Palast Barberini
The Palast Barberini, more recently also known as the Palais Barberini, was a classicist-baroque town house built under the Prussian King Frederick II according to designs by Carl von Gontard between 1771 and 1772 at Humboldtstraße 5/6 in Potsdam. Its main façade faces the Alter Markt with the Potsdam City Palace and the St. Nicholas church.
The building was named after the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which the king had chosen as a model. The Potsdam recreation of the Italian model formed the monumental south-eastern end of the Alter Markt and, together with the neighboring Noacksches Haus at Humboldtstraße 4, also designed by Gontard, was one of the last buildings to be built around the square under Frederick II. In the middle of the 19th century, the palace building was extended by two side wings at the rear facing the Havel according to designs by Ludwig Persius and Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse and used as a venue for Potsdam's cultural and club life.
The Palast Barberini was largely destroyed in an air raid on April 14, 1945 and the ruins were demolished during the Soviet Occupation Zone. The site was then used as a green space and parking lot for a long time. As part of the redevelopment of the center of Potsdam with the reconstruction of the city palace as a new state parliament building and other buildings in the neighborhood, the Palast Barberini was rebuilt from 2013 to the end of 2016 with an exterior largely based on the original for use as the art gallery Museum Barberini after donations from the entrepreneur Hasso Plattner.
Location
The site of the Palast Barberini belonged to the medieval settlement core of the city of Potsdam in the vicinity of the Havel crossing and the castle complex located on the later site of the palace.. The city views of the 17th and early 18th centuries show the dense development of this area. Further details of the predecessor buildings that certainly existed are not known.The building stood on the south side of the Alter Markt within the closed street of Humboldtstraße, which continued east of the square with Brauerstraße. Old maps show the street running from the city-side end of the Long Bridge in a north-easterly direction to the Alter Markt, which disappeared after the demolition of the ruins of the city palace in 1960 and the development on the south side. The so-called Knobelsdorffhaus, now incorporated into the Old Town Hall complex, with the former address Brauerstraße 10, today marks the corner of this otherwise also lost street and the Alter Markt.
The north-western boundary of the street, which was named Schloss-Straße or Schloss-Gasse on 18th century plans, was formed by a side wing of the city palace, while the development of town houses in the south-east with their commercially used side wings occupied the space up to the Havel. Manger's Baugeschichte von Potsdam describes the location with the words am alten Markte unweit des Schlosses ". In the course of the introduction of house numbers in Potsdam after 1806, the houses were given the address "Am Schloss 5/6", then Humboldtstraße 5/6 from 1874.
Name
The Palast Barberini was the only building in Potsdam to be constructed according to a foreign model that was familiar not only to art-historically educated circles but also to the general public under the name of its model. While a copy of Andrea Palladio's Palazzo Valmarana in Vicenza, built in 1754 on the corner of Schlossstraße and Hohewegstraße, was known to the general public as the Plögerscher Gasthof or Kommandantur, and the recreation of a design by Inigo Jones for Whitehall Palace in Breite Straße was called Hiller-Brandtsche Häuser after the first owners, the name Palast Barberini remained alive among Potsdam's inhabitants and was also registered as such on various city maps. A role may have been played here by a mixture with the name of the famous dancer Barberina, who was adored by Frederick II and was engaged at the Royal Opera in Berlin from 1744 to 1749. However, there was no connection to the Potsdam building. The name Palais Barberini can only be found in recent press articles and publications, but not in the urban and art historical literature on Potsdam.The palace as a royal urban development
Under King Frederick William I, large parts of the old town were renovated and provided with simple half-timbered or solid buildings. His son Frederick II had these buildings gradually replaced by more magnificent buildings from 1748 onwards. This was done on the basis of the city palace and exclusively according to specifications developed from the king's perspective and often according to foreign models selected by Frederick II. It was of secondary importance whether the models selected by the king had actually been realized at the original location.The main focus was on Italian Renaissance and Mannerist buildings, but English and French buildings were also adapted for Potsdam's conditions. As these models had originally been planned for completely different purposes and classes of inhabitants, there were always glaring contradictions between the needs and financial possibilities of the bourgeois users and the royal desire for representation, especially as the king also urged the greatest possible economy: "If only great lords, especially those who, in addition to their pleasure, also build for the best of their subjects, did not want to look so much at miserable savings! how great would be the benefit for them as a result! especially in Potsdam, where palaces are built for poor citizens, whose subsistence often amounts to more than the entire benefit of renting and purchasing."
When the Palast Barberini was built between 1771 and 1772, the redesign of the remaining square fronts of the Alter Markt had long been completed and the renewal of more distant districts was already underway. Only the adjoining house at Humboldtstraße 4 to the southwest was not rebuilt until 1777. The house at Humboldtstraße 3, modeled on the Palazzo Pompei in Verona designed by Michele Sanmicheli around 1530, was built as early as 1754, as was the adjoining row of houses at Brauerstraße 1-6 to the northeast.
Friedrich Mielke assumes that the king did not have an adequate model that would have corresponded to the exposed urban location. In addition, the Seven Years' War brought building activity in Potsdam to a virtual standstill.. The fact that the above-mentioned neighboring buildings could be seen more easily from the palace may also have played a role: The house at Humboldtstraße 3 was opposite a passageway to the palace courtyard, while the row of houses at Brauerstraße 1-6 was more visible from the Fortuna portal than the actual south side of the market
After the destruction caused by the war and subsequent demolitions, only the Old Town Hall from 1753, the neighboring house at Brauerstraße 10 and the Hiller-Brandt houses in Breite Straße, built in 1769 according to plans by Georg Christian Unger, have survived in Potsdam as examples of imitation of foreign models. The Palast Barberini stood at the end of the era of copied palace façades. In the 1770s and 1780s, the work of Ungers, Andreas Ludwig Krüger, Johann Gottlob Schulze and others led to an independent development of late Baroque town houses in Potsdam, which met the requirements of the users in terms of appearance and function.
Design
The design of the house, inhabited by master carpenter Naumann and innkeeper Berkholz, is attributed to Carl von Gontard, although Georg Christian Unger's collaboration is also considered. The architects used the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which was built from 1625 onwards based on designs by Carlo Maderno, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini and which Gontard most likely knew from his own experience, as a model. Mielke also cites parallels to an illustration in Paul Decker's masterpiece Fürstlicher Baumeister... from the beginning of the 18th century, which was created under the influence of the Roman building and which was known to Frederick II from his library.Description of the building
The Palast Barberini consisted of two three-storey town houses combined behind a uniform façade, which were built at royal expense to replace simpler previous buildings in order to give the Alter Markt the representative appearance desired by the king. The façade had thirteen window axes, the middle five of which formed a protruding avant-corps, whose architecture clearly distinguished it from the four-axis side wings that were aligned with the street.The central avant-corps was accentuated by a storey-by-storey arrangement of Tuscan, Ionic and Corinthian columns. On the first floor and second floor, these were designed as three-quarter columns. The second floor, on the other hand, was structured with pilasters, each of which was accompanied by two half pilasters that appeared to be pushed back. Large arched windows appeared in the backs of the upper storeys, while the first floor of the avant-corps was open in arched positions. The central window of the second floor was given an altar with a baluster parapet on two full columns standing in front of the façade.
The four-axis side wings each took up the structure of the avant-corps in a simplified form. Here, this was achieved on the ground and second floors with flat pilaster strips, while the smooth wall surface dominated on the second floor. In addition to the three main storeys, the lower two storeys in the side wings each had a low mezzanine storey that opened onto the street with framed rectangular windows. The windows of the main storeys had straight roofs on the first floor and alternating triangular and segmental arched roofs on the upper storeys. The upper end was formed by a parapet, which was decorated with balusters in the avant-corps and crowned with vases. The flat pitched roof of the house was largely concealed by the parapet.
At the time of their construction, the rear of the town houses facing the Havel was simple and not emphasized by a special architectural language, as only subordinate farm buildings were located here. The two long side wings of twelve to three axes each, which were added to the rear of the buildings in the 19th century in the course of their conversion, followed the street-side wings in terms of their division into storeys and formal language. However, the formation of a parapet was dispensed with here. A cornice zone with small openings to the attic was arranged under the flat hipped roof. Only the three axes of the long sides at the ends on the Havel side and the front sides of the wings had window roofs, giving the impression of end buildings. The rear of the central building was given a representative façade structure corresponding to the central avant-corps on the street side.
Nothing is known about the layout of the interior rooms when the main building was constructed between 1771 and 1772 due to a lack of surviving documents. During the conversion and extension work between 1845 and 1849, the apartments previously housed in the main building were moved to the new side wings, a passageway with columns was created on the first floor of the central building to meet the increased representational requirements and several richly decorated halls were built on its upper floors. The courtyard on the Havel side between the side wings was landscaped. A wide perron led from here to the riverbank. The L-shaped outbuildings visible on the 19th century floor plan, which were symmetrically arranged in the extension of the side wings and contained stables and toilets, were later replaced by pergolas.