Vienna: KHM … Antiquities

Since, I’ve written about the Kunsthistorisches Museum in previous footprints, I’m going to keep the words to a minimum in this one.

We had already decided to skip the Coin Collection, so after lunch at the museum’s café, we headed off to check out the Greek & Roman and Egyptian antiquities collections, both of which are among the most important in the world.

Suffice to say that both collections are expansive … the Egyptian collection alone consists of some 17,000 objects. There are small items … such as cameos; as well as large items … such as the head of a colossal statue. There are ceramics, glassware, gold jewelry, mosaics, bronzes, clay tablets, stone statues, funeral cult representations … such as mummies, and more. There are statuettes that have weathered the millennia intact; and larger pieces that have not aged as gracefully, but beautiful nonetheless.

In the short time we had available — with yet another collection waiting in the wings — there was no way to see everything. We wandered the galleries, focusing our attention on pieces that immediately caught our attention. I think we managed to see the most important objects in each collection.Læs mere