Symposium or Das Gastmahl des Platon [1] are paintings by the German painter Anselm Feuerbach from c. 1869 and 1873/74 of a moment from Plato's Symposium, when the drunken Alcibiades and revelers enter the house of the poet Agathon. [2] [3] Socrates, near the wall at right-centre, turns his back on the scene, and bows his head. [3]
The 1869 painting is in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and the 1874 painting in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. [3]
Symposium was first displayed in 1869 at the Great International Art Exhibition, in Munich Germany. During the exhibition critics wrote, “a sea of ice that had forced itself undesired into a perfume shop.” Another critic, “An extreme of ugliness in form and color which borders on vulgarity and filth ... as if Feuerbach had put his paint brush into ink and calcium water instead of color.” The image ended up in a private collection. Feuerbach painted another more colorful version, which is since 1878 in the collection of the National Gallery in Berlin (Alte Nationalgalerie). However, the earlier 1869 version has been considered by some, to be the superior of the two works on the subject. [1] In the second version the decor and costumes have become still more elaborate and Victorian. [3]
The subject was not common, but had been depicted in an etching of 1648 by Pietro Testa, with a similar basic composition, including Socrates ignoring the intrusion.
Anselm Feuerbach was a German painter. He was the leading neoclassical painter of the German 19th-century school.
The Neue Nationalgalerie at the Kulturforum is a museum for modern art in Berlin, with its main focus on the 20th century. It is part of the National Gallery of the Berlin State Museums. The museum building and its sculpture gardens were designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and opened on September 15th, 1968.
The Altes Museum is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin, Germany. Built between 1825 and 1830 by order of King Frederick William III of Prussia according to plans by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it is considered a major work of German Neoclassical architecture. It is surrounded by the Berlin Cathedral to the east, the Berlin Palace to the south and the Zeughaus to the west. Currently, the Altes Museum houses the Antikensammlung and parts of the Münzkabinett. As part of the Museum Island complex, the Altes Museum was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, in recognition of its testimony to the development of the museum as a social and architectural phenomenon.
The Alte Nationalgalerie is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin, Germany. The gallery was built from 1862 to 1876 by the order of King Frederick William IV of Prussia according to plans by Friedrich August Stüler and Johann Heinrich Strack in Neoclassical and Renaissance Revival styles. The building's outside stair features a memorial to Frederick William IV. Currently, the Alte Nationalgalerie is home to paintings and sculptures of the 19th century and hosts a variety of tourist buses daily. As part of the Museum Island complex, the gallery was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 for its outstanding architecture and its testimony to the development of museums and galleries as a cultural phenomenon in the late 19th century.
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