State Hall of the Austrian National Library (Prunksaal)

Museum · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

One Viennese room eighty metres long holding two hundred thousand books printed before 1850, shelved where they were put and read by nobody.

The State Hall is a single room almost eighty metres long and twenty metres high, lined floor to gallery with walnut bookcases, and about two hundred thousand books stand in them. Every one was printed between 1501 and 1850, and nobody reads them here — the hall is a museum, and the books stay where they were shelved. Halfway along, an oval dome opens to thirty metres, and under it Daniel Gran's fresco carries the emperor Charles VI into the sky. Fifteen thousand of the books were Prince Eugene of Savoy's, the emperor's leading general; the court bought his library the year after he died, and his coloured bindings still stand together. Charles VI ordered the hall in 1722 and had it raised over an old covered riding school. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach designed it, his son finished the shell in 1726, and the books moved in four years later. Sixteen Habsburgs stand in marble around the middle of the floor, with four Venetian globes over a metre across among them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The books people actually read are in another wing — the library's reading rooms serve print from 1851 onward, so nothing on these shelves belongs to the collection in daily use.
The four globes here are not the globe museum — the library runs a separate globe museum in another building on Herrengasse, a few streets away, and it is a different visit altogether.
The hall doubles as a private event venue — it is hired out for dinners and concerts, so on some days it shuts to visitors earlier than usual.
Pick a bright day if you have the choice — forty-eight windows light the hall from the sides, and under heavy cloud the ceiling and the upper gallery lose most of their detail.
The walnut was cleaned with lasers in 2022 — ninety specialists spent half a year on the hall, working over the gilding, stucco, marble and six thousand square metres of bookcase wood.

Things to do

1
Walk past the dome to the far wall
Keep going past the dome to the far end of the hall, then turn and look back. From there the room reads as one corridor of walnut and gold, the cases climbing to the gallery on both sides and the dome opening halfway down. It is from the ends that the whole length finally reads as one room.
2
Pick out Prince Eugene's coloured bindings
Stand in the oval under the dome and look at the shelves instead of the ceiling. Prince Eugene's books were shelved in this middle section, bound in red, blue and yellow goatskin with gold tooling. Find the run where the leather changes colour and the gold catches the window light.
3
Follow one coastline round a globe
Get down to eye level with one of the globes and move round it as far as the room allows. Follow a single coastline and watch where the drawn line runs firm and where it thins out, because the mapmakers who worked in Venice had nothing to go on there. The blank stretches are the point.