The story
The Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover is not only a picture gallery. It is the state's largest museum, and under one roof it runs five collections at once, a natural-history hall with dinosaur skeletons and a living vivarium of fish and reptiles, archaeology, ethnology, a coin cabinet, and the state art gallery.
For art visitors the draw is that last department, the Landesgalerie, which follows European painting from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It holds work by Rembrandt and Rubens, German medieval altarpieces, and a good group of Max Liebermann, a leading German Impressionist from Berlin.
The building sits by the Maschpark near the city's town hall, and the easy slide from a whale skeleton to a Renaissance Madonna is exactly what a nineteenth-century civic museum was built to offer.
