The Habsburg collection: the largest group of Bruegels anywhere, a Vermeer, and a staircase Klimt painted before he broke with the establishment.
This is one of the great picture galleries of the world, and it exists because the Habsburgs collected obsessively for four centuries and then, in 1891, put it all in a purpose-built palace facing an identical one across a square.
Bruegel
The museum holds twelve paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, roughly a third of everything he is known to have painted, and they are hung together in one room. Hunters in the Snow, The Tower of Babel, The Peasant Wedding, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. There is nowhere else on earth you can do this, and it is the single best reason to come to Vienna if you care about painting.
The room was reorganised for the 2018 anniversary exhibition and the hanging has been better ever since.
The rest of the picture gallery
Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, which he kept all his life. Velázquez portraits of the Spanish infantas, sent to Vienna as marriage prospects, which is why they are here. Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Rubens by the roomful, Rembrandt self-portraits, Dürer, Holbein, Arcimboldo’s composite heads.
The Kunstkammer
Reopened in 2013 after a decade shut, and now arguably the best thing in the building. It is the Habsburg cabinet of curiosities: automata, clockwork, ivory, rock crystal, bezoars, narwhal tusk sold as unicorn horn, and Cellini’s salt cellar — the gold and enamel Saliera of 1543, stolen from the museum in 2003 by a man who climbed scaffolding, and recovered from a forest three years later.
The building
The staircase is worth stopping on. The spandrels above the arches were painted by a young Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch in 1890 — conventional, historicist work, done a decade before Klimt broke with the academy and helped found the Secession. Seeing what he was before makes the Secession make more sense.
Practicalities
Three hours is a minimum and it is easy to spend a day. The café under the dome is expensive and one of the more beautiful rooms in Vienna to be tired in.
Closed Mondays outside summer. A combined ticket with the Neue Burg collections and the Treasury exists and is good value if you are staying a few days. The Natural History Museum in the matching building opposite has a superb mineral collection and the Venus of Willendorf, and is much less crowded.
More Museums
The Albertina
A million prints and drawings, Dürer's hare, and a permanent Monet-to-Picasso collection in the old Habsburg state rooms.
Leopold Museum
The largest Egon Schiele collection in the world, assembled by an ophthalmologist who started buying when nobody wanted them.
Sigmund Freud Museum
The consulting rooms at Berggasse 19, kept deliberately empty because the furniture went to London in 1938 and never came back.