Page - 393 - in Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums - Europäische Museumskultur um 1800, Volume 2

393 Meijers From an International Perspective However this may be, none of these plans do suggest that we are dealing with a Notlö- sung or temporary solution due to lack of space, but with a deliberate choice for this par- ticular location where, according to its director Anton Steinbüchel, the Ambras collection had already proved the “public’s favourite”, attracting five or six hundred visitors a week.25 That the proposed move to the Belvedere was in part carried out, can be concluded from the fact that in 1821 a start was made on moving ethnographic objects,26 and in around 1840 parts of the collection of antiquities to the Unteres Belvedere, including the sculp- tures of the ‘Theseus’ temple in the Volksgarten.27 The same occurred with the Egyptian antiquities, which till 1836 had shared premises in the Johannesgasse with the Brasiliani- sches Museum.28 Unfortunately the natural history collections mentioned in Arneth’s plan were ignored by the historians who were only interested in the art collections. In this connection how- ever they should be looked at, because there was a great deal of activity going on at that time next door in the university botanical gardens that bordered on the Belvedere. (Fig. 9) Building had begun here in 1843 on a museum to house the botanical collection of the K. K. Hof-Naturalienkabinett, including the many plants from the Brasilianisches Museum, which means that these too, like the archaeological and ethnological collections just men- tioned, were moved to the Rennweg.29 Although the Belvedere complex developed in this way partly due to practical circum- stances, we can perhaps discern here the features that would later define the new Kunsthis- torisches Hofmuseum – the emphasis on the dynastic, and the combining of all the art-histor- ical collections with the painting gallery embedded in it as one department among several. Where did this unusual syndrome – as one might almost call it – come from, and what factors played a role in this phenomenon for which there had been increasing evidence from the early nineteenth century onwards? Did the founding since roughly 1805 of nu- merous Nationalmuseen and Landesmuseen have an influence on the policy regarding mu- Fig. 9 The museum in the Botanical Garden of the University, next to the Belvedere, built 1843–44. Photograph from: Fritsch 1894, Teylers Museum Haarlem