Sulpiz Boisserée

Sulpiz Boiserée (2 August 1783 - 2 May 1854) was a German art collector and art historian. With his brother Melchior he formed a collection that ultimately formed the basis of that of the Alte Pinakothek. He played a key role in the completion of Cologne Cathedral.

Boisserée was born in Cologne on 2 August 1783, into a wealthy family who hoped he would follow in the family business and that his younger brother, Melchior, would become a scientist. The brothers were raised during the Napoleonic occupation of Cologne. He attended school in Hamburg but returned to Cologne in 1799. Through his friend Johann Baptist Bertram he and Melchoir became interested in art, especially that of the medieval period. In 1803 the brothers went to Paris, where they studied the works on show at the Musée Napoleon at the Louvre, which had been greatly enriched through Napoleon’s looting of art from abroad. In Paris they became disciples of the romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel with whom they visited Belgium and Switzerland in 1804-5.

In 1804, alarmed by the nationalisation of church property and its destruction through sales, the Boisserée brothers began to collect medieval art, motivated as much by the desire to save it as to possess it. Melchior concentrated on acquisition and Sulpiz on research.

Boisserée developed a new theory of the history of German painting, rejecting the idea that it had evolved gradually from crude beginnings; he proposed instead that a refined medieval style, ultimately derived from Byzantine prototypes had flourished, until the art was revolutionised by Jan van Eyck.

In 1810 the brothers put their collection on public display in a palace in Heidelberg, attracting enthusiastic attention from Romantic circles. Schlegel was especially enthusiastic. Goethe, who also visited the collection was, with his classical sympathies, more reserved, although he was still prepared to write a preface for Boisserée's essay Altdeutsche Baukunst (1817). The brothers closed their museum in 1819. Boisserée wrote a catalogue of the collection, commissioning Johann Nepomuk Strixner to document the works in a series of lithographs, which were published between 1821 and 1840. In 1827 Georg von Dillis, the director of the royal collection of Ludwig I of Bavaria, bought the complete collection. Bertram and the Boisserée brothers followed it to Munich, and in 1835 Boisserée was appointed general curator of sculptural monuments in Bavaria, and the museum was finally opened as the Alte Pinakothek.

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