The Man with the Golden Helmet
About 1650 to 1655 · Oil on canvas
Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, on deposit from...
Gemaeldegalerie
Museum · Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin · Founded 1830
Open, admission and hours confirmed 4 September 2026 · 22 sources
On this page 19 sections
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About 1,200 paintings on display, European, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, hung as nine departments in a single circuit of just under two kilometres. The museum names its core strengths as German and Italian painting of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries and Netherlandish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth, and the hang bears that out: the early Netherlandish sequence, with van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Petrus Christus, Hugo van der Goes, Bosch, Bruegel and Gossart, is the reason specialists come, and the Italian trecento cabinets at the far end hold Giotto, Simone Martini and Masaccio. The seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish department is the largest and holds 20 Rembrandts, two Vermeers, two Frans Halses and four Rubenses by the museum's own counts. The eighteenth century is thin by comparison, three cabinets for England, France and Germany together. This is not an encyclopaedic museum and it was never meant to be one: it was assembled from 1830 as a scholarly survey of the history of painting, and its value is that the survey is still legible room by room.
| Local name | Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
|---|---|
| Kind | Museum |
| Founded | 1830 |
| City and country |  Berlin, Germany |
| Address | Johanna-und-Eduard-Arnhold-Platz / Matthaeikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin, Germany |
| Website | smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/home |
| Status | Open, confirmed 4 September 2026 |
| Record last verified | 10 August 2026 |
Visiting
What it costs and when it is openConfirmed 4 September 2026
- Hours
- MondayClosed
- Tuesday to Sunday10:00 to 18:00
- Closed
- Monday.
- Admission
- Gemaeldegalerie, paintings from the 13th to 18th centuryEUR 14the collection display alone
- Gemaeldegalerie, concessionEUR 7
- Kulturforum, all exhibitionsEUR 22admits to every institution on the Kulturforum site
- Kulturforum, all exhibitions, concessionEUR 11
- Annual pass, Staatliche Museen zu BerlinEUR 25the cheapest annual pass; the museum states from 25.00 EUR
- 3-day Museum Pass BerlinEUR 32
- 3-day Museum Pass Berlin, concessionEUR 16
Free entry: The museum publishes no free day for the collection display. Its concessions page states that the reduced rate is generally 50 per cent of the admission fee and lists who qualifies: schoolchildren, students, those in national or community service, unemployed people claiming ALG I job-seekers' allowance, and severely disabled people with at least a 50 per cent reduction in earning capacity, each on presentation of identification.. The same page carries a further list of who enters free, but that list is loaded by script and was not present in the page we fetched, so we do not reproduce it. It needs re-reading in a browser before anything is published under it.- Tickets
- smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldega... The museum's own ticket page.
- Do I need to book?
- No. Day tickets are sold at the counter and online, and admit at any time during opening hours on the day printed. The museum recommends booking online in advance to plan reliably and to avoid the queue at the counter, and sells tickets up to four weeks ahead.
- Address
- Johanna-und-Eduard-Arnhold-Platz / Matthaeikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin, Germany MapU-Bahn Potsdamer Platz
S-Bahn Potsdamer Platz
Bus Potsdamer Bruecke, Potsdamer Platz Bhf / Vossstrasse, Kulturforum, Philharmonie
On foot The visitor entrance is on the Kulturforum piazza between Johanna-und-Eduard-Arnhold-Platz and Matthaeikirchplatz, a short walk west of Potsdamer Platz and next door to the Kupferstichkabinett, the Kunstbibliothek, the Kunstgewerbemuseum and the Neue Nationalgalerie - Website
- smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/home
- Telephone
- +49 30 266 42 42 42
Before you go how long, access, photography, bags, eating, shop
- How long to allow
- The museum states that a complete tour runs to just under two kilometres through some 72 main galleries and small side rooms holding about 1,200 paintings. Half a day is a fair reckoning for the whole circuit; a single department, and there are nine, is an hour.
- Access
- The visitor entrance is wheelchair accessible. The museum publishes a Report access barrier form and offers its pages in simple language and in sign language.
- Photography
- The museum publishes its rules in its Museum Regulations rather than on the visit page. Check them on the day; we have not read a photography rule and will not paraphrase one.
- Bags
- Governed by the published Museum Regulations of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, which we have not read; do not assume the Kulturforum cloakroom rules from another Berlin museum.
- Eating
- Cafe at the Kulturforum, on the upper level of the shared foyer
- Shop
- Bookstore Walther Koenig inside the building, closed Monday and open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, telephone +49 30 26558643
Prices and hours change. We take them from the institution's own pages and print the day we read them, and you can check the current position at the source we used. Confirm before you travel.
What is inside
Photograph by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 The entrance hall and its dome
You come in off the piazza into a small polygonal hall lit from above through a coffered ring of glass blocks and a round oculus. It is the one piece of theatre Hilmer and Sattler allowed themselves and it does the work the exterior refuses to do: the building says nothing from outside and then hands you a ceiling. From here the plan opens into the Central Hall, and from the Central Hall into everything else.
Photograph by MenkinAlRire · CC BY-SA 4.0 The shared foyer, the bookshop and the cafe
The Gemaeldegalerie does not have a building to itself. It shares the Kulturforum block with the Kupferstichkabinett, the Kunstbibliothek and the Kunstgewerbemuseum, and it shares their foyer: a multi-level concourse of white columns and rooflights with the Walther Koenig bookshop on the floor of it and the cafe on the upper level. The 22.00 EUR Kulturforum ticket admits to all of them, which is the practical argument for buying it rather than the 14.00 EUR collection ticket.
Photograph by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0 The Central Hall
A vast top-lit hall running the length of the building, two rows of square columns carrying a shallow barrel vault pierced by circular skylights, with a low square water basin set into the floor at the centre holding a sculptural installation. The museum's own description is that the individual galleries are grouped around a light-filled central hall; the floor plan gives the hall itself over to special exhibitions. It is also, in practice, the room you cross between departments, and it is very large and very quiet.
CC0 Halls I to III: German painting of the 13th to 16th centuries
The circuit starts here, in top-lit halls hung on grey-blue fabric with carved wooden sculpture standing free on plinths between the panels. The museum's own list for the department runs from an anonymous Crucifixion retable from Soest of about 1240 through Schongauer, Duerer's Hieronymus Holzschuher of 1526 with its cover, Baldung, Altdorfer, Cranach's Fountain of Youth of 1546 and Holbein's merchant Georg Gisze of 1532.
CC0 Cabinets 1 to 4: the German cabinets
Small rooms off the halls, walls in sage-green fabric, the smallest devotional panels set into deep grey shadow boxes and glazed, several to a box. This is where the department's miniature end lives, and it is the part of the building that most rewards standing still: half of what is in these cases is the size of a book.
Cabinet 5: the Kupferstichkabinett's exhibition room
One room inside the painting circuit is not the Gemaeldegalerie's at all. The floor plan gives Cabinet 5 to the Kupferstichkabinett, the Museum of Prints and Drawings, which shares the Kulturforum building. Its holdings are light-sensitive, so what is on the wall changes; there is no permanent hang to describe.
CC0 Halls IV to VI: Netherlandish painting of the 15th and 16th centuries
The strongest sequence in the building and the reason many specialists come. Van Eyck's Madonna in the Church of about 1437 to 1440, Rogier van der Weyden's young woman in a white headdress of about 1440, Petrus Christus's Portrait of a Young Lady of about 1470, Hugo van der Goes's Monforte Altarpiece of about 1470 to 1475, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Gerard David, Bosch's John on Patmos, Bruegel's Two Chained Monkeys of 1562, Jan Gossart's Neptune and Amphitrite of 1516 and Anthonis Mor's Duchess Margaret of Parma of about 1562 are all on the museum's own list for this department.
Public domain Halls VII to XI and cabinets 8 to 19: Flemish and Dutch painting of the 17th century
The largest department and the centre of the plan. The museum states that its Rembrandt gallery holds a leading place reflected in its central position, with 20 works by him, one of the largest and finest Rembrandt holdings anywhere. Around it: Frans Hals's Malle Babbe and his Catharina Hooft with her nurse, two Vermeers in the Young Lady with a Pearl Necklace and The Glass of Wine, Ter Borch, Gerrit Dou, Pieter Claesz, Ruisdael, Saenredam, ter Brugghen, and on the Flemish side four Rubenses including the Child with a Bird, van Dyck, Jordaens, Jan Brueghel, Brouwer, Teniers and Cornelis de Vos. This is also where The Man with the Golden Helmet hangs, the picture this archive holds a record of.
Cabinets 20 to 22: English, French and German painting of the 18th century
The smallest of the departments and the easiest to walk past. Watteau's French Comedy, Chardin's Draftsman, Gainsborough and Antoine Pesne sit here; Pesne is the Prussian court painter, which makes these three rooms the closest thing in the building to a local collection.
Halls XII to XIV and cabinets 24 to 26 and 28: Italian, French and Spanish painting of the 17th and 18th centuries
Caravaggio's Cupid as Victor of 1601 to 1602 is the picture people come to this end of the circuit for, and the floor plan marks its position. The Italian eighteenth century runs alongside it, with Canaletto's Grand Canal looking south-east to the Rialto of 1758 to 1762 and his Santa Maria della Salute.
Halls XV to XVII and cabinets 29 to 32: Italian painting of the 16th century
The Venetian and central Italian sixteenth century, with Titian's Venus with an Organist of 1550 to 1552 and his Clarissa Strozzi at the age of two, which the floor plan marks by position, and Raphael among the painters the museum names for the collection as a whole.
CC0 Hall XVIII: Italian painting of the 13th to 15th centuries
A tall pale hall at the far end of the circuit holding Botticelli's Venus of about 1490 and his Virgin and Child with Singing Angels, the Ideal City panel attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini of about 1490, Mantegna's Presentation at the Temple, Giovanni Bellini's Resurrection and Piero del Pollaiuolo's profile portrait of a young woman. Standing in one place here you can see a Botticelli nude and a perspective panel of an empty city that has been argued over for a century.
CC0 Cabinets 35 to 41: the Italian cabinets
The trecento and early quattrocento, much of it in long glazed vitrines: gold-ground panels, gabled altar wings, small predella scenes hung a foot apart so the differences between workshops are legible. Giotto's Death of the Virgin of about 1310, which the museum also titles The Entombment of Mary and which belongs to the Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein rather than to the state, is at this end, with Simone Martini's Entombment, Masaccio's birth tray of about 1423, Fra Filippo Lippi's Adoration in the Forest of 1459 and Gentile da Fabriano's enthroned Virgin.
Cabinets 33 and 34: the Children's Realm and the miniatures
Cabinet 33 is given to what the floor plan calls the Children's Realm, on the theme of the painter's workshop, and Cabinet 34 to miniature painting. They are inside the circuit rather than off in an education wing, which means a child is looking at how the pictures were made in the same walk as the pictures.
Cabinet 23
Marked on the museum's own floor plan as closed temporarily, with no reopening date given and no statement of what it holds. The plan also carries the words subject to changes, which is the honest position for any room list here: works go off for conservation and loan, and the museum keeps a separate Paintings on Tour page for what is currently not on display.
What to see first
The Man with the Golden Helmet
Circle of Rembrandt van Rijn, about 1650 to 1655The reason this archive has a page for this museum. Bought for Berlin in 1897 as an autograph Rembrandt, doubted from the first day by Hofstede de Groot and Bredius, carried for most of a century on Wilhelm von Bode's authority, and in 1986 concluded by this museum, after technical examination, not to be by Rembrandt at all but by a painter of his circle. The museum withdrew an attribution and did not allege a forgery. No new name has been adopted and the label reads anonymous. It is inventory 811A and it belongs to the Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein rather than to the state. A museum that publishes a conclusion against its own most reproduced picture is doing the thing this publication exists to record.20
Full record in this archiveThe Madonna in the Church
Jan van Eyck, about 1437 to 1440The museum's own headline picture for the Netherlandish department, and a panel small enough that most visitors are surprised by it. Berlin's fifteenth-century Netherlandish rooms are the sequence specialists travel for, and this is their anchor.19
Cupid as Victor
Caravaggio, 1601 to 1602One of the few Caravaggios in Germany and marked by position on the museum's own floor plan, which is how the institution signals what it expects you to look for. The collection page also lists it under the title Amor Vincit Omnia, dated 1602, so the museum itself is not consistent about the title or the year.6
Young Lady with a Pearl Necklace
Johannes Vermeer, about 1660 to 1665One of two Vermeers here, with The Glass of Wine of 1658 to 1660. Two Vermeers in one department is rare, and both are in the Dutch seventeenth-century rooms rather than isolated as a set piece.15
The Fountain of Youth
Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546Late Cranach at full scale, and one of the pictures the museum puts on its own highlights carousel. It sits in the German department that the museum names, with Italian painting of the same centuries, as a core strength of the collection.17
The merchant Georg Gisze
Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532Marked by position on the floor plan and used by the museum as the illustration for its whole German department. A portrait of a Hanseatic merchant in London, painted by a German in England and hanging in Berlin, which is a provenance question dressed as a picture.6
Venus
Sandro Botticelli, about 1490In Hall XVIII at the far end of the circuit, on the same wall as the Ideal City panel. The museum also holds his Virgin and Child with Singing Angels and his Giuliano de' Medici, which makes Berlin a serious Botticelli address and not a one-picture stop.18
Death of the Virgin
Giotto di Bondone, about 1310The oldest Italian picture the museum puts forward, and the one that shows how the collection was actually built: the museum's collection page credits it to the Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein, the private patrons' society Bode founded in 1897, not to the state. The same page also calls it The Entombment of Mary, so the museum runs two English titles for it.18
Neptune and Amphitrite
Jan Gossart, 1516Two life-size nudes in a classical niche, painted by a Netherlander who had been to Rome, and one of the pictures that makes Hall VI worth slowing down in. It is on the museum's own list for the department.19
The Monforte Altarpiece
Hugo van der Goes, about 1470 to 1475A very large Adoration of the Magi, incomplete at the top where it was cut, and one of the few pictures by van der Goes anywhere. The museum lists it among its own Netherlandish highlights.19
The Child with the Bird
Peter Paul Rubens, about 1614, reworked about 1625Marked by position on the floor plan and first on the museum's Flemish list, ahead of the two Rubens saints. The museum's own dating, with a rework eleven years later, is the kind of two-stage date that provenance work has to carry rather than smooth over.16
The Lot fragment
Hans Baldung Grien, about 1537Restituted by this museum to the heirs of the painter Hans Purrmann, who sold it to the Berlin museums in May 1937 at market value only because his persecution as a degenerate artist had taken his income. The heirs lent it back for ten years, so the picture on the wall is not the museum's. It is a fragment of a larger panel that showed Lot with his two daughters.12
Artworks recorded here
Exhibitions on now
- On now15 Sep 2026 to 10 Jan 2027Confirmed 17 Sep 2026
Past exhibitions here
- Closed16 Jun to 13 Sep 2026Confirmed 7 Aug 2026 · check before you travel
A collection much older than the building it is in
The Gemaeldegalerie opened as a public institution in 1830, in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Royal Museum on the Lustgarten, the building now called the Altes Museum. What it opened with was not bought for the public: the nucleus was the combined art collection of Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg and Frederick the Great, assembled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as princely property. What made the new institution different from a princely cabinet was its first director. Gustav Friedrich Waagen arranged and expanded the Berlin holdings according to systematic scholarly criteria rather than personal taste, and the museum's own account calls that genuinely innovative for its moment.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. A collection hung by taste is a record of one man's eye; a collection hung as a survey is an argument about the history of art, and it can be checked. Almost everything good and everything difficult about this museum follows from that decision of the 1830s. The survey principle is why there are 72 galleries rather than twenty, why the eighteenth century gets three cabinets and the fifteenth gets halls, and why a proposal to show a smaller and better selection reads here as an attack on the collection's reason for existing rather than as good curating.
Bode, the patrons' society, and the cost of a director being right
The gallery's international standing was made by Wilhelm von Bode, director from 1890 to 1929. The museum credits his connoisseurship and his energy with a string of acquisitions that produced what it calls a near complete survey of European painting from the thirteenth century onwards. He also solved the funding problem by inventing a mechanism: in 1897 he founded the Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein, a society of wealthy Prussian citizens who bought pictures for the state galleries. The Verein is still active and still owns things on these walls. Giotto's Death of the Virgin is credited to it on the museum's own collection page, and so is Schongauer's Nativity. In 1904 the swollen collection moved into a purpose-built home, the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum, now the Bode-Museum, conceived as a museum of Renaissance art in which painting and sculpture were shown together.
Bode's authority is also the reason this archive has a record of one of the pictures in the Dutch rooms. In 1897 the Verein bought The Man with the Golden Helmet as an autograph Rembrandt. The two most formidable Rembrandt scholars of the day, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Abraham Bredius, doubted it from the moment it arrived. Bode's endorsement carried the field, and the doubts dropped out of the literature for most of a century. A collection built by a director of great judgement inherits his misjudgements at the same rate, and a museum that has been right in public is institutionally worse placed to say later that it was wrong.
What the war and the wall did to it
The museum's own account is blunt about the break. The Second World War ended what it calls a long and illustrious period of continuous development: the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum was badly damaged in the aerial bombardment, and over 400 large-scale works were lost. Those are not pictures in storage somewhere. The museum keeps a separate loss documentation for the Gemaeldegalerie, which is the honest institutional response to a hole that cannot be filled, and it is worth saying plainly that a survey collection with 400 large paintings burned out of it is a survey with gaps in the middle of it.
Then the city was divided and the collection was divided with it. From the Cold War until 1997 there were two Gemaeldegalerien: one in Berlin-Dahlem in the West, holding what the Burlington Magazine later described as the more significant part, and one in the Bode-Museum on the Museumsinsel in the East. Fifty years of separate hanging, separate cataloguing and separate scholarship on one collection. It was reunited and put on show at the Kulturforum in 1998. The collection has therefore been in one place, under one roof, for 28 years out of its 196, and that is the fact to hold on to before reading anything about where it should go next.
The building: Prussian austerity, a dome, and a very large hall
Design proposals were submitted to an architectural competition in 1986 and the contract went to Heinz Hilmer and Christoph Sattler the following year. The museum describes the result in its own words as having a distinctly Prussian austerity of expression, a simple building rising above a sloping piazzetta, with the individual galleries grouped around a light-filled central hall, and it says the plainness of the facade is deliberately reminiscent of Schinkel's Altes Museum. That is a claim of descent from the building the collection started in, made by a building put up 168 years later.
What it produces in use is a sequence with one surprise in it. The exterior gives nothing away and carries no name of its own; the lettering on the piazza wall says Kulturforum, and lists the Gemaeldegalerie first among the institutions behind it. You enter a small polygonal hall lit through a coffered ring of glass blocks and a round oculus, which is the one deliberately theatrical thing in the building. That opens into the Central Hall, an enormous top-lit space with two rows of square columns, a shallow vault pierced by circular skylights and a low water basin set into the floor holding a sculptural installation. The floor plan gives the hall to special exhibitions. Everything else is arranged around it, so the hall is also the room you keep crossing, and its scale is the most divisive thing about the building: it is either the calm centre the museum intended or a great deal of empty stone between you and the pictures.
The eviction that nearly happened, and what has happened instead
In June 2012 the Budget Committee of the German Parliament allocated ten million euros to convert the fabric-lined galleries of this museum into space suited to modern art. The Burlington Magazine's editorial that October reported that the decision appeared to have caught the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz unawares, and that it was driven by two pressures: the Neue Nationalgalerie was to close for refurbishment in 2015, and 150 works of Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist art given to Berlin by Heiner and Ulla Pietzsch came with a condition that a significant part be permanently displayed in the context of the Neue Nationalgalerie's holdings. Under the plan the old masters would move into cramped shared accommodation in the Bode-Museum, alongside the sculpture collection in Bode's spirit, until new galleries could be built across the Kupfergraben. The editorial recorded that the date for those galleries had already slipped from beyond 2018 to not before 2022, that no feasibility study had been done, no architect appointed and no money raised, and that a brochure inviting sponsors had nonetheless been produced. It reported the affair being called a Kulturkampf between new art and old, Willibald Sauerlaender likening it to Swift's Battle of the Books, and the Stiftung's president suggesting a smaller temporary display might be superior since not every work was first rate, which art historians received as an insult to a collection built on depth.
What has happened since is that the twentieth century got its own building instead. A new museum, berlin modern, is under construction on the Kulturforum beside the Neue Nationalgalerie to a design by Herzog and de Meuron, with a groundbreaking in December 2019 and a foundation stone laid in February 2024, and the museum's own account of it describes a revised, more sustainable and more participatory scheme with free exhibition space and a street gallery. So the pressure that would have emptied these galleries has been built next door rather than resolved at their expense. The Gemaeldegalerie's own collection page nonetheless still states that plans are being devised to return the collection to the Museumsinsel, to show the paintings in dialogue with sculpture of the same period. That is the same idea the 2012 editorial argued against, still in the museum's own words, with no date and no building attached to it.
Provenance: what this museum publishes about itself
A museum is a party to provenance, not a neutral host, and the Gemaeldegalerie's own news pages are the best evidence of how it handles that. Two cases are published there in detail. In the first, the Stiftung restituted five works to the heirs of Heinrich Ueberall, a Berlin art and antiques dealer whose customers had included the German Foreign Office until 1933, who was forced to give up his business between 1936 and 1938, obtained a British visa in 1939 too late to use it, and died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in September 1939. His widow Rebekka took her own life in 1942 after receiving a deportation notice, destitute in a so-called Jewish apartment. Three of the five works came from this museum: Matthias Stom's Sarah Leading Hagar to Abraham of 1642 to 1650, a seventeenth-century copy after Bartholomeus van der Helst, and a still life by Frans Ykens. They had entered the collection through a 1935 purchase facilitated by the Dresdner Bank, part of a mixed lot of over 4,000 artworks the state of Prussia acquired from the bank, much of it held as loan collateral. The Stiftung has run a provenance project on that lot since the beginning of 2018 and states it had long suspected it contained works confiscated through persecution.
In the second, the museum restituted a fragment of a painting of Lot of about 1537 by Hans Baldung Grien to the heirs of the painter Hans Purrmann. Purrmann sold it to the Berlin museums in May 1937. The museum's own account concedes the crucial point rather than hiding behind it: the price he was paid matched the market value at the time, and he sold only because his persecution as a so-called degenerate artist had destroyed his livelihood. A fair price under those conditions is not a fair transaction. The heirs lent the fragment back for ten years, so the picture in the German galleries is on loan from the family it was taken from. Both cases are on the museum's site under its own name, and in both it identifies itself as a beneficiary of the persecution of Jews and of artists. That is a good deal more than most institutions of this rank put in writing.
The picture that unmade itself
Somewhere in the Dutch and Flemish rooms hangs a head of an old man in an iron gorget under an ornamental helmet loaded with gold paint so thick it stands off the canvas. For most of the twentieth century The Man with the Golden Helmet was among the most reproduced pictures in Germany, hanging as a print and in embroidery in a very large number of ordinary homes. It was bought for Berlin in 1897 as a Rembrandt. In 1986, after technical examination, this museum concluded that it is not by Rembrandt but by a painter of his circle.
The precision of that conclusion is the reason this archive treats the Gemaeldegalerie as a subject and not just a location. The museum withdrew an attribution. It did not find a forgery and has never suggested one; the curator who announced the result said in as many words that it is not a fake and remains a great and masterly work. No replacement name has been adopted, though Carel van den Pluym, Heyman Dullaert and Johann Ulrich Mayr have all been proposed, and the label reads anonymous. The examination that unmade the attribution also found that the canvas had been cut down on all sides and that large areas, chiefly in the face, had been filled in or painted over by restorers under an ochre varnish that gave the picture exactly the warm tone by which generations had recognised it as Rembrandtesque. A century of connoisseurship had been judging a surface that was substantially not the painter's. The picture is inventory 811A and it belongs to Bode's Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein, not to the state, which means the society Bode founded to buy pictures still owns the one that cost him most.
How to actually use it
The museum's own numbers are the planning tool: just under two kilometres, some 72 halls and cabinets, about 1,200 paintings, and nine departments. Nobody sees that properly in one visit and the ticket does not require you to. Day tickets admit at any time during opening hours on the date printed, they are sold at the counter as well as online up to four weeks ahead, and the museum's only advice is that booking online saves the queue. There is no timed entry to work around and no evening opening: Tuesday to Sunday, ten until six, closed Monday.
The honest strategy is to pick a department and finish it. The early Netherlandish halls, IV to VI, are the strongest thing here and take an hour properly. The Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century, halls VII to XI with cabinets 8 to 19 around them, is the largest and holds the Rembrandts, the two Vermeers and the picture this archive follows. Hall XVIII and the cabinets from 35 to 41 at the far end are the Italian thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and are the quietest rooms in the building on most days. At 14.00 EUR for the collection display, coming back twice costs less than one ticket to several better-known museums, and the 22.00 EUR Kulturforum ticket admits to the Kupferstichkabinett, the Kunstbibliothek and the Kunstgewerbemuseum in the same building. The Walther Koenig bookshop keeps the museum's hours and the cafe is on the upper level of the shared foyer. Cabinet 23 is closed, and what is currently away on loan or in conservation is listed on the museum's own Paintings on Tour page rather than guessed at on the wall.
What visitors say
We publish no visitor prose and cite no platform average, so what follows is built from the museum's own statements and from named published criticism. The museum's case for itself is depth: about 1,200 paintings over a circuit of just under two kilometres through some 72 halls and cabinets, arranged as a continuous survey of European painting from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, with 20 Rembrandts in a gallery it says holds a leading position reflected in its central place in the plan. The price is low for what is behind the door, 14.00 EUR for the whole collection display and half that on concession. What is repeatedly said against it is not about the pictures. It is that the collection has spent three decades being told it is in the wrong building: it was split between two cities until 1997, opened at the Kulturforum in 1998, was nearly evicted from it in 2012 to make room for twentieth-century art, and the museum's own collection page still says plans are being devised to move it to the Museumsinsel. No date is given. A visitor who wants to know where these pictures will be in ten years cannot find out from the institution that holds them.
What is praised, what is criticised
- Praised: the depth rather than the highlights: nine departments and about 1,200 paintings hung as a survey, so a school or a workshop can be followed across a room instead of met once
- Praised: the Rembrandt holding, 20 works by the museum's own count, placed at the centre of the plan rather than in a side room
- Praised: the price: 14.00 EUR for the whole collection display, 7.00 EUR concession, and 22.00 EUR for every exhibition on the Kulturforum site, which is low against comparable old-master collections in Europe
- Praised: the galleries themselves, which the museum designed to be top-lit and grouped around a light-filled central hall, and which are hung on fabric with the smallest panels glazed into shadow boxes rather than crowded
- Praised: audio tours in nine languages, German, English, French, Italian, Korean, Polish, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian
- Praised: that the museum publishes its restitutions on its own news pages, with the biography of the dispossessed owner set out at length rather than reduced to a line
- Criticised: the collection's future is unsettled and the museum will not say when: its own collection page states that plans are being devised to return it to the Museumsinsel, with no date, no building and no interim arrangement published
- Criticised: in June 2012 the Bundestag budget committee allocated ten million euros to convert this museum's fabric-lined galleries into space for modern art, and The Burlington Magazine reported that the plan had no feasibility study, no architect and no funds raised
- Criticised: the same editorial reported the president of the Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz suggesting a smaller temporary display might be superior because not every work was first rate, which art historians took as an argument against the survey principle the collection was built on
- Criticised: the war losses are permanent and large: the museum records over 400 large-scale works lost, and keeps a separate loss documentation for the Gemaeldegalerie
- Criticised: Cabinet 23 is marked closed temporarily on the museum's own floor plan, with no reopening date and no statement of what it holds, and the plan carries the words subject to changes
- Criticised: the free-admission list on the museum's Concessions and Free Admission page does not render without script, so the one group of visitors most likely to need it in advance cannot read it in a plain browser
- Criticised: the approach: in every free-licence photograph of the entrance the museum is reached across a very large expanse of empty granite, and the building itself carries no name of its own on the front, only the shared Kulturforum lettering
The October 2012 editorial, read in full, is the sharpest published attack on what was being done to this collection. It set out the Stiftung's long-held scheme to reinstate the old masters on the Museumsinsel beside the sculpture collection in Bode's spirit, and the ten million euros the Bundestag budget committee allocated in June 2012 to convert the Gemaeldegalerie's fabric-lined galleries for modern art, prompted by the closure of the Neue Nationalgalerie for refurbishment and by the Pietzsch gift of 150 Surrealist and Abstract Expressionist works. It recorded that the official announcement gave the twentieth century priority over the old masters, that critics were calling the affair a Kulturkampf, and that Willibald Sauerlaender had likened it to Swift's Battle of the Books. It objected that the plans were sketchy: a brochure for sponsors existed, a feasibility study did not, no architect had been appointed and no funds had been raised, while the date for replacement galleries had already slipped from beyond 2018 to not before 2022. It noted that many specialists doubt whether Bode's method of hanging painting with sculpture is still desirable, and that no other great museum follows it outside individual period rooms. And it recorded that the director of the Gemaeldegalerie had publicly said the old masters would not leave the Kulturforum until an appropriate home existed, adding that he should be held to his word.The Burlington Magazine, editorial, unsigned, 1 October 2012 [10]
The museum publishes its own restitution cases at length on its news pages, with the biography of the dispossessed owner rather than a bare legal summary: the Berlin dealer Heinrich Ueberall, who died in Sachsenhausen in September 1939 and whose widow took her own life in 1942 after a deportation notice, and the painter Hans Purrmann, who sold a Baldung Grien fragment to these museums in May 1937 at market value because his persecution had left him without income. In both cases the museum names itself a beneficiary of persecution. That is not a review, and we treat it as what the institution is willing to say about itself in public.Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, on its own acquisitions, the museum, 5 August 2026 [11]
Questions about Gemaeldegalerie
Where is Gemaeldegalerie?
Johanna-und-Eduard-Arnhold-Platz / Matthaeikirchplatz, 10785 Berlin, Germany.
How much does it cost to visit?
Gemaeldegalerie, paintings from the 13th to 18th century: EUR 14; Gemaeldegalerie, concession: EUR 7; Kulturforum, all exhibitions: EUR 22; Kulturforum, all exhibitions, concession: EUR 11; Annual pass, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: EUR 25. As confirmed 4 September 2026.
When is it open?
Monday closed; Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-18:00. Closed: Monday. As confirmed 4 September 2026.
How do you get there?
U-Bahn: Potsdamer Platz; S-Bahn: Potsdamer Platz; Bus: Potsdamer Bruecke, Potsdamer Platz Bhf / Vossstrasse, Kulturforum, Philharmonie; On foot: The visitor entrance is on the Kulturforum piazza between Johanna-und-Eduard-Arnhold-Platz and Matthaeikirchplatz, a short walk west of Potsdamer Platz and next door to the Kupferstichkabinett, the Kunstbibliothek, the Kunstgewerbemuseum and the Neue Nationalgalerie.
What should you see first?
The Man with the Golden Helmet (Circle of Rembrandt van Rijn, about 1650 to 1655); The Madonna in the Church (Jan van Eyck, about 1437 to 1440); Cupid as Victor (Caravaggio, 1601 to 1602); Young Lady with a Pearl Necklace (Johannes Vermeer, about 1660 to 1665); The Fountain of Youth (Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1546); The merchant Georg Gisze (Hans Holbein the Younger, 1532).
What we could not confirm
- Which room The Man with the Golden Helmet hangs in, and whether it is currently on display at all. Our own record places it at the Gemaeldegalerie as of 4 August 2026 with inventory 811A, but the museum's floor plan does not mark it and its digital collections search is a script-driven application that returned no result to a plain fetch. A museum-published object record for 811A should be attached before this page claims a room.
- What the sculptural installation in the water basin at the centre of the Central Hall is. It is plainly visible in the free-licence photographs and we have found no statement about it on the museum's own pages; we have deliberately not taken the identification from a Commons uploader's description.
- Who enters free. The museum's Concessions and Free Admission page states the concession rate is generally 50 per cent and lists who qualifies for it, then introduces a list of who is admitted free which is loaded by script and was absent from the fetched page. It needs reading in a browser before we publish any free tier.
- What Cabinet 23 holds and when it reopens. The museum's floor plan says only closed temporarily.
- Whether the plan to move the collection to the Museumsinsel is still live in any funded sense. The museum's collection page still states it; the museum of twentieth-century art that would have displaced the paintings in 2012 is instead being built beside the Neue Nationalgalerie. No date, site or budget for a Gemaeldegalerie move has been found on the institution's own pages.
- Current visitor figures. We found no published attendance number for the Gemaeldegalerie on the museum's own pages and have deliberately published none rather than take one from an aggregator.
Images
Sources
- 1Gemaeldegalerie, Plan Your Visit: opening hours by day, the visitor entrance address, transport, wheelchair access and free WiFi. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/plan-your-visit/
- 2Gemaeldegalerie, Tickets and Admission: the 14.00 EUR collection ticket and 7.00 EUR concession, the 22.00 EUR Kulturforum ticket, the annual pass from 25.00 EUR, the 3-day Museum Pass Berlin at 29.00 EUR, and the information and booking telephone number. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/plan-your-visit/prices-tickets/
- 3Wikidata, Gemaeldegalerie Berlin (Q165631): coordinates 52.50861 N, 13.36472 E, inception 1830, telephone +49 30 266424242 and official website, used as the machine identity only and cross-checked against the museum's own pages. Tertiary. wikidata.org/wiki/Q165631
- 4Gemaeldegalerie, About the Collection in the Gemaeldegalerie: the 1830 foundation in Schinkel's Royal Museum, the Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg and Frederick the Great nucleus, Gustav Friedrich Waagen as first director, Wilhelm von Bode as director 1890 to 1929, the 1904 move to the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum, the 1897 founding of the Kaiser Friedrich-Museums-Verein, the loss of over 400 large-scale works in the war, the Dahlem and Bode-Museum split until 1997, the 1998 opening at the Kulturforum, the plan to return the collection to the Museumsinsel, the just-under-two-kilometre circuit of some 72 galleries and about 1,200 paintings, the 20 Rembrandts and the central position of the Rembrandt gallery, and the nine audio-tour languages. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/collection/
- 5Gemaeldegalerie, Profile of the Gemaeldegalerie: the 1986 architectural competition and the 1987 award to Hilmer and Sattler, the museum's own description of the building's Prussian austerity of expression and of galleries grouped around a light-filled central hall, and its statement that the facade is deliberately reminiscent of Schinkel's Altes Museum. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/about-us/profile/
- 6Gemaeldegalerie, Floor Plan of the Gemaeldegalerie (PDF, 189 KB), text extracted from the file itself: the department-by-room key for Halls I to XVIII, Cabinets 1 to 41 and the Central Hall, the note that Cabinet 23 is closed temporarily, the note that the plan is subject to changes, and the works the plan marks by position, among them the Vermeer, the Petrus Christus, the Holbein, the Chardin, the Caravaggio, the Botticelli, the Titian and the Rubens. smb.museum/fileadmin/website/Museen_und_Sammlungen/Gemaeldegalerie/Besuch_Planen/Lageplan/floor-plan-Gemaeldegalerie.pdf
- 7Gemaeldegalerie, Highlights of the Collection: the nine departmental groupings the museum uses, and the individual pictures it puts forward as its highlights with their dates, including the van Eyck, the Cranach, the Caravaggio, the Rembrandt, the Vermeer, the Holbein, the Petrus Christus, the Watteau, the Canaletto and the Ideal City attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/collection-highlights/
- 8Gemaeldegalerie, Gastronomy and Bookstore: the Cafe at the Kulturforum on the upper level of the foyer, and the Walther Koenig bookstore with its own hours, closed Monday and open Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00, and its telephone number. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/plan-your-visit/gastronomy-gift-shop/
- 9Gemaeldegalerie, Concessions and Free Admission: the statement that the reduced rate is generally 50 per cent and the list of who qualifies. The separate free-admission list on the same page is loaded by script and was not in the fetched HTML. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/plan-your-visit/concessions-free-admission/
- 10The Burlington Magazine, editorial, 'Old versus new in the Berlin museums', October 2012, volume 154 number 1315. The whole editorial was read in the raw bytes: the plan to clear the Gemaeldegalerie out of the Kulturforum for a museum of twentieth-century art, the ten million euros the Bundestag budget committee allocated in June 2012 to convert its fabric-lined galleries, the Pietzsch gift of 150 works, the charge that the plans were sketchy with no feasibility study, no architect and no funds, the objection that no other great museum hangs painting with sculpture in Bode's manner, and the slippage of the replacement galleries from beyond 2018 to not before 2022. burlington.org.uk/archive/editorial/old-versus-new-in-the-berlin-museums
- 11Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 'Five Works from the Gemaeldegelerie and the Alte Nationalgalerie restituted': the restitution to the heirs of the Berlin art dealer Heinrich Ueberall, who died in Sachsenhausen in September 1939, of three Gemaeldegalerie pictures acquired in the 1935 Dresdner Bank transaction, named as Matthias Stom's Sarah Leading Hagar to Abraham, a copy after Bartholomeus van der Helst and a still life by Frans Ykens; the 4,000-work mixed lot Prussia bought from the bank; the provenance project running since the beginning of 2018; and the statement by Dr Irena Strelow for the heirs. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/whats-new/detail/five-works-from-the-gemaeldegelerie-and-the-alte-nationalgalerie-restituted/
- 12Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 'Restituted Work from Hans Purrmann's Collection to Remain with the Gemaeldegalerie as a Loan': the restitution of the Lot fragment of about 1537 by Hans Baldung Grien, which Purrmann sold to the Berlin museums in May 1937 at market value but only because his persecution as a degenerate artist had destroyed his income, and the heirs' agreement to lend it back for ten years. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/whats-new/detail/restituted-work-from-hans-purrmanns-collection-to-remain-with-the-gemaeldegalerie-as-a-loan/
- 13Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 'A Sustainable Building for Everyone: The Evolution of Plans for the New berlin modern Museum': the museum of twentieth-century art now under construction on the Kulturforum beside the Neue Nationalgalerie, its December 2019 groundbreaking and February 2024 foundation stone, and the revisions to the Herzog and de Meuron design. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/whats-new/detail/a-sustainable-building-for-everyone-the-evolution-of-plans-for-the-new-berlin-modern-museum/
- 14Wikimedia Commons, Category:Gemaeldegalerie (Berlin) and its subcategory Category:Gemaeldegalerie, Berlin - Building, plus the room-numbered interior files: the source of every plate on this page. The licence of each file was read individually from extmetadata.LicenseShortName and every plate was opened and looked at before it was attached. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gem%C3%A4ldegalerie_(Berlin)
- 15Gemaeldegalerie, Highlights: Dutch Paintings of the 17th Century, the museum's own list with dates, including the two Vermeers, Frans Hals's Malle Babbe and his Catharina Hooft with her nurse, Rembrandt's Samson and Delilah of 1628 and his Self-Portrait with a Velvet Beret and a Fur Collar of 1634, Ter Borch, Dou, Claesz, Ruisdael, ter Brugghen and Saenredam. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/collection-highlights/dutch-paintings-17th-century/
- 16Gemaeldegalerie, Highlights: Flemish Paintings of the 17th Century, the museum's own list including three Rubenses with the Child with a Bird, Saint Sebastian and Saint Cecilia, van Dyck's Young Genoese Lady, Jordaens, Jan Brueghel the Elder's Bouquet of Flowers, Brouwer, Cornelis de Vos, Teniers and Gonzales Coques. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/collection-highlights/flemish-paintings-17th-century/
- 17Gemaeldegalerie, Highlights: German Paintings of the 13th to the 16th Century, the museum's own list including the anonymous Crucifixion retable from Soest of about 1240, Schongauer's Nativity marked Property of the KFMV, Duerer's Hieronymus Holzschuher of 1526 with its cover, Baldung's Lamentation, Altdorfer, Cranach the Elder's Fountain of Youth of 1546 and Holbein the Younger's merchant Georg Gisze of 1532. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/collection-highlights/german-paintings-13th-16th-century/
- 18Gemaeldegalerie, Highlights: Italian Paintings of the 14th and 15th Century, the museum's own list including Giotto's Death of the Virgin of about 1310, Simone Martini's Entombment of Christ, Masaccio's birth tray of about 1423, Fra Filippo Lippi's Adoration in the Forest of 1459, Mantegna's Presentation at the Temple, Giovanni Bellini's Resurrection, Piero del Pollaiuolo's profile portrait, Carpaccio, Gentile da Fabriano, the Ideal City attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Botticelli's Venus of about 1490. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/collection-highlights/italian-paintings-14th-15th-century/
- 19Gemaeldegalerie, Highlights: Dutch Paintings of the 15th and 16th Century, the museum's own list including van Eyck's Madonna in the Church of about 1437 to 1440, Rogier van der Weyden's Portrait of a Young Woman with a White Headdress of about 1440, Petrus Christus's Portrait of a Young Lady of about 1470, Hugo van der Goes's Monforte Altarpiece, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Gerard David, Bosch's John on Patmos, Bruegel the Elder's Two Chained Monkeys of 1562, Jan Gossart's Neptune and Amphitrite of 1516, Jean Fouquet and Anthonis Mor's Duchess Margaret of Parma. Read from the raw HTML on 5 August 2026. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/collection-highlights/dutch-paintings-15th-16th-century/
- 20Iconotheca, our own record of The Man with the Golden Helmet, circle of Rembrandt van Rijn, about 1650 to 1655, read live on 5 August 2026: the Gemaeldegalerie as its current location, inventory number 811A, the deposit from the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museums-Verein, the 1897 purchase as an autograph Rembrandt over the objections of Hofstede de Groot and Bredius, and the 1986 withdrawal of the attribution after technical examination. This is our own research and not a museum publication; a museum-published object record for inventory 811A should be attached to this venue page on the next pass. iconotheca.com/artworks/circle-of-rembrandt/man-with-the-golden-helmet/
- 21Gemaeldegalerie, Paintings on Tour: the museum's own list of works currently off the permanent-collection circuit, for loan, conservation, photography or exhibition preparation. Checked against every highlights[] entry on this page on 10 August 2026: none of the twelve highlighted works, including The Man with the Golden Helmet, appears on this list as loaned out, deaccessioned or removed from the collection. Two, Holbein's The Merchant George Gisze (cat. no. 586) and Rubens's The Child with the Bird (cat. no. 763), are listed as currently being prepared for the museum's own forthcoming exhibition Portraits! Surprising Encounters from Botticelli to Lempicka and so are temporarily off their usual gallery wall, in-house, not on loan elsewhere. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/collection-research/paintings-on-tour/
- 22Gemaeldegalerie, What's New: the museum's own news list, read in full on 10 August 2026. No item published since 4 August 2026 concerns this venue; nothing announces a deaccession, an acquisition affecting a highlighted work, a closure or a reopening. The most recent item confirms the museum is operating and promoting a forthcoming special exhibition, Portraits! Surprising Encounters from Botticelli to Lempicka, 16 October 2026 to 14 March 2027, which is consistent with ordinary operation, not a closure. smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/gemaeldegalerie/about-us/whats-new/