Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister

Jakob Fugger, the Augsburg merchant and banker who bankrolled the Habsburg emperors, looks out from Albrecht Dürer's portrait in a cap of gold brocade. Dürer, the Nuremberg painter, met him during the Imperial Diet held in Augsburg in 1518, and the painting dates from around 1520. It hangs today in the Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister, the State Gallery of Old German Masters, inside the former church of St Catherine's, a convent of Dominican nuns.

Those nuns left their own mark on the collection. Living in strict enclosure, they had been allowed to earn the indulgence of a pilgrimage to Rome by praying inside their convent, and around 1500 they commissioned paintings of Rome's great pilgrimage basilicas from the Augsburg painters Hans Holbein the Elder and Hans Burgkmair, among others. This Basilica cycle is still shown here, in the former convent it was painted for.

After the convent was dissolved in 1802 and Augsburg became part of Bavaria, the church was turned into a picture gallery in 1835, the oldest branch of the Bavarian State Painting Collections. Its core is painting of the Augsburg and Swabian schools of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, with works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, the Saxon court painter, as well. Visitors reach it through the Schaezlerpalais, the Rococo mansion next door.