Germany Guide
Lower Saxony
Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum
Address: Willy-Brandt-Allee
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–5pm, Thurs till 7pm
Price: €4
Website: www.nlmh.de
The Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, founded in the mid-1800s, is the grande dame of Lower Saxony museums and has multiple personalities over its three levels. An aquarium and reptile house claim the ground floor alongside fairly musty ethnographical displays. Exhibits above track European civilization from prehistory to Roman and Saxon – the crowds inevitably gather around Roter Franz, a 300 BC bog corpse named for his red hair – and there are the usual dinosaur skeletons and stuffed mammals in the natural history department. But it's the gallery of art in the second-floor Landesgalerie that steals the show. A Gothic Passion altar by Meister Bertram fizzes with the artist's characteristic vivacity, and there's a flowing Mary and Child by Tilman Riemenschneider, the genius of late Gothic; nearby, Cranach studies his friend Martin Luther, alive and dead. Botticelli and Tiepolo star among the Italians, and the Dutch and Flemish masters are well represented: Bartolomeus Spranger teeters on the verge of Baroque with his saucy Bacchus tweaking the nipple of Venus; and look for Rubens' Madonna and Child, modelled, it's thought, on his first wife, Isabella Brant, and eldest son, Albert. Caspar David Friedrich provides a Phases-of-the-Day cycle, Morning, Noon, Dusk and Evening, and Monet glimpses Gare St-Lazare through thick swirls of steam. Excellent collections of Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth, Worpswede's Paula Modersohn-Becker and Max Liebermann represent German Impressionism and early Expressionism.