DAY 119 SUNDAY JULY 22 WIENER MUSEUMS

Last day in Vienna so we felt ready to tackle a museum or two.  Our Vienna Card Booklet listed about 50 so we headed for the Museumquartier where the largest group were located and approached the Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum.  A statue of Empress Maria-Theresia dominated the square.

and another sculpture near the entrance featured a mythical thorpedo type. All the buildings we visited today were fabulously beautiful both inside and out and served very well as keepers of art and science. First up in the KHM was the Egyptian display which took up a dozen rooms and contained many massive sarcophaguses.  Then the classical Greek and Roman section

THESEUS KILLS THE MINATOUR

 including some pieces remaining from the local Roman settlement and on to mediaeval era. This statue made clever use of black and white marble:

 Upstairs the wall and ceiling paintings by Gustav Klimt were featured prominently.  He is evident everywhere we go in Austria.  The rest of the Museum was given over to an unbelievable number of masterpieces by mostly familiar name painters:

 Room after room of paintings that you had to sit in the middle on the sofas supplied to see properly.  This large one by Peter Paul Rubens was described as political because it featured St Francis Xavier during the CounterReformation and gave a positive slant on his religious approach, highlighting the miracles he was credited with at the time.

This wall had only one Rubens on it and it was not easy to pick which one.

Top centre.  We figured that the Sydney Art Gallery would only ever be able to handle one of these artists at a time, we would pay a lot to see, and be in a big crowd.  The crowds all day were quite reasonable here and we felt a sense of privilege to get so close to such a collection so easily.  Particularly after reading in the New York Times yesterday that there are thousands of masterpieces stored in Swiss vaults avoiding taxes that no one ever gets to see.  How money corrupts art! Today we learn that rich people have 32 trillion dollars in cash stored in Swiss and Cayman Island banks doing nothing.  That is more than the annual GDP of USA and Japan combined.  They cannot take it with them.  Coming outside to the fresh cool air,  we tried to be our normal, mediocre selves and opted for lunch in a nearby Konditorei (cafe specialising in cakes made on the premises).  They had a lunch special of 9.70 euros for a 3 course meal.  Suitably fortified by this lovely food we wandered through the large Quartier building nearby and found a few small specialised museums and displays.  Decided a better way to spend the remainder of the afternoon was to do the Natural History Museum and compare it with the one in London.  Vienna by half a length.  In London the Climate display was out of the way with few people looking.  In Vienna they put it right at the entrance and handled the history of ice ages in great detail.  They had a whole corridor of photos showing many of the 30 or so European Glaciers now and 100 years ago.  They made it clear that in another 100 years there would probably be none left.  We enjoyed the birds, of course.  We were pleased to see the Brush Turkey from "Australien" was labelled "Buschhuhn", pronounced bush hoon.  Some friends in Killcare would find that an appropriate name given their behaviour in their gardens.  The dinosaur room was full of noisy kids of course but this front leg from Utah was tucked away quietly in a corner.

We scratched out heads as we thought about people we know who still think these fossils are 6000 years old.  Among the animals we did not see a platypus or echidna but there were two displays concerning the Tasmanian Tiger and a note from 2005 about the face cancer killing off the devils. BBC News had a segment on the Tarkine yesterday showing counting of the remaining devils there who are hopefully out of contact with this horrible disease.  There is worldwide concern.