Christina, Queen of Sweden by Veronica Buckley

In eight thematic tours they invite readers to cast a new gaze upon the collection. Writer and historian Philipp Blom and his wife, the writer Veronica Buckley, have set off on numerous journeys of discovery through the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. Veronica Buckley reclaims a protean life that had been preserved mostly as myth. Freed from her crown, Christina cut a breath-taking path across Europe: spending madly, searching for a more prestigious throne to scale. Among the other highlights in the Picture Gallery are its holdings of pictures by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which are unique worldwide, as well as masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Raphael, Caravaggio or Velázquez. Christina, Queen of Sweden, longed fatally for adventure. The foundations of the collection were laid and its main emphases set in the 17th century: 16th-century Venetian painting (Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto), 17th-century Flemish painting (Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Anthony Van Dyck), Early Netherlandish painting (Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden) and German Renaissance painting (Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach).

Today it is one of the largest and most important of its kind in the world.

The Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum developed from the art collections of the House of Habsburg. Specialists concentrate on styles and epochs, techniques and influences, but one can also look at these works very differently: as inspirations for highly personal observations, meditations and narratives. We must only listen, open ourselves to them.

Christina, Queen of Sweden by Veronica Buckley