It is characteristic of the purism of Schinkel’s approach, a purism not archaeological but visual, that this attic masks externally a Durandesque central domed space (Figure 6). Such circular central spaces, so recurrent in Romantic Classical planning, had been a favourite setting for classical sculpture, the principal treasure of most art collections of this period, ever since the Museo Pio-Clementino was built at the Vatican. None is finer than this in the proportional relationship of interior colonnade, plain wall above, and coffered dome with oculus. Most, indeed, are but feeble copies of the Roman Pantheon; this exceeds in distinction, if not in scale, its ancient original. But the Museum, unlike the Munich Glyptothek, had to have picture galleries as well as sculpture halls; and Schinkel’s organization of these, so much less palatial than Klenze’s in his Pinakothek, is a technical triumph of the rationalistic side of Romantic Classicism. Screens at right angles to the windows, and thus free from glare, provided the greater part of the hanging space, a premonition almost of the movable screens of mid-twentieth-century art galleries (Figure 6). The external treatment of the rear walls of the Museum, moreover, achieved a clarity of mathematical organization and a subtlety of structural expression in the detailing which was also hardly equalled before the mid twentieth century. Tall windows in two even ranges express clearly the two storeys of galleries behind; the stuccoed walls between delicately suggest by their flat rustication—so like that Soane used on the Bank of England—the scale of fine ashlar masonry. But the giant order of the front is also clearly echoed in the flat corner antae just short of which the string-course between the storeys and the rustication of the walls are stopped. A prototype of such detailing can be seen in the Athenian Propylaea, no doubt familiar to Schinkel through publications; a derivation—or at least a superb twentieth-century parallel—is the way Mies van der Rohe handles the juxtaposition of steel stanchions and brick infilling in his buildings erected for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in the last fifteen years (see Chapter 20). The rapid deterioration of rationalist Grecian standards, which followed within a few decades even in the hands of Schinkel’s ablest pupils, is to be noted in the Neues Museum, built in 1843-55 by F. A. Stüler (1800-65) behind the Altes Museum. It is even more evident in the contiguous Nationalgalerie, also by Stüler but based on a sketch by Frederick William IV. This temple stands on a very high substructure in an awkward perversion of the theme of Gilly’s monument to Frederick the Great and Klenze’s Walhalla. It was finished only in 1876 by which time, even in Germany, Romantic Classicism was completely dead (see Chapter 9).