Musée d'histoire de l'art

One room on the first floor holds more paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder than anywhere else on earth, around a dozen, including 'Hunters in the Snow', the line of tired hunters and their dogs trudging over a hill above a frozen valley, painted in 1565. That Vienna owns them at all comes down to the Habsburgs, the dynasty that ruled much of Europe for centuries and spent a good part of that power buying art.

The museum was built to show exactly that off. Emperor Franz Joseph opened it in 1891 on the Ringstraße, the grand boulevard laid out where Vienna's old city walls had stood, in a palace of a building by Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer, its staircase decorated by the young Gustav Klimt before he became the Klimt of gold and scandal. The point was to gather the scattered imperial collections under one roof and let the public in.

So the walls read like an inventory of Habsburg reach. Vermeer's 'The Art of Painting', the artist seen from behind at his easel, which the family kept as one of its treasures. Rooms of Titian, Rubens and Velázquez, whose Spanish court portraits of small solemn princesses came to Vienna through the marriages that tied the two branches of the family together. And below the picture galleries sits the Kunstkammer, a warren of carved ivory, clockwork automata and gemstone cups assembled by emperors who wanted the strange and the ingenious as much as the beautiful. Its most famous object is a gold salt cellar made by Benvenuto Cellini for the king of France.