Leseprobe

8 wedding of two children of August III, Prince-Elector Friedrich Christian and Princess Maria Anna, the objects were stored in the four pavilions surrounding the Palais. As a consequence of this measure, only a substantially smaller exhibi- tion area was now available for a collection of objects numbering in the hundreds. And it was this placement that confronted Winckelmann during his visit to the Grosser Garten in 1755, while working as the librarian for Count Heinrich von Bünau near Dresden from 1748 to 1754. In view of the circumstances, Winckel- mann’s above-cited lament is quite understandable. The new presentation in the Japanisches Palais A new and adequate arrangement of the collection of antiquities came about only in 1786, when Camillo Count Marcolini, lord chamberlain, director of the Meis- sen Porcelain Manufactory, and director of both the Saxon Academy and the Royal Collections, relocated the ‘Gallery of Ancient and Modern Statues’ from the Grosser Garten to the bank of the Elbe. Sculptures, both large and small, were presented in ten galleries on the ground floor of the Japanisches Palais, while the electoral library and the numismatic cabinet occupied the building’s first floor. For the installation of the collection of antiquities and the ‘modern’ sculptures, Friedrich Wacker, appointed inspector of the collection in 1748, took the Capitoline Japanisches Palais, view from the north, 1929 Photo by Walter Möbius