Alte Pinakothek

When King Ludwig I opened this gallery in 1836, it was the largest museum building in the world. He commissioned Leo von Klenze — the same architect behind the Glyptothek — to build a palace specifically for the Wittelsbach family's art collection, which had been accumulating since the 1500s. Klenze invented the top-lit gallery: grand halls illuminated by skylights rather than windows, a design so effective that it became the template for art museums worldwide, from London's National Gallery to New York's Met.

The collection is staggering in its depth. Over 800 paintings cover European art from the 14th to the 18th century, with particular strengths in early German, Flemish, and Italian Renaissance works. This is the only museum in Germany that owns a Leonardo da Vinci painting — the "Madonna of the Carnation," painted around 1473 when Leonardo was barely twenty-one. Albrecht Dürer's iconic "Self-Portrait" from 1500, with its Christ-like frontal pose and searching gaze, hangs here and remains one of the most reproduced images in Western art.

The Rubens collection alone would justify a museum. Ludwig I's ancestors were obsessive Rubens collectors, and the Alte Pinakothek houses one of the world's largest holdings: massive, muscular, exuberant canvases that fill entire walls. "The Great Last Judgement" stretches over six metres tall. Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Velázquez, El Greco, and Cranach are all represented with major works, not minor sketches.

The building was devastated by bombing in 1944. Its paintings had been evacuated to safety, but the structure itself was gutted. The reconstruction, completed in 1957, deliberately left some bomb damage visible on the exterior brickwork — a decision that was controversial at the time but now reads as honest. The scars are part of the story, just as the art inside survived by being carried to shelter in the dark.