Still on Our Honeymoon... Vienna, Day 5 (Kunsthistorisches Museum)

My yin and I woke early on a Sunday morning and took the 6:48 train from Prague to Vienna. Over the next four hours, I enjoyed watching the rail yards pass by the window as the Bohemian countryside dissolved imperceptibly into Austrian farmlands:

And it gave me a chance to catch up on my journaling before the experiences of the past few days disappeared into the fog of memory:

 My yin, on the other hand, took the opportunity to catch up on her sleep:
 

We arrived in Vienna shortly after noon, hopped a suburban train from Wien Meidling in the south to Wien Praterstern in the north. From there we were a single metro stop away from our next destination, a small studio apartment we found on a website:

Unfortunately, the owner of the studio wasn't there when we arrived so, after giving him a call to remind him that he was supposed to be there, we took a chance to check out the neighborhood, which lies just north of the Danube and appeared to be something of an artist's commune:

Our next door neighbor.

Anyway, our host soon arrived with the key, and after dropped our things, my yin and I were off to the Kunsthistorisches Museum:

Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunsthistorisches is built on a scale that can be intimidating, with labyrinth galleries twisting and turning endlessly. One could easily spend an entire day walking around and still not see everything. Unlike the Metropolitan, the artworks in the Kunsthistorisches were not assembled by curators or obtained from philanthropic benefactors. No, the art – like almost everything else in Vienna – belonged almost exclusively to a single family: the House of Hapsburg, who ruled huge swaths of Europe (primarily through marriage and incest) for more than 800 years. During this time, they amassed a collection of art rivaled only by the Vatican and British Monarcny:

 

Allegory of Vanitas by Antonia de Pereda

St. Jerome by Guido Reni

The Capture of Sampson by Anthonis van Dyck

Venusfest by Peter Paul Reubens

Not only is the breadth of their collection amazing:

So, too, is the scale of the galleries in which these Old World masterpieces are housed:

Walking around the Kunsthistorisches, one feels incredibly small, and I have no doubt that this was the very effect that the Hapsburgs were trying to achieve as they built up the city.  Keep in mind that this building, impressive as it is, has a twin (now the Museum of Natural History) siting across the quad. Ultimately, the scope of the museum metamorphoses from enormousness to enormity, which may have been why American artist Ed Ruscha, when asked to curate an exhibit encompassing all of the Kunsthistorisches treasures, named it: 

This was one of two special exhibits on display while we were there, and inside this relatively small room (i.e., 50 meters by 20 meters), one could see that the imperial taste extended beyond painting to include not only earthly specimens:

A ginormous piece of quartz.

But also fragments from the furthest reaches of the solar system:

Meteorite from Arizona, 1891.

And this doesn't even touch their collection of furniture:

 Egyptian sarcophagi:

Roman sarcophagi:

Roman busts:

Sculptures of, you guessed it, clubbing by Napoleon:
 

And Greek tilework:

In fact, one of my favorite things about the Kunsthistorishes' collection of Western antiquities was the way it mixed the ancient with the contemporary. So, in the image below, you can see an abstract modern sculpture by Joannis Avramidis in the foreground and two thousand year-old fragments from a Greek temple in the background:

Finally, there was the second special exhibit in the main stairway of the museum, which allowed visitors to climb scaffolding and see eye-to-eye with the amazing paintings on the archways by Gustave Klimt:

Egyptian-inspired representations of Life and Death.

Life

   

Death

Needless to say, my yin and I were on stim-overload and left the Kunsthistorisches as little before it closed at 6 o'clock. We hopped a tram (the Viennese love their trams) and circled around the Ringstrasse:

The Ringstrasse is a curious boulevard that circles the entirety of central Vienna. It exists because Vienna was the last major European city to tear down its walls. In 1857, Franz Joseph I (who was ruling the Austro-Hungarian for ten years before the American Civil War began and still ruling it at the onset of World War I over 60 years later) decreed that the wall was to come down, freeing up a wide swath of land all the way around the city. Today a pair of trams forms a complete loop, while the Innere Stadt itself remains largely free of trams, subways, and buses.

Anyway, my yin and I took the tram to the west side of town and then hoofed it to a small restaurant that served vegetarian versions of goulash and wiener schnitzel. We ate slowly, resting our legs from the long day of travel and sightseeing. We returned back to the studio around nightfall and went to be relatively early, resting ourselves for the big plans we had on tap for the following day...