The story
In April 1473, during a war between England and the Hanseatic League, a Danzig privateer named Paul Beneke captured the galley San Matteo at sea. In its hold was a huge triptych of the Last Judgment, painted in Bruges by Hans Memling for Angelo Tani, the Medici bank's agent there, who meant it for his family chapel near Florence. It never reached Italy. The privateers gave it to St Mary's Church in Danzig, where it hung for more than three centuries.
It has travelled ever since. Napoleon's troops sent it to Paris in 1807, where the Louvre showed it under another painter's name, and it came home in 1817. In the Second World War it was hidden in churches in Germany, found by the Red Army in 1946 and taken to the Hermitage in Leningrad. It returned to Poland in 1956 and has belonged to this museum ever since. On the central panel the archangel Michael weighs souls, the saved climb toward a heavenly gate on the left, and the damned tumble to the right.
The old-art galleries fill a former Franciscan monastery built in the 15th century. Around the Memling are goldsmiths' work and pewter made in the city, heavy carved furniture, and Dutch and Flemish paintings.
