Kunsthistorisches Museum

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.

The Holy Lance of Vienna is first recorded among the possessions of the Ottonian emperors in the tenth century, prized as a relic of Saint Maurice, the Roman soldier-martyr, and carried into battle as a token of divine favour; Otto I is said to have carried it at the decisive battle of Lechfeld in 955. Only later, from around the thirteenth century, did a competing identification take hold, linking the lance instead to the Roman soldier Longinus, said in later Christian tradition to have pierced the side of the crucified Jesus. Modern metallurgical and art-historical examination has resolved the physical question without settling the devotional one: the lance's core is a Carolingian-period weapon, probably seventh or eighth century, later fitted with silver bands and gold cuffs inscribed with the names of Christ's Passion, additions made centuries after the object itself was forged.

The lance's ownership after the Empire's dissolution in 1806 stayed with the Habsburgs rather than passing to any successor German state, and it left Vienna only once in the modern era, when Nazi Germany moved it to Nuremberg in 1938 after the annexation of Austria and returned it to the Schatzkammer after the war in 1946. The museum today presents both the relic tradition and the archaeological dating side by side rather than asserting either as settled fact.