Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

The core of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest was once a private empire of pictures. The Esterházy princes, among the richest families in the Habsburg lands, spent generations buying Old Masters, and in 1865, short of money, they sold the whole collection to the Hungarian state. It became the foundation of the national gallery of European art that opened in this columned building in 1906.

Its glory is Spanish. The museum holds one of the finest groups of El Greco and Spanish painting outside Spain itself, alongside Raphael's small, tender Esterházy Madonna. That Raphael has had an eventful life. On a night in 1983 thieves climbed into the museum and took seven paintings, including the Madonna and works by Giorgione and Tintoretto. Within weeks the Italian police tracked them to an abandoned convent near the Greek town of Aigio and recovered every one.

The collection runs from early Netherlandish panels through Dürer to Goya, and the building itself reopened a few years ago after a long restoration that brought back its gilded Romanesque and Renaissance halls.