Biography

Alexandra Enzensberger works on strategies of display in European art museums spanning the period from 1800 to the present. She was Post-Doctoral Fellow and Assistant to the Director at Villa I Tatti in 2016 and Executive Assistant to the General Director of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin from 2017-2018. Her PhD thesis, “Das inszenierte Meisterwerk” – “Making Masterpieces. Art on Display in the Modern Museum,” will be published in December 2018 (Deutscher Kunstverlag – De Gruyter). During her doctoral studies she received a scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and was a visiting student at Paris EHESS in 2011 and at Harvard in 2015.

Project Summary

This project examines the history of display and reception of the Raphael tapestries, once in the collection of the State Museums of Berlin, that were lost in the Second World War: what role did it play in the 1840s to purchase not only one “real Raphael”, but a whole set of famous objects, for the still very young Prussian museum? And how did these objects then shape the newly opened Bode-Museum (formerly the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum) at the beginning of the twentieth century? By framing the Berlin Raphael tapestries and their presentation in 1848 at the Royal Museum, the project explores how the cult of Raphael was used during the March Revolution to project the image of national unification.