Visit to Belvedere

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We walked to Schwarzenbergplatz to take the tram for Belvedere. There were quite a few tourists who were going to Belvedere, so we followed them. We decided to buy the Belvedere Pass, which allowed us to look round the Upper Belvedere and Lower Belvedere. We took the lift to level 2 and started looking round collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, featuring works by Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Degas and Edward Munch, and sculptures by Rodin, Degas and Renoir. The collections of Realist paintings were stunning, such as the paintings of Stephansdom or Nashmarkt. We also enjoyed splendid panoramic views of the skylines, garden and Lower Belvedere.

Schloss Belvedere has been home to the Austrian Gallery of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. We marvelled at wonderful masterpieces by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. My parents said there were some artists who follow the similar style, e.g. pointillism, coloured gradation to Klimt in Japan. We also found it interesting to see Neoclassic/Romanticism paintings and portraits of historical celebrities and upper class people, Baroque paintings on the first floor.

We had lunch at the restaurant in the Upper Belvedere. We did shopping there and collected our rucksacks, and then headed for Lower Belvedere. The baroque garden had fountains, parterres, colourful flowers and roses, allegory statues and cascade. We took pictures of the garden with the background of Upper Belvedere on the way to Lower Belvedere.

There were special exhibitions, i.e. contemporary art work held on the Lower Belvedere and Orangery, thus some of the art work had been relocated to the Upper Belvedere and more importantly, the collections of the medieval art had been relocated to the stable building. Whilst strolling through the Lower Belvedere, my mother could recognise the different features of interiors from Upper Belvedere. We found contemporary art exhibition was a little mismatching with the authentic interior and decorations of Lower Belvedere. The collections of medieval art, e.g. altarpieces, mythological statues, panel paintings and triptychs were displayed at the small space of the former stable building. I told my parents that Austria is predominantly Roman Catholic. Sunday Mass in some churches including Stephansdom is accompanied by orchestral and choral works, and the people are taking care of those mythological art collections.



Having found the tram 0 running from the vicinity of Upper Belvedere, we walked to the tram stop from Lower Belvedere. We took the shadowy route (on the concrete road along the Belvedere) rather than the sun-dappled garden. The tram came soon after we reached the station, and it brought us back to Franzensbruckenstrasse

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