The last mention of sgraffito here was more than two years ago: How Big is Your Diocese? It is a technique unsuitable for exposure to the elements as Wilhelm Walther discovered in Dresden in the 1870s.
He executed a mural just over 100 metres long in sgraffito on the outside wall of the Stallhof, on Schlossplatz Square. It faded and was washed away. In the 1900s it was replaced by Meissen porcelain tiles, more than 24,000 of them depicting a cast of over 100 characters: margraves, princes and kings as well as scientists, artisans, craftsmen and farmers. It represents the history of the Wettins, the ruling House of Saxony, riding in a procession.
It looks a sociable excursion, like an up-market Canterbury Tales. But it need not detain us for long as nearby is the Zwinger Palace, a Baroque beauty to rival any in Europe.
Inside are four museums of which we visited only one: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Quite how such a collection of high quality art has been preserved in Dresden after the damage of the Seven Years War (1756 -1763) in which Prussia invaded Saxony and much greater destruction in WW II is a bit of a mystery. I noticed my fellow art enthusiasts taking pictures of this world class collection needlessly as it can all be seen on-line. I took this picture in a room devoted to frames.
It would be tedious to list either the artists or their pictures so I will just show you one that particularly appealed to me.
Do you see the snail crawling along the floor at the Virgin Mary’s feet? It looks a bit like a mouse but it’s a snail, symbolising the Virgin birth as snails in those days were supposed to reproduce without having sex. At the bottom of the picture Mary is watching over Jesus while Joseph sleeps and the shepherds, on the right, dance rather riotously.
Oh, I must mention one more because Poussin’s composition reminds me of his Dance to the Music of Time in the Wallace Collection.
The palace reminds me of all those Wettin cake imitations in Florida.