Cornerstone of Antiquity. Berlin's First Museum

A visit to Museum Island is today a fixture on many Berlin visitors' itineraries. Since its opening in 1830, what was then still the Royal Museum quickly became a magnet for the public. Yet the experience of visiting a museum in those days was an entirely different one from what we know today.

This exhibition traces the founding chapter of one of the world's most celebrated museum complexes, examining how the institution was conceived, built, and received — and what it meant to encounter antiquity for the first time within its neoclassical walls.