From the museum website, 25 March 2009
Unrivaled masterworks from one of most important art collections in the world: the Museum Frieder Burda is hosting the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna! Genuinely imperial works, as there is no other museum that has been characterized to such an extent by the collecting passion of the German emperors from the House of Habsburg. The encounters between emperors Maximilian with Albrecht Dürer and Carl V with Titian led to highlights in European art history that after five hundred years continue to live on in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. They can now be experienced in the exhibition assembled exclusively for the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden.
While German painting will be represented by Dürer and his contemporaries, numerous of Titian’s fellow Italian artists will be traveling from Vienna to the River Oos: Tintoretto, Veronese, Annibale Carracci, and others.
Besides German and Italian painting, Netherlandish painting comprises a further magnificent focus of the Viennese collection: due to a matrimonial policy that was as prudent as it was fortunate, Burgundy and the Netherlands came under Habsburg rule very early on. From the flourishing art centers in Flanders, wonderful paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jan Brueghel were acquired by the emperors and can be seen alongside numerous other Netherlandish painters at the Museum Frieder Burda.
One of the exhibition’s highlights is no doubt the two Spanish royal children painted by Diego Velázquez, who was court painter to the Spanish King Philip IV, one of Carl V’s great-grandchildren.
The Habsburg painting collections can be experienced in a unique selection of about seventy paintings from two centuries that brings the entire wealth of European paintings from circa 1500 to circa 1750 to Baden-Baden: still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and religious and mythological motifs.
In addition, valuable pieces from the Kunstkammer, the Collection of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, are being presented: bronze busts, precious tapestries, etc., allowing the splendor of the Habsburg collections to unfold in the modern museum building designed by Richard Meier.