L'histoire
This is less a single building than the organisation that looks after Bavaria's state-owned paintings and spreads them across a family of Munich galleries. Its core is the old picture hoard of the Wittelsbachs, the dynasty that ruled Bavaria for seven centuries and collected with unusual appetite, and the holdings grew so large that a central directorate was set up in the late 18th century to manage them.
Most visitors meet the collection at the Alte Pinakothek, the Old Masters gallery King Ludwig I commissioned and opened in 1836. It holds one of the world's largest bodies of work by Peter Paul Rubens, much of it commissioned by the Wittelsbach princes themselves, and a famous group of paintings by Albrecht Dürer, including his frontal, almost Christ-like self-portrait of 1500. The single picture people seek out is Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander at Issus of 1529, a dizzying aerial swarm of thousands of tiny soldiers under a burning sky.
The same institution runs the Neue Pinakothek for 19th-century art and the Pinakothek der Moderne for the 20th, along with branch galleries around Bavaria, so its paintings run from medieval altarpieces to the present day, gathered under one administration rather than one roof.
