アルテ・ピナコテーク

Walk along the south front of the Alte Pinakothek and the wall changes partway across, from carved stone to plain unrendered brick. That seam is deliberate. Allied bombing gutted about a third of the building in the war, and when the architect Hans Döllgast rebuilt it in the 1950s he chose not to fake the lost stonework. He filled the gap with bare brick, some of it salvaged from the rubble, so the wound stays visible.

The museum it patched up is one of the oldest picture galleries in the world, opened in 1836 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria to show the Wittelsbach family collection, which his ancestors had been assembling since the 16th century. The architect Leo von Klenze gave it long top-lit halls that were copied by museums across Europe.

Inside hangs one of the strangest self-portraits ever painted: Albrecht Dürer at 28, in 1500, facing straight out with a symmetry and steady gaze that European artists reserved for images of Christ. Nearby is one of the largest gatherings of Rubens anywhere, among it his enormous 'Great Last Judgment', a wall of tumbling bodies so large that the gallery was designed around its frame.