Monument to Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777)

History of the work

On the lawn in front of the main building of the University of Bern stands Albrecht von Haller in bronze, on a pedestal of granite from Baveno. The Lucerne sculptor Hugo Siegwart made the statue between 1906 and 1908. It was unveiled on 16 October 1908, exactly 200 years to the day after Haller’s birth.

Haller (1708–1777) came from a Bernese patrician family. He was a physician, naturalist and poet and is regarded as the founder of modern experimental physiology. In 1736 he went to the newly founded University of Göttingen, where he taught anatomy, surgery and botany; in 1749 he was raised to the hereditary nobility. As a poet he became known for “Die Alpen” (The Alps); the poem went through eleven editions in his lifetime alone.

Siegwart (1865–1938) was born in Malters, trained in Lucerne, Munich and Paris and had his own studio in Lucerne from 1892; from 1903 to 1917 he lived in Munich. For the domed hall of the Federal Palace he made the statues of Arnold Winkelried and Niklaus von Flüe around 1902. His nude group of Swiss wrestlers in Lucerne drew criticism from the church and a long dispute. According to SIKART and Wikipedia, the controversy in fact brought him further large commissions, including the Haller monument.

The university’s main building, in front of which Haller stands, had been completed only a few years earlier: it was built from 1900 to 1903 after a competition of 1898, to designs by Hodler & Joos. On top of its central block stands a figure by Alfred Lanz representing Science. A detail for your visit: as a newspaper article noted on the 300th anniversary in 2008, Haller looks from the Grosse Schanze towards the Bernese Alps that he described in his poem.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Kultur Stadt Bern, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum (offene Daten) · Wikipedia (de): Albrecht von Haller · Wikipedia (de): Hugo Siegwart · HLS: Thomas Freivogel, Siegwart, Hugo · SIKART: Franziska Lentzsch, Hugo Siegwart · Bauinventar Stadt Bern: Hochschulstrasse 4 (Universität, Hauptgebäude) · plattformj.ch: „Angenehm' Gemisch von Bergen, Fels und Seen“ (15.5.2008) · Wikidata: Haller-Denkmal (Q64446888) · Wikimedia Commons: Haller-Denkmal (Bronzestandbild – Hugo Siegwart 1908)