We love visiting Berlin. We usually stay in the east side of the city, and the last time we went, we decided to spend a serious amount of time in the magnificent museums and art galleries.

The monumental Ishtar Gate was one of the city gates of Babylon, located in modern Iraq. It was built under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II. Built in ornamented glazed coloured bricks it is covered in symbolic animal reliefs. The blue gate of Babylon was named for Ishtar, the goddess of love and war. It is simply mind blowing, and very very big. It’s in the Pergamon Museum one of the five great museums on Museumsinsel - the Museum Island, in Berlin.

The Ishtar Gate, the blue gate of Babylon

Of course, apart from the gate this museum contains the market gate of Miletus, and the Great Altar of Pergamon. They are enormous, about the size of Coventry.

In the Altes Museum, we went to see the Fayum mummy portrait of a young woman. Surviving examples or portrait painting from the ancient world are rare, but they were evidently amazingly skilled. This is so sensitive, those eyes, so beautiful.

Next stop was the Neues Museum, to queue to see the bust of Nefertiti. No photos allowed so the image is courtesy of the Neues Museum. Is there anything new to be said, except that round the corner, ignored by the crowds, is the matching bust of Nefertiti’s husband, the pharaoh Akhenaten. Some say this was once even more beautiful, but it has suffered badly at the hands of his enemies.

The Bode Museum is at the top end of the island and we headed straight for the Byzantine collection. Speechless. Finally we went to the ‘temple of the arts’ the Alte Nationalgalerie. Every so often, we’d come across an empty space with a sign saying something like - here used to be displayed a (Chagall, Picasso, Reubens, Tintoretto etc), but it was taken illegally in 1945 by the Soviet Army and is believed to be in the vaults of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This is illegal and despite repeated attempts to reclaim the art, it is still held illegally in Russia. Huh!

And of course, we went all over Berlin. You may notice how this visit inspired some of my paintings.