Szépmuvészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts)

Szépmuvészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts) Review

Across Heroes' Square from the Palace of Exhibitions and built by the same team of Albert Schickedanz and Fülöp Herzog, the Museum of Fine Arts houses Hungary's best art collection, rich in Flemish and Dutch old masters. With seven fine El Grecos and five beautiful Goyas as well as paintings by Velázquez and Murillo, the collection of Spanish Old Masters is probably the best outside Spain.

The Italian school is represented by Giorgione, Bellini, Correggio, Tintoretto, and Titian masterpieces and, above all, two superb Raphael paintings: The Eszterházy Madonna and his immortal Portrait of a Youth, rescued after a world-famous art heist.

Nineteenth-century French art includes works by Delacroix, Pissarro, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Renoir, and Monet. There are also more than 100,000 drawings (including five by Rembrandt and three studies by Leonardo), and Egyptian and Greco-Roman exhibitions. A 20th-century collection was added to the museum's permanent exhibits in 1994, comprising an interesting series of statues, paintings, and drawings by Chagall, Le Corbusier, and others. The special exhibits are outstanding and frequent. Labels are in both Hungarian and English; there's also an English-language booklet for sale about the permanent collection.