sincerely hope that the time is not distant when the Museum will also become a workshop for the specialist. I hope the time will come when every American scholar studying the history of Germanic art will have to resort to this museum.

"That of course, can only be brought about through the building up of a special museum library and a collection of photographs so comprehensive as to be practically complete. The photography of historic monuments of art through governmental as well as private initiative has been carried on in Germany and its neighboring countries so systematically during the last decades that the establishment of such an exhaustive archive of photographic material is brought within easy reach. We should undertake it as soon as the installation of our casts and other reproductions has been completed."