Szépművészeti múzeum, Budapest

The Museum of Fine Arts is the grand museum building before you, facing the Hall of Art on Heroes’ Square. Albert Schickedanz and Fülöp Herzog designed it, and construction took place from 1900 to 1906 in an eclectic neoclassical manner. Look at the broad entrance steps and the open colonnade above them: the portico is closed by a pediment filled with a many-figure relief.

The building combines an antique-inspired entrance section with gallery wings whose decoration recalls Renaissance architecture. Its collections range across European art rather than focusing on Hungarian art, with more than 100,000 works divided among Egyptian, Classical, sculpture, old master painting, modern art, and graphics departments. The Egyptian holdings number about 3,500 objects, and painted mummy sarcophagi are among their most engaging pieces.

In the sculpture collection, Leonardo da Vinci’s Rearing Horse and Mounted Warrior is a treasured work. The old master galleries cover painting from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries, including works by Raphael, Dürer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Monet elsewhere in the museum’s wider holdings. The institution opened in 1906, and its centenary was marked in 2006.