Ruth Paget: Visiting Nuremberg, Germany's National Museum with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Friday, April 4, 2014

Visiting Nuremberg, Germany's National Museum with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

You could spend a week or two just visiting each gallery once in Nuremberg’s German National Gallery. With just a morning to devote to it, my husband and I decided to visit the Renaissance galleries.

What struck me the most was the presentation of tools such as sextants, protractors, pantographs, compasses, and globes before you could enter the painting collection. I thought this was a subtle way of explaining that technological advances set the foundation for the Renaissance style, particularly in the development of perspective painting.

Perspective painting is based on what is called the vanishing point, a point from which angles emanate to determine size in a painting. Images are larger the further away they are from the vanishing point and smaller as they approach it. The difference in size gives the illusion of depth or perspective in painting. This approach differs from that of the Middle Ages where the most important person in paintings or sculpture is usually much larger than surrounding people and landscape elements like trees.

Mathematical precison was the element sought after in the Museum’s Behaim terrestrial globe (c. 1493), the oldest surviving globe in the world. Hispaniola, where Columbus and crew landed, is very large with no North American and South America depicted.

You could predict sea voyage lengths with an accurate globe. Knowing this helped control lucrative trade routes that made nations rich and able to control other countries. Globes were almost proprietary knowledge for this reason: information sharing was not an asset during this period in history.

The German Renaissance paintings in the galleries displayed a sobriety that you do not find in Italian Renaissance art. Flemish painting was more of an influence on German Renaissance art with brown backgrounds and interiors and emphasis on detailed lacework. Nudes by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472 – 1553) and portraits by Albrecht Dürer (1471 -1528) reflect the influence of Flanders.

This short visit whetted my desire for return visits to the German National Museum to see suits of armor, tea sets, doll houses, and German furniture, which are all in the collection.