Kunsthistorisches Museum

The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, established in 1891, houses extensive collections amassed by the Habsburgs, featuring art and artifacts from five millennia. Its holdings include masterpieces by Old Masters such as Raphael, Titian, Velázquez, and Vermeer, as well as the world’s largest collection of works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The museum also displays ancient artifacts, including Egyptian mummies and Roman sculptures, and the renowned Kunstkammer, which reopened in 2013, featuring treasures from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. The museum is located at Maria-Theresien-Platz, 1010 Vienna, and offers various visitor services, including guided tours, audio guides, and educational programs. It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with extended hours on Thursdays until 9 p.m.

Planning your visit

The Kunsthistorisches Museum is the Habsburg collection, and the building was purpose-built in 1891 to hold it — a palace of a museum on Maria-Theresien-Platz, facing its twin natural history counterpart across the square, with a domed marble staircase that Klimt decorated as a young man before he became scandalous. The picture gallery holds the world's largest collection of Bruegel the Elder, including the Hunters in the Snow and the Tower of Babel, gathered because the Habsburgs happened to like him when nobody else was buying. Alongside sit Raphael, Titian, Velázquez — the family portraits of Spanish relations — Caravaggio and Vermeer's Art of Painting.

The Kunstkammer, reopened in 2013 after a decade closed, is the other reason to come and is frequently skipped: the Habsburg cabinet of curiosities, holding Cellini's gold salt cellar, automata, carved rock crystal and the accumulated strangeness of Renaissance princely collecting. The Egyptian and Roman collections fill out a museum that comfortably absorbs half a day.

Bookable options include entrance tickets, tickets with digital tours, highlight tours covering the Bruegel room and the picture gallery's landmarks, and skip-the-line private tours. Private formats are worth considering because the collection's logic is dynastic rather than art-historical — things are here because a specific emperor wanted them — and that thread is far more interesting when someone draws it for you. Combination tickets with the Leopold Museum cover two very different eras of Austrian art. Current availability is listed below.