Harvard Art Museums

Harvard does not have one art museum but three, and since 2014 they share a single building in Cambridge. The Fogg covers Western art, the Busch-Reisinger holds German and Central European work, and the Arthur M. Sackler keeps the Asian and ancient collections. Renzo Piano wrapped the old brick courtyard building in glass and topped it with a great glazed roof that pours daylight down through the middle.

Because these are teaching collections, they run deep in a scholarly way, from Italian gold-ground panels to a famous group of Impressionist and Bauhaus works. Behind the galleries sit conservation labs you can see into, where the science of looking after paintings is part of the display.

One story here is about fading. Mark Rothko painted a set of murals for a Harvard dining room in the 1960s, and years of sunlight drained their crimson away. Rather than repaint them, conservators aimed coloured light at the canvases to restore the lost tone, switching it off each afternoon so you could watch the damage return.