Germany Guide
Munich
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum
Address: Prinzregentenstrasse
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–5pm, Thurs until 8pm
Price: €5
Website: www.bayerisches-nationalmuseum.de
One of the big hitters among Munich's museums, the sprawling Bayerisches Nationalmuseum (Bavarian National Museum), houses behind a stern facade a dizzying array of fine and applied arts from late antiquity to the early twentieth century, much of it stemming from the Wittelsbachs' own collections. The ground floor is devoted to works of the Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance, from suits of armour to winged altarpieces and carvings by Tilman Riemenschneider; the basement houses the world's largest collection of Nativity cribs, with examples from the Alps and Southern Italy, plus Bavarian furniture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often decorated with paintings on religious themes. Upstairs, musical instruments from the Wittelsbachs' court, silver table services and antique board games add a luxuriously domestic note, while there's a roomful of Nymphenburg porcelain as well as Rococo sculpture by Johann Baptist Straub and Ignaz Günther.