Kunsthistorisches Museum

Museum · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

The Habsburgs' art collection in a purpose-built Vienna palace of 1891, holding the world's largest group of Bruegel and a cabinet of curiosities.

People come to the Kunsthistorisches for the Bruegel room above everything else: 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 objects collected for strangeness as much as value — automata, carved cherry stones, and a gold salt cellar by Cellini. The same floor carries the Egyptian and Near Eastern rooms and the Greek and Roman antiquities. The museum opened in 1891 to house art the family had been accumulating for three hundred years, in a domed Renaissance-revival palace on the Ringstrasse facing an identical twin across the square. 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.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Go to the Bruegel room first — it is the one room that fills, and it sits at the far end of the picture galleries, so arriving last means arriving with everyone else.
The Klimt panels are the narrow strips between the columns — On the main staircase they sit above the arches, at a height and size that makes them easy to climb straight past.
The crown jewels are not in this building — The Habsburg regalia are in the Imperial Treasury inside the Hofburg, and the armoury and the carriages are elsewhere again.

Things to do

1
Sit down in front of Hunters in the Snow
There is a bench, and the painting is smaller than expected and colder than expected. 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 cafe 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: the same marble, the same gilt, the same sightlines back down the stairs. Sitting in it is part of walking the building, not a break from it.
3
See the ostrich eggs and ivory spheres on the ground floor
Twenty-one rooms hold about 2,200 objects, and the pleasure is the sheer implausibility of the materials. There are 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.