Ninety seconds on National Museum of Art of Romania
The throne room is shown three times a day and is shut the rest of it, so the hour of arrival decides whether the palace is part of the visit or only the building the pictures hang in.
The former royal palace on Revolution Square, holding the national collection of Romanian medieval and modern art and a European gallery. The Brâncuși holdings and the Grigorescu rooms are the reason to go.
Two permanent galleries fill the palace and one ticket covers both of them. The European rooms occupy the Kretzulescu wing, about three hundred works hung by school across five centuries, with a Rembrandt and an El Greco among the names that carry. The Romanian side is larger and is what most people have come for. Guided rounds of the former throne hall leave at half past eleven, at two, and at half past four, and are the only way into it. Two and a half hours is enough for the Romanian galleries at a steady walk. Doing both wings properly is most of a day, and visitors who have tried it say so without exaggerating.
The palace burned in the fighting of December 1989. Something like four fifths of the building was damaged and more than a thousand works were harmed or destroyed, which is why a national collection spent the following decade closed. The galleries came back one at a time, the modern Romanian and the European rooms at the turn of the century and the medieval collection a couple of years behind them.
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