# Albertina audio guide, five stops, free.

All five play right here, no app and no code card. Then point Chiaro at the next room, or the next painting on Level 2, and it narrates that one from a photo.

Made by Chiaro. Not affiliated with Albertina. Page: https://chiaro.ai/museums/albertina/

Five stops, two floors, one palace. It begins on Level 1 in the Habsburg State Rooms, the archducal apartments the museum spent eighty years using as offices, then climbs to Level 2 and the four paintings: a horse Toulouse-Lautrec painted at seventeen, Signac's Venice, a Modigliani, and Monet's two-metre pond at the end. About nine minutes of listening, and twenty minutes of walking if the lift is free.

Everything on this page comes from the Albertina's own Collections Online and a second source, last checked on 8 September 2026. The Batliner rooms are rehung from time to time and the State Rooms can be roped off for an event, so treat the card on the wall as the last word and write to us when it contradicts us.

## The stops

### 1. The Habsburg State Rooms

Louis Montoyer, with interiors remodelled by Joseph Kornhäusel · State wing built 1802–1804; interiors remodelled from 1822; restored 1998–2003 · Twenty rooms with silk wall hangings, chandeliers, fireplaces and tiled stoves, inlaid floors and original furniture · Level 1, State Rooms (Prunkräume)

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/albertina/en/state-rooms.mp3?v=1062704 (133 s)

Look for:
- A white tiled stove standing in a corner. The Albertina counts the fireplaces and stoves among the original fittings it restored.
- The floor. Inlaid marquetry in several woods, in patterns that change from room to room.
- The chairs. Much of the original furniture was ordered from the Vienna cabinetmaker Josef Danhauser, scattered around the world after the First World War, and bought back in the restoration of 1998 to 2003.
- The silk on the walls, ordered from Lyon as part of the fitting-out Duke Albert paid for between 1802 and 1804.

The doors are white and gold, the floor under your feet is inlaid wood laid in a pattern that will change in the next room, and somewhere in a corner there is a white tiled stove standing like a small column. You are in a private apartment, not a gallery. For about a hundred years this building was where Habsburg archdukes and archduchesses actually lived, and twenty of their rooms survive.

They were built by a man who wanted the emperor to notice. Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen and his wife, Archduchess Marie Christine, had fled the Austrian Netherlands in 1792 when war and revolution reached Brussels. Emperor Franz the Second gave them this palace on the Augustinian bastion in 1794. Albert adapted it first for his graphic collection and his library, and then added a whole state wing between 1802 and 1804, with a façade a hundred and fifty metres long, aimed squarely at the Hofburg next door.

Look at what came with them. Furniture, shutters and wall panelling were carried here from their palace at Laeken outside Brussels and built into the new rooms, with silk wall coverings ordered from Lyon, marquetry floors and gilded crystal chandeliers. The architect of the extension was Louis Montoyer, and since then the palace has touched the Hofburg directly. After Albert died in 1822 the house went to his heir, Archduke Carl, the man Austria remembers as the victor of Aspern, who had Joseph Kornhäusel rework the interiors. The wide staircase with the sphinxes, and its steps of hard white Kaiserstein, comes from that campaign.

Then the rooms disappeared. In 1919 the building and the collection passed to the Republic, and in 1920 every one of these state rooms was closed to the public and turned into offices, library and storage. For eighty years the silk and the marquetry were treated as wall and floor. Bombs went through the palace in March 1945, and it was patched up plainly after the war.

So what you are standing in is a recovery. During the rebuilding of 1998 to 2003 the classicist rooms were restored for the first time in eight decades, and the museum went hunting for the original furniture, commissioned from the Vienna cabinetmaker Josef Danhauser by Duke Albert and later by Archduke Carl, and scattered across the world after the First World War. Large parts of it were bought back. The digging also turned up a Roman burial ground of more than a hundred and thirty graves under the building, which held the works up for a while. When the rooms finally opened, they were open to the public for the first time in the history of the house.

### 2. The White Horse Gazelle

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1881 · Oil on canvas, 61 × 49.5 cm · Level 2, Monet to Picasso: The Batliner Collection

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/albertina/en/white-horse-gazelle.mp3?v=785388 (98 s)

Look for:
- The signature at the top right. It reads Monfa 1881, a family name, not Lautrec.
- The horse's mouth on the edge of the door. It is nibbling the wood of its box, which is what tells you the animal is bored and penned in.
- The white coat, which is not white. In shadow it drops to pale blue, against a door and a background painted in the same warm brown.

A white horse fills almost the whole canvas. Head down, ears up, mouth resting on the top edge of a stable door. The picture is sixty-one centimetres by forty-nine and a half, and the person who painted it was seventeen.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec spent the summer of 1881 at the Château du Bosc near Albi, where his family often took their holidays, and Gazelle was one of the horses at the stud of the Counts of Céleyran, his mother's side of the family. He had come to painting through an accident, or rather two of them. Severe bone fractures in 1878 and 1879 left him in bed for a long time and eventually deformed his legs, and it was during that illness that his talent surfaced. A friend of the family, the sporting painter René Princeteau, gave him his first lessons, and for years dogs and horses were what he drew and painted above all.

Now find the inscription at the top right. It does not say Lautrec. It says Monfa, and a date. Monfa was one of the additional surnames of the old southern French family he belonged to, and he used it on his early work. In the same summer he painted this horse a second time, that time in profile.

Then look at what he has actually noticed. The animal is shut into a narrow box and it is not calm about it. The ears are pricked, the eye is wary, and the mouth is worrying at the wood of the door. That is a bored, penned animal, and a boy of seventeen caught it exactly.

The colour is the other surprise, because there is so little of it. The door and the whole background behind the horse are held in the same warm brown, so nothing competes for your attention. And the white of the coat is not white. It is a cold white that deepens into pale blue wherever the light does not reach, which is why the horse reads as solid rather than as a hole in the picture. Here he is, a boy in a stable in the south of France, getting a horse's mouth exactly right.

### 3. Venice, the Pink Cloud

Paul Signac · 1909 · Oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm · Level 2, Monet to Picasso: The Batliner Collection

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/albertina/en/venice-the-pink-cloud.mp3?v=838260 (105 s)

Look for:
- The paint at arm's length. It is separate square touches of colour, never blended, and the water only closes up when you step back.
- The green in the sails and the hulls. The pink cloud overhead is what throws those emerald shadow tones onto the boats.
- The church behind the masts on the right. That is Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore, with its slender tower beside it.

Stand close first, closer than feels polite. The water in front of you is not water. It is several thousand separate rectangles of paint, laid side by side and never blended, in blue and green and a pink that has no business being in a lagoon. Now walk back four or five paces and the whole thing closes up into an evening in Venice.

Paul Signac painted this in 1909, and he is one of the two people who worked this method out. After some early attempts in the Impressionist manner he attached himself in 1884 to Georges Seurat, four years his senior, who together with the ageing Pissarro formed the core of Neo-Impressionism. Seurat was introverted and kept his colleagues at a distance. Signac was the opposite, and set out to explain and spread the new method to anyone who would listen. In 1898 and 1899 he published a treatise arguing that the whole thing descended from Delacroix's theory of colour. Seurat had died young in 1891, and by then Signac was the movement's chief spokesman.

He was also a serious sailor who took his boat into distant waters, and no painter of his generation returned to harbours as often as he did. He first saw Venice in 1904 and came back in March 1908.

What you are looking at is the anchorage by the Giudecca, with the island of San Giorgio Maggiore across the water in the last of the light. The church front is Palladio's, and the slender tower stands beside it. Above them floats the cloud the painting is named for, and here is the thing worth checking with your own eyes: that pink is what puts the emerald green into the shadows of the boats in the foreground. Cover the cloud with your hand and the greens stop making sense.

One correction to what your eye will tell you. This was not painted on the spot. At seventy-three by ninety-two centimetres it could hardly have been. Signac made his studies in Venice and built the canvas the following year in the studio, out of those notes, which is why the light in it is so much more decided than any real evening ever is.

### 4. Female Half-Nude

Amedeo Modigliani · 1918 · Oil on canvas, 100 × 65.3 cm · Level 2, Monet to Picasso: The Batliner Collection

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/albertina/en/female-half-nude.mp3?v=922478 (115 s)

Look for:
- The eyes. Flat blue-grey almonds with no pupils, part of a face reduced to a mask.
- The shift. She has not taken it off, which is why the museum's other title for this picture is Young Woman in a Shirt.
- The signature in the top right corner, written into the green of the background.

The first thing most people notice is the eyes, because there is nothing in them. Flat blue-grey almonds, no pupils, no direction of gaze. The head tips over to one side, the neck is longer than any neck, and the face has been smoothed down into something much closer to a mask than to a portrait.

That is the sculptor talking. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Livorno, trained as an academic painter, arrived in Paris, and between 1909 and 1914 worked there mainly as a carver of stone. The austere, archaic, over-lengthened forms he cut in those years never left him. When he went back to painting he went on carving, in oil.

She is one of a small group of pictures he made in 1918 of the same red-haired model in different poses. Her name is not recorded. The painting travels under two other titles as well, Young Woman in a Shirt and The Milkmaid, and both of them are pointing at the same thing. Look again: she is not undressed. She is still wearing her shift, holding it against her breast with one hand, and the gesture is so modest that it is genuinely hard now to reconstruct why pictures like this gave offence. They did.

He was not being provocative for the sake of it. The Albertina's own reading is that he was deliberately reaching backwards, to Botticelli's Madonnas, chaste and seductive at the same time, to Raphael's Fornarina, to Titian's Venuses and to the odalisques of Ingres. What he added to that tradition was Egypt and Africa: the flat, frontal, hieratic stylisation he had fallen for in the sculpture galleries.

He had two years to live when he painted this, and things had only just become slightly easier. In 1916 he made friends with a young Polish writer, Léopold Zborowski, who became his agent and finally let him paint full time; before that his situation was wretched. His neighbour in the old washhouse on Montmartre they called the Bateau-Lavoir was the writer Max Jacob, who lived among Picasso and Soutine and Modigliani and became the best interpreter of them all. Jacob's verdict was that because Modigliani had been poor since childhood in Livorno, everything in him, including the pride and the black moods, was aimed at one thing: purity in art.

### 5. The Water Lily Pond

Claude Monet · About 1917 to 1919 · Oil on canvas, 100 × 200 cm · Level 2, Monet to Picasso: The Batliner Collection

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/albertina/en/water-lily-pond.mp3?v=1014638 (127 s)

Look for:
- The pale opening at the far left. That is the reflected light of the sky, and it is the only one; the dark reflections take up nearly three quarters of the right-hand side.
- The mark at the bottom left. It reads Claude Monet, but it is the estate stamp applied after his death, not his own hand.
- The missing horizon. No bank, no sky, no far edge: the whole two metres are water seen from above.

Two metres wide, one metre high, and no horizon anywhere. No bank, no sky, no far edge. You are looking straight down into water, and the only thing that tells you there is a world above it is a pale opening at the far left where the sky is reflected. Everything else, almost three quarters of the right-hand side, is dark reflection with lily pads floating across it.

This is Giverny, the small place north of Paris where Claude Monet spent his last decades and narrowed his subject matter down to almost nothing: the flower garden, and the pond he had laid out on Japanese models. Until he died in 1926 the water lilies were the centre of everything he made.

The canvas had a job. From 1914 Monet had been painting the pond on very large panels, and he wanted them shown in a room built to his own idea of them. On the day after the armistice of 1918 he decided to dedicate these grandes décorations to his friend Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, and to give them to the state. He did not live to see the room. The series went in the year after his death, in 1927, into a hall with an oval plan in the basement of the Orangerie in the Tuileries gardens.

This picture is one of the many works with which he prepared that decoration. In April 1918 Monet ordered twenty canvases at exactly this size, a hundred centimetres by two hundred, and painted them one after another over the following two years. He liked this particular arrangement enough to repeat it almost word for word on two more canvases, one of which he left unfinished, and to enlarge it into the right-hand section of a huge triptych that hangs today in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

So look at what he was doing. The lilies are not centred. The light sits on one side and the dark on the other, and there is no line anywhere to steady your eye. Reflection and reality have collapsed into a single surface, so the dark mass down the left is at once a reflected landscape and a smear of paint lying on water. The Albertina's own catalogue puts it plainly: the abolition of symmetry, the missing horizon, the merging of the reflected and the real, all of it pointing far past Impressionism.

One last thing, bottom left. There is a signature there, Claude Monet, and it is not a signature. It is the estate stamp, pressed into the paint after he was dead, on a canvas he had never declared finished. Part of the reason this thing still looks modern is that nobody ever decided it was done.

## Before you go

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Vienna, in the inner city between the State Opera, Kärntnerstraße and the Hofburg. There is one main entrance, up on the bastion of the old city wall; an outdoor lift and an escalator take you up from Albertinaplatz, and the ticket desks are on the same level as the door.

U-Bahn lines U1, U2 and U4 to Karlsplatz/Oper, or U3 to Stephansplatz. Trams 1, 2, D, 62 and 71 and the Lokalbahn Wien-Baden stop at Kärntner Ring/Oper. Bus 2A stops at Albertina itself.

- There is no closing day. The Albertina gives its hours as daily, ten in the morning to six in the evening, and until nine on Wednesday and Friday.
- The State Rooms are the part that can shut. The museum asks for understanding that they are sometimes only partly accessible in bad weather, for conservation reasons, or because of an event, and publishes a telephone number for the day's situation.
- Children under 19 get in free, and visitors under 26 pay the reduced rate.
- The Albertina and the ALBERTINA MODERN on Karlsplatz are two separate buildings with two separate tickets. Only the combined ticket covers both, so check which one you are buying.

Official tickets: https://www.albertina.at/en/visit/tickets/

The Albertina's own guide is a smartphone guide rather than a rented handset. You buy a code card, scan the QR code on it, and the tour opens on your own phone with no app to install: five euros per building, free for Friends of the Albertina, with separate tours for the Habsburg State Rooms and for Monet to Picasso. Ours is the other kind. Nothing to buy, nothing to collect at a desk, five works rather than a floor, and it works before you have even bought a ticket.

Official site: https://www.albertina.at/en/

## Questions

**Is there a free Albertina audio guide?**

Yes, and it is this page. The five tracks play straight from the browser you are already holding, there is nothing to buy and nothing to pick up at a desk, and every word is written out below if the room is too loud to listen in. For the sixth work and everything after it, photograph it and the Chiaro app takes over.

**How much is the official Albertina audio guide?**

Five euros per building at the regular rate, three euros for the Austrian Sign Language version, and free for Friends of the Albertina. It is not a handset: you buy a code card, scan its QR code, and the tour plays on your own phone. There are tours for the Habsburg State Rooms and for Monet to Picasso, and a purchased tour stays playable until that exhibition closes.

**Where is Dürer's Young Hare in the Albertina?**

Usually nowhere you can stand in front of it. The Hare is watercolour on paper, light damage to paper is permanent, and so the Albertina's Dürer sheets live in storage and come out only for particular exhibitions. When this page was checked in September 2026 the Hare was in the anniversary exhibition Collecting for the Future, which runs to 11 October; after that, assume it is back in storage. Check the museum's current exhibitions before you go, and do not plan the visit around it.

**Is the Albertina closed on Mondays?**

No. The museum publishes its hours as daily, ten in the morning to six in the evening, with Wednesday and Friday running until nine. The one part that can be closed on any given day is the State Rooms, which the Albertina sometimes shuts wholly or partly for an event or, for conservation reasons, in bad weather.

**How long does the Albertina take?**

These five stops are about nine minutes of audio and roughly twenty minutes of walking across two floors. The Albertina also runs several temporary exhibitions at once on Levels 0, 1 and 2, so most visitors stay a good deal longer than that.

**Does my ticket also cover the Albertina Modern?**

No. The Albertina on Albertinaplatz and the ALBERTINA MODERN on Karlsplatz are separate buildings with separate admission, about ten minutes apart on foot. The combined ticket, at EUR 29,90, is the one that covers both of them and the Albertina Klosterneuburg as well.

## Continue in the app

Point Chiaro at anything in the Albertina.

Five stops, and the Albertina still has nineteen more state rooms and a whole floor of paintings you have heard nothing about. Hold the camera up to any of them, a tiled stove, a Kirchner two rooms along, the sphinxes on the staircase, and the app names it and then answers the questions that follow, out loud, while you stand there.

Download Chiaro: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6745618830?pt=127817940&ct=albertina-md&mt=8