Kunstmuseum Basel

Basel can claim the oldest public art collection in the world, and it began as a rescue. In 1661 the collection assembled by the Amerbach family, rich in works by Hans Holbein the Younger, was about to be sold to Amsterdam. The city and its university bought it instead, and a few years later they put it on show, which made it a museum open to ordinary citizens more than a century before the Louvre.

That Holbein group is still the heart of the place. Holbein lived and worked in Basel before he left for the English court, and the museum holds his portraits, designs and the unsettling Dead Christ in the Tomb, a narrow, coffin-shaped panel of a corpse so bleakly real that Dostoevsky, who saw it here, said it could make a believer lose their faith.

The building of 1936 carries the story onward through Böcklin, a deep run of Cubism and a floor of postwar and contemporary art, all of it added over the centuries to the cabinet the Amerbachs sold in 1661.