Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

The Kunsthistorisches Museum stands on the Ringstrasse in Vienna, completed in 1891 to a design by the architects Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer, built to house the vast art and antiquities collections amassed over centuries by the Habsburg dynasty. It forms an architectural pair with the nearly identical Naturhistorisches Museum standing directly across the Maria-Theresien-Platz, the two matching Historicist buildings designed together as twin bookends framing the square. The museum's domed central hall and grand staircase are richly decorated with marble, gilding and painted ornament, including ceiling and spandrel paintings executed in part by the young Gustav Klimt before he broke from academic painting to help found the Vienna Secession. Its collections, ranging from ancient Egyptian and classical antiquities to the paintings of Bruegel, Titian and Velazquez, made it one of the largest and most comprehensive museum buildings built anywhere in nineteenth-century Europe.