Architecture in the museum: Displacement, reconstruction and reproduction of the monuments of antiquity in Berlin's Pergamon Museum (Germany)

This dissertation is a study in the formation of modern knowledge about the architecture of antiquity. Its main concern is to address an epistemic problem by exploring the relationship between archaeology—the scholarly practice of excavating the past—and the reconstruction and display of “monuments” of antiquity in the museum—the process through which the history of art and culture becomes intelligible to modern viewers. Exploring the framing of archaeological fragments by modern visions, I examine the Pergamon Museum, a highly contested and, yet, immensely popular “museum of ancient architecture” in Berlin, and three of its chief exhibits, the Great Altar of Pergamon, the Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.; The first part of the dissertation, “Architecture in the Museum,” investigates the architectural exhibits of the Pergamon Museum through the 20th century theories of museology and historic preservation. Part 2, “The Architecture of an Imperial Museum in Berlin,” studies how German imperialist discourse on art and “Kultur” was translated into the actual ordering of works of art and cultural contexts in Alfred Messel's project of the Royal Prussian Museum of 1907 (today's Pergamon Museum). In Part 3, “The Altar and its Frames,” I study the history of the museum displays and reconstructions of the Great Altar of Pergamon, from Carl Humann's excavations of the castle of Bergama in 1878 to 1930 when the Pergamon Museum was opened to the public. The final part of the dissertation focuses on Walter Andrae's curious reproduction of “Babylonian architecture” in the museum's South Wing, refraining the products of an archaic industry as unique works of art.; Focusing on the history of the construction of the Pergamon Museum, I expose the ideological underpinnings of the process that transformed fragmentary archaeological finds into complete museum-objects. I argue that, even though initially hypothetical, the reconstituted “monuments” gained autonomy from the discursive field in which they had found their form and, through the assumption of aesthetic distance and modern spectatorship, have come to replace the lost antique originals instead of merely representing them.