Dresdner Zwinger

Dresdner Zwinger is a Baroque palace in Dresden, Germany, housing the Old Masters Picture Gallery, the Porcelain Collection, and the Museum of Mathematical and Physical Instruments.

Planning your visit

The Zwinger is not a palace in the ordinary sense. Augustus the Strong built it from 1711 as a setting for festivals and tournaments — an enclosed courtyard surrounded by galleries and pavilions, sculpted by Balthasar Permoser into one of the great works of European Baroque, with the Crown Gate and the Nymphs' Bath among the highlights.

It now holds three collections. The Old Masters Picture Gallery is the reason most visitors come: Raphael's Sistine Madonna, whose two bored cherubs at the bottom have escaped into global kitsch, alongside Vermeer, Rembrandt, Titian, Giorgione and Rubens.

The Porcelain Collection is the largest of its kind in the world, reflecting Augustus's near-pathological obsession — he traded a regiment of dragoons for Chinese vases — and includes early Meissen, developed in Dresden when Bottger cracked the European secret of hard-paste porcelain.

The Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon holds historic scientific instruments and clocks.

The complex was destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt.

Bookable options are entry tickets. Current availability is shown below.