I left off in the Gemalde Gallerie.   It’s not crowded. It’s not too big. Like the city, it’s full of surprises. Here’s the rest of the painting by Cranach which includes the man with the spectacular trousers, who seems to be an executioner. The steadfast lady is Saint Catherine. Are the revolving faces being tortured on a wheel as she was? And is that snow? I’ve not been able to find out:

Bernardo Bellotto painted an extraordinary picture of the Kreuzkirche which was destroyed in the Prussian bombardment of 1760:

The patient labour of clearing rubble reminds us of scenes from 1945:

There’s a surprising painting by Vermeer, whom I had always associated with demure bourgeois scenes. It’s called The Procuress:

Can you see the gold coin being handed over.

There are a few great Rembrandts, including this portrait of Saskia:

And this young man almost hiding behind the dead bird:

Sorry, I can’t remember who painted this, it’s called The Jewish Cemetery

And here’s a detail, about a quarter of a panorama of the Grand Canal in Venice by Canaletto, which I enjoyed partly for the man pissing against a wall:

This is Christ throwing the money lenders out of the temple, but they’re not money lenders! They’re peasants at a market:

The most famous picture in the collection is the Sistine Madonna with those two cute cherubs who’ve been reproduced a million times. But there is, as they say, much more, and yet not too much.

Across the river in the Neustadt is the trendy part of town, terraces of tall apartment buildings from the 18th century, some recently restored, some battered and stripped of architectural detail. Nice bars and bakeries, vegan cafes, graffiti denouncing the Nazis, rooms for rent through Air B and B, all that sort of thing. In Katharinenstrasse some extraordinary Jugendstil (the German term for art nouveau) facades have survived:

I’ll leave it there. There’s a lot more to see in Dresden