The Albertina sits on top of one of the last remaining bastions of the old city walls, behind the opera house. The palace was the residence of Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, whose collecting habit founded the museum: roughly a million prints and sixty-five thousand drawings, including Dürer's watercolour of a young hare and his study of praying hands, sheets by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Schiele and Klimt. Almost none of it is on permanent display, and cannot be — works on paper fade under light, so the originals appear in rotating exhibitions and go back into the dark afterwards.
What is always there is the Batliner Collection, a bright run of modern painting from Monet through Picasso and the German Expressionists, and the twenty Habsburg state rooms, which most visitors walk through on the way somewhere else. They are silk, gilt and parquet, restored to how the archdukes had them, and worth as much attention as the exhibition. Outside, a cantilevered titanium canopy juts over the entrance ramp like a wing, and the terrace on the bastion looks out over Albertinaplatz to the opera.