Kunsthistorisches Museum

Museum · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna, Austria

The Kunsthistorisches opened in 1891 to house art the Habsburgs had been accumulating for three hundred years, and the building was designed around the collection rather than adapted to it. A domed Renaissance-revival palace on the Ringstrasse, it faces an identical twin across the square that holds natural history — the pair went up together, deliberately symmetrical. On the way up the main staircase, above the arches, are slender allegorical figures painted by a young Gustav Klimt in his first major public commission. He was twenty-nine and painting to order in a careful academic style, well before the gold-covered pictures that made his name. The pictures are the reason to come, and the Bruegel room is the reason above that: the largest group of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in existence, including Hunters in the Snow and the Tower of Babel. Around it are Vermeer, Velázquez, Titian, Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Downstairs the Kunstkammer holds the objects that were collected for strangeness as much as value — automata, carved cherry stones, and a gold salt cellar by Cellini that was stolen from this building and buried in a forest for three years.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Go to the Bruegel room first — it is the one room that fills, and it is at the far end of the picture galleries, so arriving there last means arriving there with everyone else.
Look up on the staircase — the narrow figures between the columns are Klimt at twenty-nine, painting to order in a style he was about to abandon completely.
The café is under the dome — it sits in the middle of the building at the top of the stairs, surrounded by marble and gilt, and is a legitimate reason to break a visit in half.
Two floors, two collections — paintings are upstairs, antiquities and the Kunstkammer are on the ground floor.

Things to do

1
Sit down in front of Hunters in the Snow
There is a bench. The painting is smaller than expected and colder than expected, and the longer you look the more of the village turns out to be happening — skaters, a chimney fire, birds, a distant crag that has no business being in Flanders. It rewards ten minutes more than most rooms reward an hour.
2
Take a coffee under the cupola
The café occupies the centre of the building at the top of the main staircase, open to the dome above. It is a room in the museum rather than a facility attached to it, and stopping there halfway through is closer to how the building was meant to be used than walking it end to end.
3
Go down to the ground floor
Twenty-one rooms hold about 2,200 objects, and the pleasure is the sheer implausibility of the materials: ostrich eggs and coconuts mounted in gold, ivory turned on a lathe into spheres inside spheres, rhinoceros horn, rock crystal, coral branching out of silver. It is the half of the museum most people leave without seeing, because they have spent everything upstairs.