Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Stand still on Schillerplatz for a moment. The traffic of the Ringstrasse hums just behind you, but here the sound drops. Gravel and paving stones under your feet, chestnut trees overhead, and in front of you a long facade of warm red brick and pale stone. Students drift in and out of the doors with portfolios under their arms. Some carry paint on their sleeves. This is not a museum dressed as a school. It is a working art school, and it has been one for centuries.

This is the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Its roots go back to 1692, when the painter and sculptor Peter Strudel opened a private academy in the city. At first it was a small affair, a place where young artists could draw from life and learn under a master. Over time it grew into an imperial institution, and later into one of the oldest art academies in the German-speaking world. That long line of teachers and students continues today.

The building you are looking at is much younger than the institution. It was built in the eighteen-seventies, during the great expansion of Vienna along the new Ringstrasse. The old city walls had come down, and the emperor's capital was filling the open ground with parliaments, museums, theatres and schools. The Academy received its own palace here, set slightly back from the boulevard, facing a quiet square.

The architect was Theophil Hansen, a Danish-born designer who shaped much of this part of Vienna. He also designed the Austrian Parliament building, a short walk away on the Ring. Here he worked in a Neo-Renaissance style — a nineteenth-century revival of the architecture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Look at the rhythm of the tall arched windows, the strong horizontal bands, the careful balance from one end of the facade to the other. It is calm, orderly, almost scholarly.

Now turn around. The figure standing in the square is the poet Friedrich Schiller, the great German writer of the late eighteenth century, and the square takes its name from him. Across the Ring, in a small garden, Goethe sits in bronze. So the Academy faces the two giants of German literature. It is a fitting address for a school that has always argued about what art is for, and who gets to make it.

Here is the first surprise most visitors never hear about. Behind these doors is one of the finest small picture galleries in Vienna. The Academy owns a collection of old master paintings, first built up as teaching material. Students were meant to stand in front of great works and learn by looking. Over the generations, gifts and bequests turned that study collection into a gallery that can hold its own against far larger museums.

The treasure at its heart is the Last Judgment triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, the Netherlandish painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A triptych is a painting in three hinged panels. On one side, paradise. In the centre and on the other side, a crowded world of sinners, strange hybrid creatures and burning landscapes. It is a picture you can lose an hour in, finding a new small torment every few seconds.

The collection also holds works linked to Peter Paul Rubens, including oil sketches, the quick and lively studies he made before larger compositions. There are paintings from the Dutch and Flemish schools, and from Italy and Germany as well. The Academy also keeps a large collection of prints and drawings, and a gallery of plaster casts of ancient sculpture. For generations, students drew those casts again and again before they were allowed near a living model.

Inside the main building, the ceremonial hall, called the Aula, carries ceiling paintings by Anselm Feuerbach, a nineteenth-century German painter who taught here. His theme was the fall of the Titans, the ancient giants who rebelled against the gods. It is a dramatic, heroic subject for the ceiling of a school, and a reminder of how seriously the nineteenth century took art as a moral calling.

Now the second surprise, and a darker one. In 1907, and again in 1908, a young man from provincial Austria applied to study painting here. Both times the Academy turned him down. His name was Adolf Hitler. Historians still discuss how those rejections fed his bitterness during his years in Vienna. It is an uncomfortable footnote, and the school does not hide from it. It is part of the story of this doorway.

Other applicants had better fortune. Egon Schiele was admitted as a teenager in the first decade of the twentieth century. He quickly grew frustrated with the conservative teaching and left to follow his own path, which led to some of the most intense drawings in modern art. The architect Otto Wagner taught here too, guiding students toward a new, modern Vienna. Women, however, were only admitted as regular students in the twentieth century.

That tension between tradition and rebellion still shapes the school. Today the Academy teaches painting, sculpture, architecture, conservation, set design and art theory. Its studios are busy, and its exhibitions often show work that would have shocked Feuerbach and his colleagues. If you visit during an open studio period or a graduate show, you can see the old building filled with brand-new, sometimes messy, often surprising art.

A practical note. The building is first a school, so not every hall is open to the public at every moment. The picture gallery and the exhibition spaces have their own access, and arrangements can change, so check before you go inside. And remember that the people around you are working. A quiet voice in the corridors is a small courtesy to someone trying to finish a drawing.

Before you leave, take one more look at the facade. Notice how the brick glows warmer as the light changes, and how the windows catch the sky. Somewhere inside, a student is mixing a colour, or arguing with a teacher, or staring at Bosch's burning landscapes for inspiration. As you walk back toward the Ring, listen for the traffic returning, and carry a little of this quiet square with you.