Art in Munich: Memling, Rubens and Guardi at the Alte Pinakothek

The three kings keep moving through Advent and Triumph of Christ. Hans Memling shows them looking for the star, approaching the child and making their way home by sea, all within a continuous landscape. The picture offers no single instant in which to settle. You have to travel through it. In a city where the number of museum doors can make a visitor hurry, this wide panel supplies a reason to stop.

Build your day around the Alte Pinakothek on Barer Straße, then leave room for a walk through the Kunstareal museum district. The Neue Pinakothek is closed for renovation at the time of writing; selected nineteenth-century works have temporary presentations elsewhere, but our supplied records provide no verified display details for individual pictures. That distinction matters when planning a visit. The name of a collection is not always the address at which one of its paintings can be encountered.

A king buys a collection; a city builds its home

Ludwig I commissioned Leo von Klenze to build the picture gallery in 1826. It opened in 1836. A year after the commission, the king bought the Boisserée collection, through which Memling’s Advent and Triumph of Christ entered the Munich holdings. Collecting and building were happening together. The institution took shape around objects that had already served other patrons, occupied other buildings and sometimes crossed several borders.

Before entering, look at the repaired masonry. Bombing during the Second World War tore open the middle of the building. Hans Döllgast’s reconstruction used brickwork that remained distinguishable from the older fabric, and the museum reopened in 1957. The exterior does not let the visitor mistake survival for an uninterrupted history. Walk far enough along it to understand the connection linking the repaired section and what remains on either side, rather than treating the front door as the whole building.

Inside, resist using size as a guide to attention. The paintings chosen for this route ask for different distances and different amounts of time. Memling needs a wandering eye. Rubens makes a relationship between two figures the centre of the picture. Guardi compresses a public emergency into a small canvas. You can follow this sequence as an exercise in changing pace, without trying to turn the museum into a complete course in European painting before lunch.

Memling: the donors stand at the edges of a world

Pieter Bultinc and his wife Katalijne van Ryebeke gave the panel to the tanners’ guild chapel in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges in 1480. The donors appear at the lower edges. Their presence makes this more than a densely illustrated Bible story. Named people paid for a devotional object intended for a particular community. Begin with them, then follow the routes by which the much smaller figures move across the country beyond.

The German title, The Seven Joys of Mary, can make the composition sound like seven separate illustrations. Memling gives the episodes a shared territory instead. A road can join places that belong to different moments, and the eye must do the editing. Choose the kings’ journey for a first reading. Only afterwards branch into the scenes of Mary’s life and the events following the Resurrection. There is no penalty for missing something on the first pass.

A man looks through a window of the stable in the central scene. Scholars have discussed whether this could be Memling himself, but the identification is unresolved. You can still enjoy what the figure does without giving him a name. He watches from a threshold, partly outside the sacred action, just as the museum visitor watches from beyond the panel. The little opening provides a second frame within the larger image.

Rubens: a family portrait remembers the Madonna

Rubens married Hélène Fourment in 1630, after the death of his first wife. She was the daughter of an Antwerp merchant, and she became a recurring presence in his later pictures. In Hélène Fourment with her Son Frans, the child’s nakedness and his position on his mother’s lap recall images of the Virgin and Child. The family portrait borrows a visual language that its first viewers would already have known.

That borrowing does not erase the two people. It gives a private relationship a public form. Hélène can be recognised as a particular young mother while also carrying an idea of Christian family life. Look at how the child is held before you try to decide which kind of image you are seeing. The composition does not require a choice between portrait and devotional association. It lets the recognition of one alter your understanding of the other.

Munich enters the story through an acquisition in 1698, when Elector Max Emanuel bought the painting from Gisbert van Colen. What began with a painter’s own household passed into a ruler’s collection. That change of setting did not remove the family subject, but it gave the picture another use as a possession to be collected and admired. In a public museum, there is time to move back through those layers to the mother supporting her child.

Guardi: a city view interrupted by fire

On 28 November 1789, fire broke out near San Marcuola in Venice. Francesco Guardi’s Fire in the Oil Depot at San Marcuola turns the incident into a night scene in which orange flames divide the onlookers from the buildings. This is a city view with its ordinary arrangements disrupted. The light that allows you to read the scene is also the force threatening to destroy part of it.

The canvas is only about sixty-two centimetres wide. A reproduction can enlarge it until the spectacle seems to belong to a huge history painting, so notice its actual scale. Guardi makes a crowd out of quick marks, leaving faces indistinct. Find the people before looking back at the burning line. Their individual gestures will not explain the whole event, but their smallness gives the light something human to act upon.

Do not assume that the three selected paintings are available just because they belong to the Alte Pinakothek: their display status in our records is unconfirmed. Send the museum your short list before the trip. For the visit itself, keep a little time in reserve to return to Memling after the other pictures. A second reading of one painting is a better use of those last minutes than adding another museum while already thinking about the train.