The Innerer Burgplatz in Vienna

In 1652 the Dutch painter Samuel van Hoogstraten was working in Vienna for Emperor Ferdinand III, and this is the emperor's own courtyard. We look north-west across the inner square of the Hofburg, the imperial palace, towards the Amalienburg, the wing put up for Rudolf II in the late 1500s. The Kunsthistorisches Museum reads the picture as the view the emperor himself had of the square, and it went straight into the imperial collection and has never left it. Hoogstraten could not resist a trick even here. He painted a black frame around the view, and on that painted frame a small slip of paper, as if tucked in, carrying his name and the date. Frame and note are both paint on the same oak panel. Within a decade Ferdinand's son, Leopold I, began a long new wing on one side of this square, the Leopoldine Wing, which today holds the offices of the Austrian president.