Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

During their long reign, which began in the Middle Ages, the Habsburg family collected an incredible array of art – an impressive collection of valuable and beautiful objects, of curiosities and wonders that you can experience today. The Kunstkammer is without doubt the world’s foremost collection of its kind. 
Over 2200 objects speak of a fascination with collecting. You can admire delicate goldsmith work and precious stone vessels, bronze sculptures and ivory carvings, clocks and automatons, tapestries and such unusual objects as fossilised shark’s teeth or bezoars.  The range of this unique collection shows us the wealth of the rooms of arts and natural wonders assembled by nobles of the 16th and 17th centuries, which aimed to reflect the entire knowledge of the day with their encyclopaedic approach.

Thanks to the Imperial family’s love of art, the Picture Gallery of the KHM is one of the most important museums of its kind in Europe today. Visitors can admire works by such famous painters as Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Rubens, Van Dyck, Van Eyck and Dürer, with the collection’s main focus being on 17th century painting. Other masterpieces of the collection include pictures by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Raphael, Caravaggio, and other Italian Baroque painters. Portraits such as those of Joseph II or Maria Theresa of Spain (“Infanta Maria Theresa”) permit us glimpses into the lives of emperors and empresses.

In the Egyptian and Near Eastern Collection, you will enter an Egyptian burial chamber and discover an enchanting blue hippopotamus among the burial objects. It is surrounded by six-metre papyrus columns (stone columns shaped like a bundle of papyrus stalks), mummies and stone sarcophagi. 
The Collection of Greek and Roman Antiquities includes objects from a period of three millennia, taking you from Cyprus and Greece to Ancient Rome and the territory of modern-day Austria during Roman times. Experience unique cameos such as the “Gemma Auguste”, treasure troves from Late Antiquity and the time of the great migrations, a collection of antique vases and Roman arts and crafts.