My main goal at the Albertina was to see drawings and engravings by Dürer and Rembrandt and then the rest of the collection (it turns out, my brain can’t deal with large amounts of various arts at once as it gets overwhelmed eventually; I guess, it’s a common thing, and I’ve finally learned from my mistakes, too).
As we didn’t have time to visit the Albertina during our previous stay in Vienna (back in 2014), we decided to go there first—and, of course, we both were overwhelmed anyway. The funniest thing that happened to us was that we both, due to our collectively shared absent-mindedness (in case of orange cats they say “not in possession of a brain cell currently”), viewed the exact part of the permanent collection (i.e. sketches, drawings and studies of sorts) backwards (!), i.e. from Klimt and Schiele to aforementioned Dürer, Rembrandt up to da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
As we were going backward in time, the timeline of the imagery was also rolling out to its (perfect) roots in front of our eyes. The sophisticated morbidity of Schiele (whom I dislike profoundly for the intentional sickly hideousness of his works, which I find catastrophically disruptive for Art in a whole, and not only for Expressionism as a movement) goes back to the less Dionysian Klimt, then there were boring pieces from classical French artists (François Boucher and the like), and finally, finally we were seeing what we came for—incredible études by Dürer (Adam; Eve; Adam and Eve together on the engraving), the precious ugliness of the figurines by Rembrandt (you don’t need to think twice as you recognise Saskia in Diana immediately), and cloudy limbs by Leonardo, and tense masculine figures by Michelangelo, and many more. Oddly enlightened, our weird trip through the collection made sense in the end.
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