Tiroler Landesmuseum

Along the facade of the Ferdinandeum on Innsbruck's Museumstrasse runs a terracotta frieze of medallion portraits, Tyrolean artists and thinkers the province chose to honour. This is the home of the Tiroler Landesmuseum, the state museum of Tyrol. It was founded in 1823 as an association and named after its patron, Archduke Ferdinand, the future Emperor Ferdinand I. The building by the architect Anton Mutschlechner opened in 1845, and a further storey was added in the 1880s.

The aim was to gather a whole region under one roof, and the collections still read that way. Gothic altarpieces from Tyrolean churches include work by Michael Pacher, the late-Gothic painter and carver from the Puster valley. A strong holding of Dutch and Flemish painting includes a small Rembrandt of 1630, a bust of an old man in a fur cap, made while the young artist was still working in his home town of Leiden. Later rooms reach modern times with Albin Egger-Lienz, the Tyrolean painter of peasants and of war, and with an early Gustav Klimt from 1890, a portrait of the musician Joseph Pembauer inside a broad painted gold border. The music collection keeps violins by Jakob Stainer, the seventeenth-century Tyrolean violin maker.

Anyone planning a visit should know the Ferdinandeum closed on 1 July 2024 for a full renovation of its listed building, with reopening planned for the later 2020s. Until then the Tyrolean State Museums stage exhibitions and events at their other sites.