Nuremberg Museum Shows Giant-Footed Africans, Constipated Man

March 18 (Bloomberg) -- America doesn’t exist. The people of southern Africa have giant feet that they use to shade themselves from the scorching sun by lying on their backs, legs in the air. The King of Ceylon has the largest ruby ever seen.

That’s all according to the world’s oldest surviving globe, which was created by a Nuremberg merchant-explorer called Martin Behaim in 1492, just as Christopher Columbus set out on his first trip to the West Indies.

It is one of 1,000 treasures -- ranging from paintings by Albrecht Duerer and Lucas Cranach the Elder to 16th-century jewels and an 18th-century harlequin suit -- on display in the newly refurbished art-gallery section of Nuremberg’s vast Germanisches Nationalmuseum, open to the public from today. In 33 magnificent exhibition rooms, all painted a cool blue, the museum aims to provide the context and cultural history for art from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

According to Behaim’s globe, Europe, Africa and Asia account for three-quarters of the Earth’s surface area and the planet’s circumference is about 12,000 kilometers (7,460 miles) smaller than in reality. That may have been deliberate, scholars at the museum say. The globe was probably a kind of advertorial to raise cash for Behaim’s planned expeditions.

Spice Benefit

Asia appears to be just a tantalizing hop across the Atlantic. To hammer home his point to potential investors, Behaim inscribed a long text off the coast of Africa showing the financial advantage of buying spices directly from Java to ship them to Europe across the ocean instead of using land routes.

The discoveries and conquests of the new era are celebrated in another spectacular item: The Schluesselfelder Schiff, a gold-plated, silver wine carafe crafted as an intricate ship, complete with tiny sailors climbing the rigging to load timber. Worth the equivalent of a house at the time it was created, it holds about two liters of wine, poured out of the dragon masthead’s mouth.

Nuremberg was at the forefront of the German Renaissance, which arrived a couple of centuries later than Italy’s. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum says it has the finest, most comprehensive German collection of art and antiquities of the period. The insurance value of the exhibits for the new display has been set at more than 1 billion euros ($1.37 billion).

The museum is also a center for research into restoration, preservation and presentation, attracting central government funding for its academic functions and giving it access to the latest technology for its own exhibitions.

Clothing, Furniture

The new permanent exhibition cost 5.5 million euros and it took six years to renovate the rooms and restore all the exhibits. Its strength is in assembling art, musical instruments, clothing, household objects, stained glass and more to create as coherent a picture of the period as possible.

Partly for that reason and partly because of the outstanding quality of the exhibits, it’s the kind of museum a visitor could return to time and again and never fail to learn something new, or at least to connect the dots on random tidbits of historical knowledge. It even recreates two bourgeois Nuremberg parlors with carved wood-clad walls, stained-glass windows and grandly ornate tiled stoves. Another plus for foreign visitors -- all the texts are translated into English.

Duerer, a native of the city, is considered the leading figure of the German Renaissance. The most valuable artwork in the museum is his ideal portrait of Charlemagne, painted in 1513. More intimate, and more touching, is his 1516 portrait of his Nuremberg teacher, Michael Wolgemut. Duerer shows an old man whose sagging jaw line and bony neck belie the alert intelligence of his eyes and the firmness of his mouth.

Rembrandt Mystery

A portrait of the young Rembrandt, painted in 1629, was only identified in 1998 as the work of the master. Previously it had been believed a copy of a self-portrait in The Hague. Yet careful investigation with X-rays showed the version in The Hague to be the copy and the Nuremberg one to be the original.

There is humor here, too. Franz Xaver Messerschmidt portrayed extremes of human emotion in a series of lead sculptures of heads with exaggerated expressions. “The Constipated Man” (1770-1780), his mouth and chin unfeasibly contorted in strain and concentration, is enough to make the viewer squirm in empathetic discomfort.

(Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg opens today.

Information: http://www.gnm.de.)

(Catherine Hickley is a writer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Catherine Hickley at chickley@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Beech at mbeech@bloomberg.net.