yesterday we did an intense bit of museuming with visits to both the modern and old museums here in munich. in deutsch, that’s pinakothek der moderne and alte pinakothek respectively. with our move happening so quickly, i hadn’t a chance to prepare myself for what sorts of art i’d be seeing. i’d made loose lists of cities with museums worth visiting - paris for the louvre and london for the tate, but i hadn’t taken a step back to my art school days to list out what i consider the most influential pieces both personally and culturally.

i’d already seen a few - michelangelo’s sistine ceiling and david, brunelleschi’s dome in florence, botticelli’s primavera and birth of venus, and duchamp’s fountain in sfmoma top the culturally influential pieces. i imagine it’ll be hard to top artemisia gentileschi’s judith and holofernes for personally influential paintings, though i stumbled across a couple of pieces in the alte pinakothek that come close.

the old musuem’s galleries were designed to hold ruben’s last judgment (1617), a magnificent piece i’d not spent much time studying, and an artist i’d never developed an appreciation for. seeing the last judgment, dominating the gallery space in both scale and composition, left me in complete awe.

there were other pieces that caused me to take pause. the el greco caught my eye from across the room and i gravitated to it, hardly noticing the other pieces hanging on the walls. the raphael pieces did much the same [i have yet to see the school of athens, a piece that falls both in the culturally and personally influential categories], along with the botticelli. when i studied art on slides, i could hardly comprehend being able to identify pieces by artists without first memorizing them. after seeing such masters’ paintings in real life, it seems impossible that one wouldn’t be able to recognise a michelangelo or a caravaggio or a titian, etc.

da vinci paintings always feel like such a treat, whether they’re finished or not [though i prefer the unfinished as they show more of leonardo’s process], and it was a complete surprise to come across the madonna of the carnation [originally attributed to andrea del verrocchio].

the dürer piece was one whose story i’d heard throughout art school. my own work plays with the same artist-as-god themes so obvious in dürer’s self-portrait. i could easily devote an entire post to ramblings around how this piece has affected my work, my mentality as an artist, etc. needless to say, rounding the corner to be face to face with albrecht dürer circa 1500 was more exhilarating than meeting any of today’s greatest celebrities.

in the small room with the exit from the upper galleries, i found the most breathtaking of all the pieces in the alte pinakothek: a piece of hieronymus bosch’s last judgment. it was a small enough piece to take in from only a few feet away, but contained more than enough of those earthly-delightish figures to leave me with no question as to who exactly had painted the piece.

now it’s off to the art store to find an outlet for all this creative energy.