Aloys Hirt

The son of a wealthy rural family, he was able to attend secondary school (Gymnasium) at Villingen, educated by Benedictine monks.

Hirt settled on a site Unter den Linden (where today stands Schinkel's Neue Wache) and produced an initial design, revolutionary in its use of shutters to control light.

This, however, was never built, with the start of construction being delayed by Napoleon's conquest of Europe and shelved indefinitely by his decisive victory over the Prussians in 1806 and the punitive Treaty of Tilsit.

In 1815 the Prussian works appropriated by Napoleon to create a museum in Paris telling a comprehensive history of art were returned and put on public display at the Akademie der Wissenschaft, seen by Friederich Wilhelm himself.

Hirt was a member on the committee ordered by Friedrich for this purpose, but suffered criticism from young art history students like Karl Ruhmohr and Gustav Waagen.

Waagen's 1828 pamphlet gave a detailed account of this competition, and asserted that quality (i.e. only the better or more representative artworks of each era) not quantity (i.e. all the state's works) should be displayed.

Hirt's architectural stance on neo-classicism was also under attack, principally by Heinrich Hübsch (1795–1863), a student of in Weinbrenner's from Karlsruhe, who laid the foundations in his 1828 book "In welchem Style sollen Wir bauen?"

Hirt was one of the first to hang paintings in historical order, an idea he may have drawn from the installation at the Imperial Gallery in Vienna.