Visit the exhibition "From Vienna to Rome: Habsburg Masterpieces from the Kunsthistorisches Museum" at Museo del Corso until July 5, 2026.

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The rooms of the Museo del Corso at Palazzo Cipolla will host, until July 5, the highly anticipated exhibition From Vienna to Rome: Habsburg Treasures from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, a journey through art and history that is also a dynastic portrait, emblematic of the splendor of the Empire and the cultural ambition of the Habsburgs.

Promoted and produced by the Fondazione Roma in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM), the exhibition, curated by Cäcilia Bischoff, brings together more than 50 masterpieces commissioned between the 16th and 19th centuries by key figures of the House of Habsburg, offering a portrait of an empire that used art as a powerful instrument of cultural representation, the dissemination of knowledge, and dialogue between civilizations.

The exhibition opens with a room dedicated to the architecture of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the monumental building designed by Gottfried Semper and Carl Hasenauer and inaugurated in 1891 as part of the major urban plan commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph I. The museum is placed in dialogue with Palazzo Cipolla, the Roman venue hosting the exhibition, through the figure of its architect Antonio Cipolla, who was active during the same decades.

The rest of the exhibition celebrates, through distinct sections, European painting between the 16th and 17th centuries, presented through its main genres and geographic origins: Flemish, Dutch, German, and finally Italian.

The great representatives of Flemish art are present with works characterized by intense colors, where nature takes center stage, as in the floral explosion of irises and butterflies by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

The great representatives of Flemish art are present with works characterized by intense colors, where nature takes center stage, as in the floral explosion of irises and butterflies by Jan Brueghel the Elder.

While the section dedicated to 17th-century Dutch painting focuses on genre scenes drawn from everyday life, a subject particularly favored by the bourgeois and Protestant society of the time, the German section draws inspiration from the precious Renaissance legacy of Lucas Cranach, a key figure in shaping an autonomous artistic language characterized by strong stylization and an exceptional mastery of line and drawing.

The innermost rooms of the exhibition maze are devoted to objects from the Kunstkammer, the celebrated Renaissance cabinets of curiosities: a collection of natural oddities and creations of human ingenuity, intended to astonish and delight the eyes of the visitor.

Over the course of more than three centuries, Habsburg collecting led to the acquisition of extraordinary works that reflected the tastes of different patrons, yet were all united by a single common thread: excellence. Above all stands Diego Velázquez, with his portrait of Infanta Margarita in a blue dress, an iconic work of court portraiture. The precise, almost severe rendering of the child’s clothing and hairstyle is softened by the youthful blush of her cheeks and the emotional and psychological intensity of her gaze.

Italian painting holds an important place in the Viennese collection. On display are masterpieces by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Orazio Gentileschi, Guido Cagnacci, and even a stunning .

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Orazio Gentileschi is a family portrait of striking realism, depicting Saint Joseph lying awkwardly asleep from exhaustion while the Virgin nurses the infant Jesus, whose gaze is directed toward the viewer, a device often used in painting to draw the spectator into the scene.

In Mars, Venus and Cupid by Titian, the soft, rosy nude of the goddess of love, a symbol of seduction and surrender to pleasure, contrasts with the pale, moonlike coldness of the lifeless body of Cleopatra in Guido Cagnacci’s painting, lost in the sleep of death after the bite of the asp, still coiled around her arm, under the desperate gaze of her attendants.

Last but not least, the final room comes as a surprise thanks to the presence of Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns, one of the masterpieces of the exhibition. It is a dramatic scene, rendered with an almost photographic composition and marked by the masterful use of light and shadow, in which a suffering Christ, noble and strikingly beautiful, is at the mercy of two male figures, crude and brutal both in appearance and gesture. On the left, a knight in 17th-century armor, contemporary to the painter, watches the scene almost as if he were in a theater, with his hand resting on the edge of the frame, symbolically invading the viewer’s space in a perspectival game that blurs the boundary between art and reality.

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