Schnütgen Museum

This guide to the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne traces the church of Saint Cecilia from a dissolved convent to one of Cologne's first public hospitals, where the sick lay beneath Romanesque arches for a century and a half. It then turns to Alexander Schnütgen, a nineteenth-century cathedral canon whose relentless, sometimes crafty pursuit of carved saints, ivories and reliquaries became local legend. Whatever piece he wanted, he generally got, colleagues said, and parish churches across the Rhineland rarely knew what they had lost.