Artistic Light, Vienna

On our afternoon outing today, the late sun dazzled on the top floors of the rear of the gallery at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste--our destination. The building epitomizes the sort of decorative architecture--with art!-- that is everywhere in Vienna.

The Akademie is a functioning art school, with a gallery that displays a superb collection of European old masters--above all Netherlandish. Most of them arrived in a large donation by a private collector in 1822, a time when such objects were still relatively easily acquired. The heart of the gallery is a marvelous large triptych by Hieronymus Bosch on the Last Judgment and its context.