The story
The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna is first of all a working art school, founded in 1692, one of the oldest in central Europe. It is remembered by many for a rejection, when it twice turned away a young applicant named Adolf Hitler, in 1907 and 1908, judging his drawings unfit for the painting school.
Less known is that the academy keeps a serious picture gallery, built up as teaching material. Its greatest possession is Hieronymus Bosch's Last Judgment triptych, from around 1500, a wing-to-wing panorama of paradise, judgment and a hell of inventive torments. There are also works by Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt.
The paintings hang in Theophil Hansen's grand nineteenth-century academy building on the Schillerplatz, among the plaster casts and studios where students still learn to draw.
