Vienna Art

For our last partial day in Vienna we walked to the Kunst Museum, part of the Hofburg Palace complex. This museum houses most of the artwork that belonged to the Habsburg royal family. They had quite a collection!

We began by climbing the grand stairway. The intricately carved marble and finely painted ceilings whet the appetite for the galleries to follow. Beginning in the wing for Spanish, French and Italian painters, we skipped over many to focus on the highlighted masterpieces.

Moving on to the German, Dutch and Flemish painters in the opposite wing, we did likewise, spending extra time in the rooms dedicated to Reubens, and to the museum's extensive collection of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Most of Bruegel's most famous paintings are here.

After finishing with the paintings, we walked briefly through a collection of Habsburg tableware. We had just seen an even larger collection yesterday at the Sisi Museum in a different part of the palace, but here was some of the fine crystal and cut glass.

Finally, we went downstairs to view the Habsburg collection of antiquities. Like many European nobles of the 18th and 19th centuries, young Habsburg princes took their "grand tour" in the Mediterranean regions, often stealing ancient art (stealing fair and square, of course, by either digging it up themselves -- finders keepers -- or buying it from cash-strapped locals who had done the digging).

The young Habsburgs had done very well. The antiquities here rival or exceed anything we've seen in Egypt, Greece, Italy, or Britain. Some of the Egyptian works were particularly stunning, both in terms of quality of preservation and in terms of the quantity of items on display.

After a brief bit of souvenir shopping (we tend not to collect much), we headed off to our final traditional Viennese lunch. I think I'm ready to vary my diet away from roast pork, potato dumplings, and sauerkraut for awhile now.

We had checked out of the hotel after breakfast, but had to go back for our bags. Vienna's mass transit system to the airport is probably the cleanest, fastest, and cheapest we've run into anywhere. But we arrived very early and had time to kill. At least it's not an unpleasant place to wait.

How about that Habsburg lip?!?!?