The Alte Pinakothek on Barer Straße holds one of the world's great collections of Old Master painting — Flemish, Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish work from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The building, by Leo von Klenze and opened in 1836, was heavily damaged in the Second World War and rebuilt with the bare brick interior now visible in the stairwells and connecting corridors: a deliberate retention of bomb damage rather than a reconstruction of Klenze's original finishes. The collection itself is the reason — the Rubens rooms are among the most significant in existence; the Dürer holdings include self-portraits that changed how European painting thought about the artist's own face. The building is long and narrow, with upper floor galleries lit by the Klenze top-and-side-light system; the lower floors handle works that require closer consideration. Arrive when it opens.
Maxvorstadt, Munich, Germany