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Two museums
The emperor commissioned two museums to house the Habsburg collection
Emperor Franz Joseph I opened the facility around 1891, at the same time as the Natural History Museum, which has a similar design and stands across Maria-Theresien-Platz. The buildings were constructed between 1871 and 1891 to plans by Gottfried Semper and Baron Karl von Hasenauer.
The building
An octagonal dome 60 metres high crowns a building lined with marble
The buildings have symmetrical Renaissance Revival facades of sandstone, topped with octagonal domes 60 metres high. The interiors are decorated with marble, stucco, gold leaf and murals. The grand stairway features paintings by Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt, Franz Matsch, Hans Makart and Mihály Munkácsy.
60 metresheight of the octagonal domes
The sources
The picture gallery grew from the collections of the Habsburgs
The museum's primary collections are those of the Habsburgs, particularly the portrait and armour collections of Ferdinand of Tirol, the collections of Emperor Rudolph II, and the paintings of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. The largest part of Rudolph II's collection is scattered.
Brueghel
Pieter Brueghel the Elder is shown with The Tower of Babel
Notable works in the picture gallery include several paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, among them The Tower of Babel of 1563, The Hunters in the Snow of 1565 and The Peasant Wedding of 1568/69. The list also names Vermeer's The Art of Painting.
Looted art
A panel advised in 2010 that two altar panels be restituted
In 2010 an Austrian government panel recommended that the museum restitute two altar panels by the 16th-century Dutch artist Maerten van Heemskerck to the heirs of Richard Neumann, a Jewish art collector in Vienna plundered by the Nazis.
Day 2, morning
Next is Naschmarkt.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Kunsthistorisches Museum, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.