Natural History Museum Vienna
The Naturhistorisches Museum Wien—Vienna’s Natural History Museum—was built in 1889 and designed by Karl von Hasenauer, but its story begins centuries earlier in the private collections of European rulers. In 1750, Holy Roman Emperor Francis I bought what was then described as the world’s largest natural history collection from Florentine scholar Jean de Baillou; it contained 30,000 objects, from rare fossils and molluscs to minerals and precious stones. Francis I had also helped set the stage for collecting science: he founded the Schönbrunn zoo in 1752 and commissioned Nicolaus Joseph Jacquin in 1755 to travel through the Caribbean, the Antilles, Venezuela, and Colombia. When Francis I died, Maria Theresa gave the natural science collection to the state and opened it to the general public, creating an Enlightenment-style museum. The building you see today supports that long research tradition. …
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