The Kunsthistorisches Museum is one of the world’s great Old Masters collections — and one of the most architecturally spectacular museum buildings ever constructed. Commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph in the 1860s and opened in 1891, the museum was purpose-built to display the Habsburg dynasty’s 600 years of art collecting. The twin building across Maria-Theresien-Platz is the Naturhistorisches Museum (which displays the same Habsburg collecting impulse for natural history). Both buildings were designed by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer in lavish Italian Renaissance style.The collection’s signature strengths: the world’s largest Pieter Bruegel the Elder holdings (12 paintings including The Tower of Babel and Hunters in the Snow), Johannes Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (one of two undisputed Vermeer self-references), major Velázquez Habsburg portraits, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Albrecht Dürer. The Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities collection is among Europe’s best.