Ground plan of the Kunstkammer in the Berlin Palace by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, January 1838. It shows the spatial situation after the naturalia had been transferred to the newly founded university in 1810, the antiquities and coins to the Altes Museum, and the “Patriotic Antiquities” and Egyptian artifacts to Monbijou Palace. The ground plan reveals the emphases that would emerge in subsequent decades. Ethnography and craft, previously combined in the Ivory Cabinet, were now distributed over a number of rooms. The former Medals Cabinet was now occupied by “administrative spaces” for the new curator of the collection, Leopold von Ledebur, who would determine the essential form of the collection until its dissolution in the 1870s. Franz Kugler’s Beschreibung der in der Kgl. Kunstkammer zu Berlin vorhandenen Kunst-Sammlung (Description of the Art Collection in the Royal Kunstkammer of Berlin) from 1838 documents the holdings.
