Pinakothek

Munich has free museum entries on Sundays, which was good as it was raining again. We went to the Alte Pinakothek (Old Pinakhotek). Thankfully, they had an English audio tour.

The museum had lots of Ruben. The museums top floor was even designed specifically to hold his painting of the war between heaven and hell. His most gruesome painting in the museum was one of the sinners being thrown into hell. He has a style that strikes a nice balance between anatomically correct representation and emotional exaggeration of features.


There were also several portraits of educated French women of status. One was reading Isaac Newton. The other was the famous Madame du Pompadour, Mistress of King Louis XV of France. A talented and educated women who used her affair to establish herself in the court and then used her influence to avert a war with England. She had the artist add in books, musical instruments, and correspondence to show that she was a talented woman. The best detail of the painting is it's size. It was painted on the scale of a royal portrait. As she commissioned it herself, she was telling everyone that she saw herself as the equal to royalty.

Though most painters of the eras represented in the museum supposedly only did commission portraits or religious paintings, there were two guys who seemed to only paint peasants. There are great paintings of drunken fighting peasants with old fashioned dutch pipes.

For dinner we went to Vinothek, a restaurant with an impressive wine list. We asked the waiter to choose a wine for each course. Lexi had the 3 course surprise menu, which turned out to be an eggplant remoulade, baked salmon and a coffee cream dessert. I picked out a truffle cheese appetizer, beef with the best scalloped potatoes I've ever had, and a trio of creme brulees. The chocolate and vanilla creme brulees were excellent, but the last one was nasty, like mayo and honey left in the sun. I also tried an orange Armagnac with dessert. It was like a whiskey cointreau, not bad.

We were unable to find any live music on Sunday so we packed it in early.