The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna holds one of the greatest collections of art in the world. 16th-century art, Archduke Ferdinand and Rudolph II of Hapsburg’s Wunderkammer (or chambers of marvels), and Baroque art collected by Archduke Leopold William provide the core of this extraordinary collection, in which the passion for art and the tastes of the Imperial family come through clearly even today. From the antiquities from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, to the art from mediaeval times, the collection, which also covers the Renaissance and the Baroque, is divided into eight sections some of which are housed at the Hofburg and Schönbrunn Palaces.

The exhibition is curated by Carmen Giménez, Senior Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and by leading scholar in the History of Art, Francisco Calvo Serraller, Chair in Art History at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and Member of San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts since 1999. Divided into six sections, the exhibition has been conceived as a review of this outstanding collection presenting many of its masterworks from different ages in a broad range of styles and media. Each section is devoted to concepts and traditions in the history of Western art. Section one concentrates on the portrait, exploring the ways the human face was portrayed from ancient classical times to the Renaissance and the Baroque. Another section deals with nudes and the way they were used to analyze and explore the order and proportion in the human body. Two other major sections included in this presentation of the Kunsthistorisches Collection Vienna deal with still lifes and popular scenes, two ways of illustrating the daily reality of people’s lives. The fifth section is devoted to landscape and architecture, while the last section highlights the frequent references of artists to history, religion, and mythology, thereby evidencing the way in which, throughout history, they have captured remarkable events and have conceived mythology and the supernatural.

Through the works by masters such as Titian, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Comin, better known as Tintoretto, Jan Van Eyck, Jan Brueghel, Albrecht Dürer, Cranach, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens and Anton Van Dyck, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will present to its audiences a selection of one of the most important art collections in the world.