Germany Guide
Munich
The Alte Pinakothek
Address: Barer Strasse
Opening time: Tues 10am–8pm, Wed– Sun 10am–6pm
Price: €5.50, free English audio guide
Website: www.pinakothek.de
The scars of war are visible on the broken facade of Leo von Klenze's Alte Pinakothek, at the time of its construction in 1826 to 1836 the largest art gallery in the world. Even today, it can be an overwhelming experience: the collections, which are based on the royal collection of the Wittelsbach dynasty over five hundred years, encompass German, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, French and Italian art, with a timespan from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Things kick off on the west side of the ground floor with German painting from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Outstanding works here include Michael Pacher's Kirchenväteraltar, created for the Augustine abbey of Neustift in the South Tyrol, Lucas Cranach the Elder's Adam and Eve and the same artist's Golden Age of 1530, which depicts man's lost earthly paradise. Also on display on the ground floor is Pieter Bruegel the Elder's richly comic The Land of Cockayne, which depicts the vices of idleness, gluttony and sloth by showing three prostrate figures evidently sleeping off a good lunch. The main exhibition space is upstairs, beginning with more medieval painting: Hans Memling's The Seven Joys of Mary (1435–40) is an entire story in one painting, with the story of the Three Magi as its centrepiece; startlingly modern by comparison is Albrecht Dürer's innovative Self Portrait with a Fur Trimmed Coat from 1500.
Italian art is represented by, among others, Botticelli's vivid Pietà of 1490 and an intriguing Christ with Mary and Martha by Tintoretto from 1580; but the centrepiece of the Alte Pinakothek's collection is the Rubenssaal, which was intended as the heart of the museum to reflect the importance of the Wittelsbachs' collection of works by Peter Paul Rubens. The room is dominated by the six-metre-high Last Judgement of 1617, commissioned for the high altar of the Jesuit church at Neuburg an der Donau. One of the largest canvases ever painted, it depicts 65 figures, most of them naked, as graves open and the dead are separated into the blessed and the damned.