Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History Museum)

Frommer's Review

Housed in a handsome neo-Renaissance building near the Museum of Fine Arts, this is the third-largest natural history museum (after its counterparts in New York and London) in the world, and holds the oldest collections. It was established by the husband of Empress Maria Theresa (Franz Stephan von Lothringen) in 1748, who donated one of its major art objects (a personal gift to him from his wife) to the collections at the time of his death. Located in Room no. 4 of the Mineralogy Department, and known as Der Juwelen Strauss, it's a 60cm-tall (24-in.) bouquet of flowers crafted from more than 2,000 gemstones, each of which was even rarer at the time of the object's creation than they are today. The museum also holds an important collection of early Stone Age artifacts, the best-known and most evocative of which is the Venus of Willendorf, whose discovery in Lower Austria in 1906 attests to the area's ancient habitation.

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