Belvedere district

The Belvedere and Klimt’s most famous canvas

The Upper Belvedere palace houses what is arguably the most-visited single painting in central Europe: Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907–08). On a gold-leaf field, two figures — a man and a woman — embrace in a cloak of Byzantine-patterned gold, their faces tilted, the surrounding darkness suggested rather than stated. The gold is actual gold leaf applied to the surface. The flowers at the base are painted with botanical precision. The figures are identifiable as distinctly human beings within an almost entirely abstract decorative environment. It is simultaneously one of the most intimate and most formally ambitious paintings of the early 20th century, and it has been drawing longer queues in its room than the Mona Lisa does in the Louvre — scaled for the size of the institution.

But reducing the Belvedere to The Kiss misses a remarkable collection. The permanent holdings cover Austrian art from the baroque period through the Vienna Secession and Austrian Expressionism — with major works by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and a strong selection of 18th-century European painting including Flemish and Italian works from Prince Eugene’s original collection. The building itself, built by Prince Eugene of Savoy between 1717 and 1723 to designs by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, is one of the finest baroque palaces in Europe — and unlike Schönbrunn or the Hofburg, it was built for pleasure and display rather than practical governance, which gives it a lighter, more theatrical quality.

Upper Belvedere

The Upper Belvedere houses the permanent collection across three floors, each covering a distinct period of Austrian art history. The ground floor covers medieval and baroque work, including several altarpieces from dissolved Austrian monasteries and a strong survey of 17th-century Austrian religious painting. The first floor is where most visitors spend their time — the Klimt rooms (several major works, not just The Kiss, including Judith I and the extensive collection of preparatory studies) and the Schiele and Kokoschka holdings that make the Belvedere’s Vienna Secession and Expressionism holdings among the deepest anywhere. The top floor surveys Austrian Biedermeier painting from the early 19th century, a period often overlooked but characterised by a sharp-eyed domesticity — the painters of the Biedermeier era documented middle-class Viennese life with a specificity that constitutes an extraordinary social record.

Buy Upper Belvedere entry with the permanent collection ticket — the online booking avoids the entrance queue, which can grow considerably through mid-morning on busy days, and confirms your entry time.

A private Belvedere and Klimt guided tour is the best way to understand the symbolism in The Kiss and Klimt’s relationship with his models, patrons and the Secession movement — the story of the painting is considerably richer with a knowledgeable guide explaining the context that the room labels alone cannot provide.

Lower Belvedere and Orangery

The Lower Belvedere (at the north end of the formal gardens, with a separate entrance from Rennweg) houses the Baroque Museum and the Orangery. The Baroque Museum shows Prince Eugene’s original collection, including the marble sculptures that once decorated the palace’s grand staircase before they were moved indoors for conservation. The works here — by Georg Raphael Donner and Balthasar Permoser among others — represent the high point of Austrian and Central European baroque sculpture and are as important historically as anything in the Upper Belvedere.

The Orangery occupies a long, barrel-vaulted hall designed for overwintering tropical plants — a practical space transformed into one of the most beautiful exhibition rooms in Vienna. It hosts temporary exhibitions and, regularly, classical concerts in an intimate setting that the Upper Belvedere’s scale does not permit.

The Lower Belvedere is consistently overlooked by visitors who go directly to the Upper Belvedere for The Kiss and leave. Combined tickets covering both buildings are available and represent good value. The Marble Hall in the Lower Belvedere is alone worth the visit — a gilded, frescoed ceremonial room where the ceiling fresco by Martino Altomonte depicts Apollo and the Muses, and Prince Eugene’s equestrian portrait in full regalia anchors the east wall. It is one of the finest interiors in Austria.

The gardens

The formal French gardens between the two palaces are free to enter from the main gate on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse (open from 06:30). The central axis, running from the Lower Belvedere fountain through the ornamental parterres to the grand entrance of the Upper Belvedere, is one of Vienna’s finest formal garden walks — and one of the very few great baroque garden sequences in the city that is genuinely accessible without a palace ticket.

Sphinx sculptures flank the steps on the central axis; the reflecting pools in front of the Upper Belvedere mirror the palace facade, a composition most effective in morning light when the building faces the sun. The formal parterres on either side of the central axis were restored in the late 20th century to their 18th-century designs and are planted with period-appropriate species — clipped hedges, roses, and the ornamental cabbages that 18th-century gardening favoured in geometric beds.

The Alpine Garden (Alpengarten) on the eastern edge of the Belvedere grounds is one of Europe’s oldest alpine plant gardens, in continuous cultivation since 1803. It is open from April to July with a separate admission charge and specialises in high-altitude Central European species — dwarf conifers, alpine wildflowers, and rock garden plants that have no parallel in any other Vienna garden. Specialised but excellent for garden enthusiasts.

Getting there

Tram D from the Schwarzenbergplatz to Schloss Belvedere takes about 10 minutes from the Ringstrasse — direct and reliable. By foot from the Hauptbahnhof (main train station): 15 minutes through Arsenalstrasse. By foot from the Innere Stadt: 25 minutes past the Schwarzenbergplatz, through one of Vienna’s finest 19th-century residential streets. The walk from the Schwarzenbergplatz through the Landstrasse district gives a good sense of how the Belvedere related to the city — it was built just outside the old city limits, in a position that allowed the gardens to extend toward the hills.

Belvedere 21

Belvedere 21 — formerly the Austrian Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, relocated to Vienna and reopened as an exhibition space in 2011 — stands in the Schweizergarten park south of the Südbahnhof, about 15 minutes’ walk from the Upper Belvedere. It specialises in Austrian contemporary art from 1945 to the present: an intentionally undervisited branch of the Belvedere group, which makes it one of the more rewarding spaces for anyone interested in postwar Austrian abstraction, Vienna Actionism, and the generations of Austrian artists who follow. The building, a glass-and-steel modernist structure by Karl Schwanzer, is itself an important work of 1950s architecture, and the contrast with the baroque formality of the main Belvedere complex is deliberately extreme.