Basel Art Museum Collection

The Kunstmuseum Basel is one of the most renowned museums of its kind in the world. Its world-famous collection, the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, comprises over 300,000 works spanning eight centuries, from the late Middle Ages to the present day. The core collection, the Amerbach Cabinet with its treasures of 15th and 16th century art, was purchased by the city in 1661, transferred to the university estate and made accessible to the public. The city of Basel thus owns the oldest public art collection in the world. The Kunstmuseum Basel owes this unique corpus to the friendship between Bonifacius Amerbach and his much more famous contemporaries Hans Holbein the Younger and Erasmus of Rotterdam - both of whom lived in Basel for a long time at the beginning of the 16th century.