Switzerland Guide
Geneva
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire
The Musée d'Art et d'Histoire is Geneva's most important museum and Switzerland's unofficial national collection. It's a gigantic place, covering in encyclopedic fashion the whole sweep of Western culture from antiquity to the present.
For the marvellous fine-art collection, head up the grand staircase. What confronts you at the top is perhaps the highlight of the museum, a heart-stoppingly romantic sculpture in marble of Venus and Adonis, standing alone and lit by a skylight. Also at the head of the stairs are two Rodins, The Thinker and The Tragic Muse. The collection begins in Hall 401 to the right and, although it more or less keeps a chronological thread, don't be surprised if you come across photography, concrete installations or even video art scattered in among the paintings. As you work your way around the perimeter rooms, Rembrandt and other Dutch and Flemish artists are in room 406, nineteenth-century Swiss in 408–9, while the inner ring of smaller rooms features work by the eighteenth-century Genevois painter Liotard in 419–20. Perimeter rooms 412–14 are devoted to Vallotton, Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir and Modigliani, with some striking Hodlers on the inner ring, including a mystical Lac de Thoune (1909) in room 425.
Back downstairs, the applied arts collection is on the mezzanine gallery and the ground floor; a wealth of silverware, pewter, armour and costume. The Cartigny room, with 1805 wood panelling by the Genevois craftsman Jean Jaquet, shows elegant Louis XV and XVI furniture.
The lower floor is given over to the massive archeological collection. Turn right for the Egyptian rooms, including sections from the Book of the Dead, a complete ninth-century BC mummy, and a beautiful granite statue of the goddess Sekhmet, with the body of a woman and the head of a lioness, from the fourteenth century BC. There's also an excellent display on hieroglyphics. The halls devoted to Ancient Greece and Rome are no less impressive, filled with statuary, glassware and good historical notes.Address: 2 Rue Charles-Galland Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–5pmPrice: Free 
www.ville-ge.ch/musinfo