Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy

The Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nancy occupies an eighteenth-century pavilion on the Place Stanislas, the gilded square that a deposed Polish king, Stanislas, laid out as duke of Lorraine, now one of the most admired squares in Europe. It is among the oldest museums in France, its collection begun soon after the Revolution.

Its outstanding painting is Caravaggio's Annunciation, sent to Nancy around 1608, a dark canvas where the angel plunges toward a kneeling Mary out of near-total shadow. Around it hang Rubens, Perugino and a strong run of French painting.

Then the museum turns a corner. Down in the cellars, among the excavated remains of the city's medieval fortifications, it shows the glass of Daum, the Nancy firm that made the town a capital of Art Nouveau, hundreds of glowing coloured vases lit against the old stone walls.