Object of the Month 10/2025
The former six lunettes once adorned the reading room of the old university library at Dorotheenstr. 28 (formerly house no. 9) and thus represented the faculties and subject areas of the university.
Lunettes, which fill circular framed wall panels and are usually placed above doors or windows, are associated with the architecture due to their shape. In 1871-73, a new building was erected for the university library (after several other locations since the move from the Royal Library in 1839) and also artistically decorated, as was customary for public buildings at this time. This organic unity was lost when the library moved in 1910, as was the lunette for the natural sciences. The paintings initially ended up in the old musicology reading room and were only rediscovered there in 1997 during restoration work. They were subsequently housed in the respective faculties and in the Grimm Centre (the present-day Central Library).
While no information has yet been found on the creation and commission, the surviving drafts dated between 1874 and 1878 provide a good insight into the struggle for an adequate representation of the scientific disciplines. It can be seen from the first drafts that purely allegorical representations were initially trialled. Although these allegories were retained in the creative process, they were supplemented by portrait medallions of famous university scholars. In this way, a pictorial language that had been widespread since the late Middle Ages was chosen or adapted: the personification of the faculties in connection with a scholar. The fact that the decision as to which scholar best represented the respective discipline was not always free of conflict is evident in two specific cases. The order of the lunettes also seems to have changed, as the numbering of the designs from 1874 and 1877 differs.
In the lunette of philosophy, alongside Plato and Aristotle as young men reading and learning, are the medallions of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the founding rector of the university, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In the lunette of philology, which depicts the representation of language families, August Boeckh and the Grimm brothers were chosen as representatives of the discipline. The medical lunette was greatly reduced during the design process: Aesculapius with a snake baton occupies the centre of the image, framed by medallion portraits of Johannes Müller (the ‘father of medical science’) and initially Eilhard Mitscherlich. However, the chemist and mineralogist was apparently not wanted after all, as the draft already notes: ‘Mitscherlich fällt weg, dafür Schönlein’ (Mitscherlich omitted, Schönlein added instead). Accordingly, the lunette was then executed with a portrait of Johann Lukas Schönlein, a physician with wide-ranging scientific interests. On the lunette depicting jurisprudence, the medallion originally intended to feature only the portrait of Friedrich Carl von Savigny in the centre was supplemented by Carl Gustav Homeyer and the allegory of Justice was placed in the centre.
The development of the lunette of theology is particularly interesting.
The first two designs dated 1874 still envisaged separate denominational representation. Catholicism is depicted with a Cistercian monk copying manuscripts as a “preserver of earlier cultures”, supplemented by ecclesiastical symbols and the personifications of “symbolism” and “dogmatics”.
The Protestant confession shows Luther translating the Bible in the centre of the picture in a similar arrangement, with the cross, Bible, communion chalice and the Trinity as well as the personifications of ‘interpretation’ and ‘dogmatics’ next to him.
It is only in the third design, with the allegory placed in the centre and holding the open Bible in its hand, that the Protestant confession becomes dominant and is transferred to the executed lunette. As a representative of Protestant theology, she is flanked by the portrait medallions of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, who also worked as an educational reformer and philosopher, and his colleague, the professor of church history August Neander. The reduction to one denomination for the Faculty of Theology appears to make perfect sense for its representation, as it has only been possible to study Catholic theology at Humboldt-Universität since 2019.
The removal of Catholic theology had finally freed up a pictorial field. The natural sciences were to be represented here. The design from 1877, which has survived in contrast to the finished lunette, contains two medallions with portraits of Alexander von Humboldt and the physician and naturalist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, who accompanied Humboldt on his journey through the Urals in 1829. Ehrenberg himself conducted research as a zoologist, ecologist and geologist, taught as Professor of the History of Medicine and Physiology in Berlin and held the office of Rector of Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1855/56. The many-breasted fertility goddess Artemis Ephesia fills the centre of the picture. Surprisingly, the finished lunette probably did not depict Humboldt, but the chemist and mineralogist Eilhard Mitscherlich, at least according to the inscription on the design. The great esteem in which the Berlin university lecturer and temporary rector of Friedrich Wilhelm University was held is also shown by the monument erected in his honour in front of the east wing of the university in 1894.
The lunettes of the former university library are classic representations of the faculties. From the original four faculties (theology, jurisprudence, medicine and philosophy), which already existed in the Middle Ages, further disciplines had been established, which were also included in the pictorial programmes. The planned rich iconography with allegories, personifications, famous representatives of the respective sciences, teacher-student relationships and numerous attributes of the subjects was reduced in the execution in favour of a clear schematic pictorial language that could also be easily recognised from a distance. The timeless personifications and the contemporary representatives of the subjects in a consistent scheme create an aesthetic continuity, while the various media levels (figures, fake stone, tendrils) also make art itself present. In contrast to the history painting, the lunettes are not narrative, but they also do not tell a story of rise and fall, so they are not valorising the rank of individual subjects or their representatives. Likewise, the usual hierarchy of placement has been cancelled out – there is no direction of reading, but rather a spatial allocation to the literature of the respective subject area.
Author: Christina Kuhli
Literature:
Angelika Keune: Gelehrtenbildnisse der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Denkmäler, Büsten, Reliefs, Gedenktafeln, Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Graphiken, Medaillen, Berlin 2000, p. 156f.;
Theater der Natur und Kunst. Theatrum naturae et artis. Exhibition catalogue, ed. by Horst Bredekamp, Jochen Brüning and Cornelia Weber, Berlin 2000, p. 60, cat. 2/34 (Anita Stegmeier);
Monika Wagner: Allegorie und Geschichte. Ausstattungsprogramme öffentlicher Gebäude des 19. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland von der Cornelius-Schule zur Malerei der Wilhelminischen Ära, zugl. Habil-Schrift Universität Tübingen (= Tübinger Studien zur Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte, Bd. 9), Tübingen 1989;
Karl Friese: Geschichte der Königlichen Universitäts-Bibliothek zu Berlin, Berlin 1910;
Karl-August Wirth/ Ute Götz: Fakultäten, die vier, in: Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte VI, pp. 1183-1219.
