Alte Pinakothek

The Alte Pinakothek's strength is unmatched depth in Rubens and a genuinely comprehensive survey of German painting from the Gothic period onward, anchored by the single Leonardo the country's museums hold between them. Few museums combine that range of major names - Duerer, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt - inside one building without any of them being a single-work stopover.

The Alte Pinakothek was designed from the start as a public art gallery rather than adapted from a palace or a former royal collection room, which was still an unusual approach when Leo von Klenze began work on it after his 1816 appointment to the Bavarian court. Klenze's design put picture galleries on the upper floor lit by skylights, a solution that became standard for museum architecture across Europe for the next century. The foundation stone was laid on 7 April 1826, chosen deliberately for Raphael's birthday, and after a decade of construction the Pinakothek opened on 16 October 1836 with 1,269 paintings on its walls - a scale and a level of organisation that made it one of the first museums anywhere built specifically to display a picture collection to the public rather than to a court.

Allied bombing raids during the Second World War left the Alte Pinakothek gutted by fire and stripped of much of its original architecture. When postwar reconstruction began, the architect Hans Doellgast made a decision that still defines how the building looks and reads today: rather than reconstructing the lost decorative stonework to match the original, he rebuilt the missing sections in plain, unornamented brick, using salvaged brick of a visibly different colour taken from the ruins of nearby barracks on Tuerkenstrasse. The result leaves the war damage legible in the building's own walls rather than concealed behind a faithful restoration - the south facade in particular reads almost like a diagram of what survived and what did not. The rebuilt museum reopened to the public in 1957, and Doellgast's approach has since become an internationally cited reference point for how to rebuild a bombed historic building without pretending the bombing did not happen.

The Bavarian State Painting Collections, which run the Alte Pinakothek, have operated a systematic programme of Nazi-era provenance research since 1999, covering every work acquired or catalogued from 1933 onward whose ownership history before that date is unclear. Since 2018 the results have been made public in a free online database, publishing the full chain of owners for each examined work rather than only a conclusion, in the collections' own account of meeting the transparency standard set by the 1998 Washington Principles. Proactive research completed between 2017 and 2022 covered around 6,000 works, and 595 objects from the wider Bavarian state collections are currently listed on the public Lost Art database as works whose Nazi-era loss through persecution cannot be ruled out, open for potential heirs to come forward. The collections' own history gives this work weight beyond routine due diligence: after the war, American forces returned thousands of works looted under the Nazi regime to the Bavarian state and its museums, and Bavarian officials went on to sell some of that returned art back, at reduced prices, to the families of the same senior Nazi officials who had profited from the original seizures - a postwar failure this generation of provenance researchers is working, painting by painting, to identify and correct.

The collection predates the building by three centuries, and the Rubens holding specifically was not bought as art history - it was bought as court decoration, in bulk, by successive Wittelsbach rulers who happened to have both the money and the connections to buy well. Duke Wilhelm IV started the pattern in the early 16th century by commissioning history paintings directly from living artists, including Albrecht Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander at Issus. Elector Maximilian I went further, commissioning hunting scenes directly from Rubens in 1616 and acquiring Duerer's Four Apostles from the city of Nuremberg in 1627 under enough political pressure that the city had little practical choice but to hand them over. The decisive purchase for the Rubens collection came later still, when Maximilian II Emanuel served as governor of the Spanish Netherlands and bought Flemish paintings on the spot: in 1698 alone he acquired twelve Rubens paintings and thirteen Van Dycks in a single Antwerp transaction with the dealer Gisbert van Colen.

The collection grew again by inheritance rather than purchase in 1777, when Bavaria's union with the Palatinate under a single ruler brought the electoral galleries of Mannheim, Duesseldorf and Zweibruecken to Munich, partly moved there deliberately to keep them safe from the wars that followed the French Revolution. What the Alte Pinakothek shows today is substantially the result of those two centuries of court acquisition, assembled before the museum that would eventually house it had even been designed.

Inside, the collection runs from the German and Netherlandish Gothic through the Italian and Northern Renaissance to the Dutch and Flemish Baroque, without a significant gap in any of those four centuries. Duerer's 1500 self-portrait and Leonardo's Madonna of the Carnation, the only Leonardo in a German museum, sit at one end of that run; at the other, Rubens is represented so extensively - more paintings than any other single collection holds - that curators treat the Alte Pinakothek as close to a second home institution for him, alongside Antwerp. Rembrandt, Bruegel and Altdorfer fill out a collection that a visitor can walk in roughly chronological order, room by room, from around 1400 to the threshold of the 19th century.

Visitors rate the Alte Pinakothek among the strongest old-master collections in Europe, and consistently mention the range of major names on view in one building - Duerer, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt - as much as any single painting. The building itself, especially the scarred, unrestored brickwork of the postwar facade, draws its own comment from visitors who notice it.