Kunsthistorisches Museum

Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary opened the facility around 1891 at the same time as the Natural History Museum, Vienna which has a similar design and is directly across Maria-Theresien-Platz.

The emperor commissioned the two Ringstraße museums to create a suitable home for the Habsburgs' formidable art collection and to make it accessible to the general public.

The buildings are rectangular, with symmetrical Renaissance Revival façades of sandstone lined with large arched windows on the main levels and topped with an octagonal dome 60 metres (200 ft) high.

Notable works in the picture gallery include: The collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum: Also affiliated are the: In 2010, an Austrian government panel recommended that the Kunsthistorisches Museum should 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.

[4] In 2015, a dispute over a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), erupted between Poland and Austria.

Rotunda
Sculptures at staircase