Natural History Museum

Museum · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

Thirty million objects in a Vienna museum whose halls were never restyled, among them an eleven-centimetre limestone woman carved thirty thousand years ago.

The Natural History Museum keeps a woman eleven centimetres tall, carved from limestone about thirty thousand years ago. A workman found her in 1908 beside a railway cutting at Willendorf, up the Danube; she came out of the ground painted red, and an excavator washed her the same day, so almost all the colour is gone. She has a case to herself in Hall 11. The collection around her is older than the house. It started around 1750, when the emperor Franz Stephan of Lorraine bought thirty thousand minerals and fossils from a collector in Florence, and it now holds about thirty million objects. Ferdinand von Hochstetter planned the order of the halls and died five years before it opened in 1889. Most of the halls were never restyled: cases stand in ranks, minerals sorted by chemistry, animals mounted in the stiff poses of their century. That is the pleasure and the problem, because nearly forty halls is more than one visit holds. More than sixty scientists work behind the doors.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Do one floor properly instead of both badly — Rocks, meteorites, fossils, dinosaurs and the human story all sit downstairs, and every animal is a floor above. Pick one.
Come to the Venus first thing or in the last hour — Her case sits in a small space, and five people around it are enough to leave you waiting your turn.
Check the roof before you pick a door — Two matching buildings face each other across the square. A bronze sun god stands on this one's dome; the art museum opposite carries Athena.
The rebuilt halls do the explaining; the old ones expect you to look — Meteorites and dinosaurs were modernised with full displays. Elsewhere you get a short label and a name.

Things to do

1
Circle the Venus and look for the face that is not there
Her case is free-standing and lit from every side, so look at her back and her head as well as her front. There is no face at all, just rows of a carved braid-like pattern. Then find the small round hollows in the stone. One of them, where a hard iron-rich lump came out, is her navel.
2
Catch the light on a sliced meteorite in Hall 5
Find the polished slices cut through iron meteorites and move until the light rakes across them. A lattice of crossing bands appears. It only forms when molten metal cools over millions of years, so no furnace can copy it. Alois von Widmanstätten found it on a slice like these in Vienna in 1808.
3
Stop halfway up the main staircase and look up
Do this before you enter a single hall. Stand halfway up and look into the top of the stairwell. Hans Canon painted the ceiling in the 1880s and called it The Cycle of Life. Twelve arched panels ring it, one for each branch of natural science, so the building explains itself before a single case does.