My Kind of Church - the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

The Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. A gleaming wonder of white walls. Wide, open plan rooms. A string quartet softly playing in one wing, a flute concet in another and at some point, the lilting strains of a soprano. There is something utterly calm and peaceful about an art gallery; people taking time out of their busy lives just to sit and look at the paintings. The paintings in the Gemäldegalerie stretch from the Medieval era through to the 18th Century, leaving the 19th Century and beyond for the Neue Nationalgalerie next door. The Medieval paintings, from the dark ages of the last millenia, mostly depict grim religious scenes or two dimensional faces leafed in gold, but the real gems in the collection appear after the Middle Ages, and especially in the Dutch paintings at the back of the gallery. The collection includes a plethora of famous artists: works by Dürer, Titian, Vermeer, Velasquez, Canaletto, Gainsborough and Rembrandt gaze at us from the walls, so recognisable and yet such a shock in reality. I always feel moved when I see great art, and especially famous art. The the faces which have felt so familiar, and the compositions which are lodged somewhere deep in our consciousnesses greet us like old friends, at the same time as they shock us afresh with their mastery. The paintings really speak to me. The eyes of Dürer's old man look questioningly, suspiciously towards me; Susanna (below) is embarrassed to be caught getting out of the bath, but also flirtatiously proud of her gleaming, naked body, and the couple in Vermeer's masterpiece (above left) carry on their modest courting blissfully oblivious to the myriad eyes boring down on them from the gallery floor. It is strangely moving to recognise the inescapable humanity of these characters. The artists did not just paint from models or puppets, but from life. We see the emotion of the characters and recognise it as the same we possess. As I wander around the gallery, I recognise more and more that people have been the same since time began. Although we are separated by hundreds of years, I am being given the privilege of staring into the emotional lives of the subjects of these paintings.
The gallery also brought home to the the genius of the artists we now consider to be "great" The paintings of Rembrandt glow with an inner light, his characters resonate with emotion and thought. We picked his paintings out of all those on the gallery walls, without knowing the artist. Vermeer's clean lines and the telling body language of his characters surpass all his imitators: when coupled with his unerring colour sense and his use of rich textiles his painting actually made me gasp when I saw it hanging. The Gemäldegalerie is perhaps the closest I will ever come to knowing what philosphers mean by the sublime: I felt inspired, awed by the acheivements of men, and moved by the realisation that man is unchanging throughout the centuries, strong and weak in equal measure. I also realised that for me, the art gallery is my church. I have no belief in God or the soul, I don't think my body will carry on after I die and I disagree strongly with the ethics of organised religion. Nevertheless, churches have always given me a feeling of peace. This may be becuase a church is a place where people come to be still and quiet, to reflect and to pause, just as an art gallery is. It may be becuase a church is usually a huge building, full of beautiful art and objects, just as an art gallery is. I also love the sense of history, of the years stretching back until we can see into the past, which I feel in art galleries just as much as churches. The gallery is open late on Thursday nights, and I think next Thursday I will relish wandering through the whitewashed rooms, alive with faces from history watching me out of the corners of their eyes.