Building and History
The building, erected in the style of historism by Gabriel von Seidl 1894-1900, is one of the most original and significant museum buildings of its time. It is situated in the Prinzregentenstrasse, one of the city's four royal avenues. The house replaced an older building which houses today the State Museum of Ethnology.
The museum was founded by king Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1855. It houses a large collection of European artifacts from the late antiquity until early 20th century. From the beginning the collection has been divided into two main groups: the art historical collection and the folklore collection.
A new building behind the museum houses the Bavarian State Archaeological Collection (Archäologische Staatssammlung) from the first settlement in the Paleolithic Ages through the Celtic civilization and the Roman period right up to the early Middle Ages.
Read more about this topic: Bavarian National Museum
Famous quotes containing the words building and/or history:
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)