Ambras Castle

Most people know Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Milanese court painter, for faces built out of fruit and vegetables. At Ambras Castle, on a hill above Innsbruck, he appears in a soberer role. Here hang his straightforward portraits of young archduchesses, daughters of Emperor Maximilian II, painted around 1563. They belong to a Habsburg portrait gallery of some 300 pictures spread over three floors of the upper castle, where you also meet Anthony van Dyck's Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia in her widow's habit and a Queen Maria Anna of Spain from Diego Velázquez and his workshop.

The castle was the project of Archduke Ferdinand II, ruler of Tyrol, who began rebuilding it in 1564 for Philippine Welser, the Augsburg merchant's daughter he had married in secret. Below the residence he put up a separate building purely to show his collections. Its Chamber of Art and Curiosities still holds what he gathered there, coral cabinets, automata, objects from distant lands and portraits of people his age considered marvels, among them the hair-covered Petrus Gonsalvus and his children. Next to it are the armouries, filled with the tournament armour Ferdinand collected from famous commanders of his day.

Much of the collection was taken to Vienna in 1806, after Tyrol passed to Bavaria, and since 1950 the castle has been run by the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The grandest room stayed in place. The Spanish Hall, built between 1569 and 1572 and about 43 metres long, is lined with 27 full-length portraits of Tyrol's rulers beneath a carved wooden ceiling.