My Vacation: Dresden
Part six in a series on my journey through Europe to retrace my Great-Grandmother’s 1914 travel diary on the centennial of its writing
My train pulled into Dresden’s central station at 4:30pm and I jumped off the moment it came to rest. When Daisy visited Dresden she made note of the Katholische Hofkirche (Dresden’s main cathedral) and the Zwinger gallery. Of the two, she wrote most of the Zwinger and in particular, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.
July 14
We came to Dresden Saturday. Dresden is so lovely and quiet and restful after being at busy Berlin. The pension Peterit is home like and restful after living at hotels. Our room is beautiful. Last evening we took a flash light of it.
Sunday we went to the Katholic Hofkirche, then peeked into the Zwinger gallery where we found the Sistine Madonna. Yesterday we spent the whole morning in this gallery. The Sistine Madonna, the Tribute Money, the Rembrandt, the Holy Might, the Boy Jesus in the Temple, the Burgamaister# Family are among some of the worlds treasure we found here.
The Sistine Madonna could take hours of my time. The Hoffman’s Boy Jesus is wonderful. Copies of it do not seem so beautiful now. This morning we went to Meissen to see the pottery of the Royal Dresden China. How interesting it all is. Our guide took us to all parts but the designing and pattern rooms. He explained things well. I bought a tea set there.
This is just one of the many times Daisy mentions the Sistine Madonna in her diary. She often rates other famous paintings against it, and in her entry on Venice she writes that Titian’s Assumption was “the only picture which rivals Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, the worlds greatest picture.” So you can understand my eagerness to see it.
But I didn’t have any time to spare as the Zwinger was scheduled to close at 6. I hailed the first cab I could find and drove straight there. We arrived at 5, I paid my driver and ran inside. As I tried to buy entrance to the gallery, the woman behind the counter looked confused as she spoke in broken English.
“Close at 6. You know?”
“Yes, I know.”
I shook my head happily as I spoke. She must have thought I was crazy to spend 20 euros for just an hour, but I was excited to have even made it. My day was nearly through, and soon I would get to see what I’d read so much about in Daisy’s diary. After a bit of protest she took my money and let me enter.
The Sistine Madonna resides in the Zwinger’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Master’s Gallery) as the central piece, just as Daisy saw it 100 years ago. Between her viewing and mine, much has happened to it. World War Two saw it ushered away to Switzerland for safe keeping until the Russian Army captured it and sent the painting home to become the featured work of the Pushkin Museum. And it wasn’t until a decade later, after the death of Stalin, that the Sistine Madonna was finally returned to Dresden.
I know embarrassingly little about art, so my typical museum tour involves walking slowly, hands clasped behind my back, nodding approval at pieces that seem particularly prominent. Occasionally, if I’ve heard of the painting or a guide has spent more time than usual describing it, I’ll make a fist with my right hand, place its knuckles just below my mouth and do my best to appear introspective.
My experience with the Sistine Madonna was entirely different. Too tired to fake any sort of understanding, I just walked straight up to it and stared. And as I stood there and stared, I started to cry. The tears were so sudden in fact that I had to turn away and cover my eyes because I was embarrassed someone might see my soaked face.
More than a few times in my life I’ve been accused of being emotionally cold, and while I don’t agree with this depiction, I understand it. At celebrations I often feign excitement, in heated arguments I usually fall silent, and at funerals I struggle to cry.
So as I stood and stared and warm tears slid down my cheeks I felt a bit guilty. If I had this sort of emotional response for a painting, how could I not also have it with friends and family?
This question has haunted me since Dresden, and it’s only now in retelling the experience that I think I can answer by asking something else: was it the painting that made me cry, or a memory attached to it?
I ask this question because I bought a postcard of the Sistine Madonna on my way out, and looking at it now I don’t have the slightest urge to cry. It was only in Dresden, when I stood in the building that my great-grandmother once stood that I felt overwhelmed.
For the last two weeks I’ve been traveling alone. I meet new people as often as possible, and technology keeps my friends and family at an arms reach, but the one voice I’ve heard most consistently has been Daisy’s. I transcribe her diary on trains and at night and in the morning her words dictate my day.
So when I stood in front of Daisy’s favorite painting it was her memory that made me cry. It finally felt real and embodied, and in the same instant that I knew she had lived, I also knew she had died. But rather than cry out of sadness, I felt joy that I could know someone who I had never met, simply by reading her words.
As 6pm approached the museum docent ushered me out, and I walked through the center of Dresden toward the train station. The town was in the midst of celebrating their annual Dixieland Festival, so I bought a beer and listened for a while as a German band played the 1910 jazz standard “Chinatown, my Chinatown.”
