Our principal reminder of the outside world is the
Alte Pinakothek reflected at eyelevel in the sphere's polished surface.
Alte Pinakothek focuses on European masterpieces from the 14th to 18th centuries, including 'Madonna of the Carnation'--the only Leonardo da Vinci work in a German gallery.
Alte Pinakothek, Kunstareal, Munich, Germany; digital image from Art Resource, New York, New York, USA.
Classic pieces can be found at
Alte Pinakothek, contemporary at Neue Pinakothek, and modern at Pinakothek der Moderne.
Viewers who visited the
Alte Pinakothek during the time of the Duchamp exhibition would have been able to look through massive windows that line twin staircases leading up to the second floor where the collection is housed and seen on the south lawn of the museum a large geometric form in concrete that resembles a minimal sculpture.
The collages are based on reproductions of paintings by Raphael, Giorgione, Durer, and others in a nineteenth-century catalogue of the collection of the
Alte Pinakothek in Munich.
Altdorfer painted superb landscapes, some of them spectacular, such as those for Gethsemane (St Florian Monastery, Linz), A View of Donauworth Castle (Munich
Alte Pinakothek) and Alexander's Defeat of the Persian Army at Issus (also
Alte Pinakothek).
He rightly points out that Wolfe's experiences in Munich were not limited to the beerhall; the American author loved visiting the
Alte Pinakothek and the Neue Staatsgalerie, where he admired the works of German and continental artists.
He refers to von Klenze's
Alte Pinakothek and to a now-demolished neo-classical building by von Gaertner and van Voit using the names of the architects, but does not mention the authors of the Neue Pinakothek (by Alexander von Branca, completed in 1981) or the forbidding Pinakothek der Moderne (by Stephan Braunfels).
We know this face from grand oil paintings by Anthony van Dyck, Rubens's student, displayed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and above all from Rubens' own incomparable double portrait of himself and Isabella "In the Arbor," shown at the
Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany.