Alter Botanischer Garten & the Neptune Fountain
Why is it significant?
Stand beside the long basin and let the sea god take your measure: Neptune, all muscle and beard, rising above the water in the middle of a small city park. Office workers eat lunch on the benches, trams grind past beyond the trees, and pigeons patrol the gravel.
Key Facts
| Place | Alter Botanischer Garten & the Neptune Fountain |
|---|---|
| Address | Sophienstraße 7, 80333 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.14130, 11.56520 |
| Part of Walk | Isar-Athens: Munich's Königsplatz, the Pinakotheks & the Blue Rider |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand beside the long basin and let the sea god take your measure: Neptune, all muscle and beard, rising above the water in the middle of a small city park. Office workers eat lunch on the benches, trams grind past beyond the trees, and pigeons patrol the gravel. It looks like the most ordinary green space in Munich... which is exactly why it is the right place to begin a walk about art.
This lawn was once a garden of science. In the early 1800s the Bavarian court laid out a botanical garden here, with Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, the same landscape genius who shaped the English Garden, drawing its paths. For about a century, professors and students came to study rare plants behind its walls. Then the city grew around it, the air turned smoky, and in 1914 the plants moved out to a new garden beside Nymphenburg Palace. Only the name stayed behind: the Old Botanical Garden.
In 1854 something astonishing went up on its northern edge: the Glaspalast, a hall of iron and glass inspired by London's Crystal Palace. It was built for a great industrial exhibition, and for decades afterwards it hosted Munich's huge art shows, where thousands of painters fought for wall space and buyers. If you wanted to be seen as an artist in Germany, you wanted to hang in the Glass Palace.
On the sixth of June 1931 it burned. In a few hours, fire destroyed the building and around three thousand works of art, among them paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and other German Romantics, lent for a special exhibition. The cause was never fully settled. A few years later, in 1937, the park was redesigned, and this fountain by the sculptor Joseph Wackerle was set at its heart... art of a dark decade, standing over the ashes of a lost one.
Keep that word in your head: lost. Much of what you will see on this walk survived war, fire or politics only narrowly. Now leave the garden by its north-eastern corner, cross Sophienstraße, and walk towards the dark obelisk standing in the middle of a round square.