Schaezlerpalais

After hearing about the treasures in a magnificent baroque palace very near our hotel, we decided to invest part of our Saturday in Augsburg there.
The first disappointment was not being able to buy the tickets with our credit card — another sign that those in charge of some tourist attractions in Germany are still very provincial. We opted for the audio guide — a big mistake. Audio guides should be a help for visitors to see things they might miss, but this guide was full of names and dates without nearly enough info about the actual pictures we were looking at or the rooms we walked through.
Too much of the art museum seemed to be in a state or renovation with poorly lit paintings in the gallery part and a weird kind of open heating system spewing out smoke in the monastery part attached to the palace. Distracted by all the oddities, we ended up missing one of the most famous paintings: Albrecht Dürer’s portrait of Jakob Fugger, a very rich merchant from Augsburg’s time in the limelight in the 16^th century. Only from the outside could we appreciate the length of the structure with the palace-​monastery extension taking up an entire big block.
At least the rococo ballroom with its mirrors and gilt walls was impressive, maybe especially so since we were there alone on a brilliantly sunny Saturday in early February. At least we could imagine the room also impressing Marie Antoinette, who evidently danced here for the palace-​warming party a few hundred years ago.
After an hour, we’d seen the whole place but then had to wait for someone to open up the room where we had to leave our bags. The café seemed more a parody with the couple of small tables and very uncomfortable looking chairs in a room next to the bookstore/​ticket office, so we chose instead to rest our feet and our ears in the sunshine outside gazing at the gardens, which themselves seemed somewhat modest for a magnificent baroque palace, but then we had lowered our expectations sufficiently by the end of our hour in the Schaetzlerpalais.

Das Schaezlerpalais gehört zu den beeindruckensten Bauten des Rokkoko in Augsburg.
Besonders sehenswert ist hier der prunkvolle Festsaal im ersten Stock mit Schnitzdekorationen, Stuckaturen, Wandspiegeln und einem Deckengemälde.
Der Festsaal reicht über zwei Stockwerke und gilt als einer der best erhaltenen seiner Zeit.
Im Schaezlerpalais sind die städtischen Kunstsammlungen sowie die staatliche Gemäldegalerie untergebracht.
Zu den Sammlungen gehören unter anderem herausragende Werke von Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein und Lucas Cranach.