VIENNA - The Last Day

On our last day in Vienna we visited the Belvedere Palace.

The main Palace building now serves as an art gallery, but in days now past it was the residence of "someone important" (we can't remember right at this moment).

 

The Palace itself is set at the top of a gently sloped rise, and it overlooks a few carefully manicured hedges and very symmetrical walkways down to another palatial building at the bottom end.  At the time we visited, much of this long sparsely vegetated "garden" was covered in fences and barriers preventing you from actually walking throughout. The overall effect was not enticing enough to interest us in trekking downhill to the other building - in fact it was quite bare and ugly - so we started with the main Palace and gallery...

 

Inside the main Palace were some beautiful white sculptures designed to "support" the many arches. The effect was quite soft and refreshingly free of gold!

 

 

Even the ornate staircase - if you overlook the elaborate mouldings - was quite refreshingly simple and light!

 

However, the good times were not to last - the main hall of the Belvedere is a monument to the Baroque period...

You can see how large this hall was - Jason is positively dwarfed by the height of the ceiling!

 

He seemed to find my horror at the discovery of gold and marble quite amusing...

The Belvedere Palace was very worthwhile going to visit. The building itself was beautiful (even with the over-the-top main hall...) and the art in the gallery was wonderful! There was quite a bit of work that appeared to have been created in local kindergartens, but the art from the romantic period was wonderful as was the focus on portraiture. The Belvedere also contains "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt, as well as some other well known works of his. Klimt is something of a national icon in Vienna, being one of their most famous exports. I'm not a fan, but I can say that seeing some of his most well-known pieces in person was a big improvement from seeing them in text books - they are much more beautiful and lively up close!

During the course of meandering through this multi-level gallery, Jase lost our tickets... which meant we almost were kicked out when attempting to get to the Cafe from the gallery shop, and also meant we were unable to access the second building at the base of the gardens. We weren't really that keen to be honest, from the pictures it appeared to be a former residence with an overwhelming amount of gold and Baroque stylings... So we gave it a miss and instead returned to the main Gallery and Museum square close to our hotel.

We visited the Kunst-"something" Museum (shown in the photo above - see Jason's earlier post for the correct name). Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take photographs of the exhibits, but were permitted to take some photos of the interior of the building...

 

There are some gorgeous statues, as well as marble pillars, frescoes and arches...

 

The main staircase really was quite something! Although there are many levels, and we wound up using the lifts... I tell you what, I wish I had bought a pedometer to record the number of stairs we have climbed during our time in Europe!!

Inside this museum was a large collection of art - I found a couple of Duhrer paintings but unfortunately none of his drawings - and I wish we had more time to go through more carefully. As it was, we did a rush through and stopped by the gallery store on our way out - I bought some fantastic books featuring colour photographs of the gallery collections, which was great! There was also a special exhibition on, found on the top floor tucked away in a corner - quite hidden away, to be honest! - and the artwork in that was quite worth checking out. I forget the artist's name...

Following this gallery visit (which had been purely a spur of the moment thing) we went back to the Natural History Museum for a second visit, where I took some photos for my painting reference image collection.

Check out the plumage on this bird!!

 

This is actually a real bird, no missing this one in a crowd...

 

We also saw lots of creatures from the animal kingdom again including some very big frogs... Eww!

 

And we found a very famous Venus statue, that I'm sure most of you would recognise! It is actually only about 10cm high, quite small... Apparently it's the oldest Venus statue in Europe, possibly the world!

 

On our way back to the hotel, we paid homage to Mozart while trying to dodge the Grass Nazi's (they don't like you to walk or sit on grass anywhere in Vienna, we have noticed...)

 

And Jase developed an obsession with this sign. He thought it must have meant no robot dogs allowed, and thought the word "Hundeverbot" was pretty cool.  He thought it must have been put up by the Grass Nazi's.