Ask most knowledgeable museum visitors and they would probably agree that the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna houses the world’s most satisfying and brilliantly conceived display of European Old Master paintings. By comparison, the Metropolitan Museum’s arrangement of its own impressive holdings in the same field would until recently have rated, at best, a polite nod. Those acknowledged masterpieces so long admired in New York were unfortunately exhibited in a confused, often irritating, part-chronological, part-thematic, part-geographical layout that made little sense in any of those contexts; one had to seek out each painting and pay homage to it singly, for its own merits. One of the marvels of Gottfried Semper’s magnificent building in Vienna is that its piano nobile introduces the visitor to a stately progression of Europe’s great schools of painting and acts as a steady, clear guide, invariably suggesting illuminating insights and comparisons. The palatial enfilade of galleries constitutes a totality—a Gesamtheit—of design, function, and effect. As it happened, both buildings were designed and built at about the same time and very much in the same Beaux Arts architectural idiom. At the Metropolitan, Richard Morris Hunt’s vision of a grand ascent to the museum’s core—the European paintings galleries—and the subsequent deployment of these spaces in an orderly, quasi-symmetrical pattern, was essentially no different from what Semper had designed in Vienna.
In New York, unfortunately, things did not work out as planned; there was, after all, no ready-made, existing paintings collection of prodigious quality