The Picture Gallery, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna

Contained within the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna’s Gemäldegalerie can be compared to other great European collections housed in art academies, like Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera or the Galleria dell’ Accademia in Venice. Its existence as a museum and the quality of the collection are a result of generous patronage. The gallery’s most important paintings, by Bosch, Rubens, Rembrandt and Guardi, among others, were donated in 1822 by Count Lamberg-Sprinzenstein, who bequeathed his personal collection of more than eight hundred works to the Academy on condition that they were placed on public view. Many more donations were added over the years, as well as a large number of admission pieces and works that had won prizes awarded by the Academy. The result is a stunning collection of masterpieces of European art from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.