The Kunsthistorisches Museum grew out of centuries of Habsburg collecting, formalised as a single public institution when Emperor Franz Joseph I commissioned matching twin buildings on the Ringstrasse, the Kunsthistorisches and the Naturhistorisches Museum, to rehouse collections previously scattered across imperial palaces. The art museum opened in 1891, bringing together the Habsburgs' picture galleries, the imperial armoury, classical and Egyptian antiquities and the coin cabinet under one roof for the first time.
Administered within the museum, but historically distinct in origin, is the Imperial Treasury, the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, which preserves the material culture of the Holy Roman Empire itself: the imperial crown, orb and sword, coronation vestments, and reliquaries accumulated by the emperors over nearly a thousand years. When the Empire was dissolved in 1806, its regalia passed into Habsburg family keeping rather than being distributed among the German states that had comprised it, and the family's collections were nationalised with the fall of the monarchy in 1918. The Holy Lance, one of several relics associated with imperial ceremony and later legend, is kept and displayed with this treasury material rather than with the museum's paintings, reflecting its original identity as a piece of imperial regalia before it became an object of religious veneration in its own right.