Dresden’s Green Vault, Over the Top and Awe-Inspiring

An ivory ship, trans woman-to-wood, and coffee for 45

I’ ve written about the jaw-dropping Old Master paintings collection at Dresden’s Zwinger Palace and the corporate collection at the Meissen porcelain factory near Dresden. In each story Augustus the Strong is the marquee name. Saxony’s grand duke, the king of Poland, and a Holy Roman Empire elector, Augustus (1670–1733) has to be counted as an art collector of the scope and taste of Charles I, the Hapsburg kings of Spain, and the Renaissance popes. His collection, started by his two or three predecessors and continued by a couple of his successors, is still intact and splendidly and intelligently displayed at the Zwinger Palace and the Dresden Palace nearby. These and the other Baroque buildings in Dresden’s old city were Augustus’s work, too.

I’m writing this third and last story about Dresden partly because of the sheer grandeur of the Saxon ducal collection and partly to atone for taking so long to get to Dresden. It was once one of Europe’s powerhouse capitals, but, aside from military and economic clout, its old city is a perfect Baroque and Rococo gem. Dresden is a place of pathos, too, owing to the February 1945 air raids that flattened it, followed by its 75-year-long restoration.

Better late than never. Today I’ll write about Augustus’s porcelain collection, on view at the Zwinger, and the Green Vault, which holds Augustus’s collection of what he called “treasures.” These are, mostly, exquisite 3-D objects made from silver, ivory, mother-of-pearl, wood, coral, shells, and precious stones. Augustus was a shopaholic who knew, demanded, and bought the very best.

Augustus was the force behind the discovery and appropriation of the recipe for Chinese and Japanese porcelain. This wasn’t a result of any scientific knowledge on his part. European porcelain happened because of his will to find the method even if he needed to coerce local chemists and potters to crack open some books, put noses to the grindstone, and think outside the box as if their lives depended on it, which they did. From 1710, porcelain production started in the factory he established in Meissen — he commissioned over 35,000 pieces of porcelain. Over his lifetime, he also bought about 25,000 pieces of the finest Chinese and Japanese porcelain.

The Zwinger porcelain galleries begin with these objects. Augustus bought rare eleventh-century objects that were once in imperial collections. He bought Imari porcelain from Japan and blue-and-white contemporary Chinese porcelain made by the best artists. “La maladie de porcelaine” — porcelain sickness — was a well-known aristocratic obsession in Augustus’s day, but he took it to extremes. His collection is still, today, the best outside China and Japan.

Augustus loved its look of translucence and sheen, both absorbing and reflecting light — at their best at night in rooms lit by candles. As a political symbol, too, Chinese and Japanese porcelain worked well for him. Europeans didn’t know much about China and Japan, but what aristocrats and potentates did understand was the culture of submission to the emperor’s absolute power in both nations. Emperors could and did cut through red tape and recalcitrance. By importing and displaying the best porcelain, Augustus hoped their political magic would rub off on him.

Chinese and Japanese porcelain design was abstract, even enigmatic. Raw power was one thing. The mystery of royal power — its presence was a gift from the gods — reinforced the power to break bones.

The Zwinger reinstalled its porcelain collection in 2007. It’s splendid. In the Chinese galleries, apricot-silk damask covers the walls, showing Kangxi blue-and-white porcelain at its glowing best. Big Imari jars are displayed in another gallery against red lacquer. Often objects simply rest on the floor or on a piece of furniture without the interference of cases.

Peter Marino, a New York glamour-lifestyle architect, designed the redo. He does lots of different projects but is famous for his high-end boutique designs for Vuitton, Armani, Zegna, and Chanel. The Zwinger solicited him for the project, shocking since the place was only 15 or so years from the days of Iron Curtain drab.

Marino looked closely at how Augustus displayed his porcelain — rooms packed to the gills — and developed a strategy of opulent minimalism better suited to our aesthetic and modern attention spans. There are brief passages where objects are arranged in clusters, but Marino is brilliant in understanding how modern eyes move and absorb information. The clusters convey a collective effect, usually color and design that dazzle, but the individual objects never lose their autonomy. Groupings are small enough so visitors can study each piece.

The royal Meissen collection is very different. It tends to be representational and narrative. The first gallery displays Meissen’s religious porcelain and portrait porcelain. The Death of St. Francis Xavier, from the late 1730s, is a multi-figure extravaganza featuring the dying missionary surrounded by onlookers and a flock of angels escorting him to Heaven on billowing clouds. Near it is a portrait bust of the court jester Baron Schmiedel made in 1739. Jesters attended to the grand dukes at home and accompanied them on trips, supplying quips, banter, and magic tricks. Yes, that’s a mouse dangling by its tail from Schmiedel’s mouth.

The Animal Hall has got to be one of the most whimsical, delightful museum spaces in Europe. It displays mostly life-size Meissen porcelain birds and animals commissioned by Augustus in 1731 and delivered through the 1730s. Augustus hoped to show the technical superiority of Saxon porcelain but also Saxony’s scientific sophistication. The modeling of 412 bird sculptures and 160 depictions of quadrupeds drew from critters caught during expeditions to Africa and the Near East that Augustus had sponsored. Some were stuffed, but Augustus maintained a small zoo.

A hundred years later, Audubon painted watercolors of birds and quadrupeds and published the images. Augustus and Meissen produced colored figures as well, but it’s believed that the color on the big animal sculptures was removed at some point. Meissen artists thought an additional firing to fix the colors would make the big pieces crack, so pigment was simply applied without subsequent firing. Over time, it faded and was removed altogether, leaving a translucent white. And unlike Audubon, Meissen delivered in 3-D.

Two latticed mock pagodas anchor the gallery. They’re topped with feathered pinnacles and Meissen bells dangling from the ceiling. The walls are decorated with leather wallpaper, with birds placed on gilded consoles and platforms. It’s a very fun look, but the sculptures truly amaze. A fox looks triumphant as he gnaws a chicken. A bird gobbles a fish with greedy glee. Turkeys and peacocks strut while swans pose like odalisques.

Augustus ordered 35,000 pieces of porcelain from Meissen before he died in 1733. He envisioned a new palace, partially realized, decorated entirely with porcelain from floor to ceiling, thinking as he did that ancient Chinese and Japanese emperors lived in such places. The rooms and the porcelain in them were to be color codes: red for power, green for humility, yellow for splendor, blue for divinity, and then purple, for authority, signaling the throne room. At the center would be a porcelain throne. A porcelain glockenspiel would add mood music. A chapel would feature a porcelain altar, pulpit, pipe organ, and life-size Apostles.

Augustus was mad about porcelain, crazy mad. The Animal Hall and the Zwinger’s Chinese and Japanese galleries evoke the look Augustus wanted but, let’s face it, we live in an age of the sleek and suggestive.

I spent an afternoon at the Green Vault across the road from the Zwinger in the Dresden Palace, where the grand dukes worked. Named after the space’s original wall covering, the two floors — one for Renaissance objects, the other for 17th- and 18th-century things — were in Augustus’s time and are today celebrations of consummate craftsmanship, mostly local. They display objects of amazing aesthetic beauty but also technical ingenuity. The dukes shared them with their friends, using them to promote erudite conversation. The objects were also meant to convey world-class but local talent and the ruling duke’s success in developing a sublime Saxon brand.

Most people don’t understand what the Green Vault is, but it has to be seen to be believed. The Golden Coffee Set from the late 1690s — 45 pieces in gold, silver gilt, enamel, ivory, and, yes, 5,600 diamonds — was made by the court jeweler. The concept of a set that could be taken apart and used in many variations was a new one. It’s got chinoiserie figures but also putti, enamel flowers, and ivory figures of Neptune, Ceres, Minerva, and Mercury. After studying this, I look at my old, standard “Don’t Let the Turkeys Get You Down” coffee mug with self-pity and woe.

A large ivory frigate from 1620 is a high point. It was commissioned by Johann George I, Augustus’s great-grandfather. Johann led the Saxons through the bitter Thirty Years’ War, which was just beginning, and everyone knew it would be a war to sear men’s souls. The figure of Neptune holds the ship. Engraved in the planks is the genealogy of the Saxon dukes, conveying legitimacy and durability during trying times. The billowing sails are painstakingly carved sheets of ivory.

A statuette of Daphne is early trans art. No, she doesn’t claim “he, him, his” pronouns. Unwilling to succumb to Apollo’s approaches, she turned herself into a tree. She also got on with her life in the woods and didn’t push her agenda. It’s silver with precious coral.

You get the point. The Green Vault is whimsy, history, opulence, and technical brilliance. If Bavarians are frothy and Prussians stern, Saxons like bombast and bluster. The Green Vault is one over-the-top object after another. It’s among the great art spaces in Europe.

In an epic theft that rivals the heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, Berlin-based Arab gang members disabled the Green Vault’s alarms on November 25, 2019, entered the building through a window whose protective iron grill they cut, and in minutes stole a chunk of the Saxon Crown Jewels. Gone were the 62-carat Dresden White Diamond, acquired by Augustus, a diamond epaulette made for Grand Duke Frederick Augustus III in the 1780s, a sword with a 770-diamond hilt, and about 15 other objects. The rarest of the Crown Jewels, the Dresden Green Diamond, limpid and weighing 40 carats, was on loan to the Met.

About 20 objects were stolen. The parts “out value” – used-car slang — was $125 million. That’s by dismantling the gems and selling them separately or, worse, recutting the White Diamond. Saxons everywhere were horrified. Nationwide, over a thousand detectives were on the hunt. Arrests were eventually made, and quiet negotiations ensued as the trial unfolded. A deal evidently was made. Just before Christmas last year, police recovered the stash.

Needless to say, security wasn’t ideal. Thieves dismantled the alarms by destroying an electrical box near the Dresden Palace, which cut power for the entire neighborhood. The Green Vault’s closed-circuit cameras weren’t, however, disabled and recorded the very fast theft. The entry window’s iron grill had apparently been cut days before the robbery and lightly glued back together. The window wasn’t visible on the security cameras.

The museum basically resurrected the SS in designing its new security system, at least in the jewel rooms in the Green Vault. No devices allowed, a mandatory path must be followed, cameras are aplenty, as are sensors. I believe the window the thieves entered is no more.

Two photographs, one of the Zwinger after the 1945 bombing and one of today’s Zwinger, convey Dresden’s modern story. The Russians confiscated the contents of the Green Vault and took them to Moscow with the intention of keeping them as war booty. It wasn’t until 1958 that Dresden got them back. Insofar as the historic city center — Augustus’s Dresden — was concerned, the Communists were happy that the palaces and churches were destroyed. They hoped to build a new city expressing socialist virtues, and, to an extent, that’s what happened.

Still, even the Communists were conflicted. The opera house was rebuilt in its original style, but that took nearly 4o years. The Communists didn’t mind, since the opera house wasn’t part of Augustus’s imperial project. It’s from the 1860s. The GDR authorities in East Berlin didn’t want to restore the equestrian statue of Augustus in front of the opera house. They wanted a sculpture of a tractor manned by happy farmers. They lost even that fight. In the 1960s, the Zwinger was rebuilt as it once was.

Clearing the rubble from the World War II bombings took decades and was done mostly by an assembly line of women using carts and trucks to haul debris to dumps. Much of the stone used for the reconstruction is recycled rubble. Blast and fire damage is evident. The biggest part of Dresden’s reconstruction happened after the reunification of Germany. The Frauenkirche, Dresden’s cathedral, didn’t reopen until 2005. Parts of the Dresden Palace weren’t finished until 2019.

I’m in Dallas next week to give two lectures. I’ve got a couple of Texas topics but want to write about the Vermeer show in Amsterdam before too long.