The Venus of Willendorf, a hall of meteorites, and a nineteenth-century museum that has kept its own cabinets on display.
The two museums on Maria-Theresien-Platz are architecturally identical and face each other across the square: art in one, nature in the other. The Naturhistorisches opened in 1889 around collections begun by Franz Stephan of Lorraine in 1750.
Its distinguishing quality is that it never modernised itself out of existence. The parquet floors, the walnut cabinets, the hand-lettered labels and the painted ceilings are all still here, and the museum has decided that the nineteenth-century way of displaying things is itself worth preserving. The effect is a museum of a museum, and it is charming rather than dusty.
The Venus of Willendorf
Eleven centimetres of oolitic limestone, carved around 29,500 years ago, found in Lower Austria in 1908. She has her own darkened room and her own case. It is a genuinely startling object to stand in front of — small, heavy, deliberate.
The meteorite hall
The largest collection on public display anywhere, in the original cases, including the Tissint Mars meteorite and a great deal of material that fell on the Habsburg lands and was dutifully sent in.
The rest
A large dinosaur hall with an animatronic Allosaurus, popular with children and mercifully well ventilated. A prehistory department covering the Hallstatt culture, with material from the salt mines. Minerals and gems, including a bouquet of jewels made for Maria Theresa. Anthropology, and a digital planetarium.
The taxidermy halls include specimens of extinct species — a Steller’s sea cow skeleton, thylacine, passenger pigeon — collected when nobody expected them to become irreplaceable.
Practicalities
Closed Tuesdays. Open late on Wednesdays. The roof tour is booked separately, runs in small groups, and takes you out above the cornice for a view down the Ring — it is one of the better-value hours in Vienna and it is not widely known.
Allow two to three hours. With children, more.
More Museums
Kunsthistorisches Museum
The Habsburg collection: the largest group of Bruegels anywhere, a Vermeer, and a staircase Klimt painted before he broke with the establishment.
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.