Bode Museum

The Bode Museum, at the northern end of Berlin's Museum Island, is notable for its monumental architecture and for combining Byzantine art with one of the world's most important sculpture collections. Its tour covers pieces from the end of the Roman Empire to the 19th century, including Eastern Christian, Byzantine, Italian Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque art. The museum also houses the Münzkabinett, with some 500,000 coins and medals from Antiquity and the Middle East. Opened in the early 20th century, the museum was conceived following the innovative idea of Crown Princess Victoria of Prussia and historian Wilhelm von Bode: to exhibit paintings and sculptures together, a practice that transformed museography. Among its recent proposals is an exhibition that contrasts European and African sculptures to invite reflection on universal human themes and on the boundaries between ethnography, art history and cultural prejudice.