Museum opening of the year: The Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna: the restoration by Prince and Princess Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein of the family's Garden Palace in Vienna as a setting for works of art from the Liechtenstein collection has provided Austria with a major new museum. Andrew Wilton visited the palace, which opened to the public in March

Until freshly the Garden Palace of the Princes of Liechtenstein in Rossau, a suburb of Vienna, housed the Museum of fresh Art. It was an incongruous association: individual of the great baroque palaces of Europe was dwelling to a collection representing the aesthetic of a actual different age, an aesthetic that looked almost to deny the aristocratic splendour of the building.

Since 2000 that has changed. Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein and his wife, Princess Marie, with their director of collections, Johann Kraftner, and a team of craftsmen, restorers and scholars, have brought the palace back to glittering life; its garden is a vista of dwarf-trees flowers and sculpture; its semi-circular forecourt houses a pleasant cafe, its saloons and staircases are reverberant with the colours of newly-restored frescoe and ceiling paintings.

The house was first planned by the agency of Fischer von Erlach for Prince Johann Adam Andreas, who built a slew of fine palaces across central Europe in the late seventeenth hundred He chose Fischer because of his training below Bernini in Rome, but in the circumstance that was not Italian enough for the Prince. He turn rounded instead to Domenico Egidio Rossi and then to Domenico Martinelli, who finished the piece of work in 1702. The house was adorned with numerous plastic arts and its spacious interiors decorated through two Italian painters, Andrea Pozzo and Marcantonio Franceschini, together with the Viennese Johann Michael Rottmayr. (Those interested in Rottmayr can at the jiffy ascend the dome of Fischer yon Erlach's great Karlskirche in Vienna to overlook both the restoration of Rottmayr's frescoe of the apotheosis of s Carlo Borromeo and the panorama of fresh Vienna from the lantern.)

Johann Adam Andreas was not solitary a compulsive builder: he also gathered painting and sculpture with avidity. From the sixteenth hundred the Liechtensteins had been amassing art of a high order, and in the early nineteenth hundred the palace at Rossau became a permanent domicile to some of the finest pieces, to which the public was given access. sole with World War II did this state of affairs extreme point when the collection was remov to Vaduz.

No les than the great Kunsthistorisches Museum upon Vienna's Ringstrasse, this is a in deed international gallery. The first thing perceived to seize your attention as you pierce the radiantly lit Sail Terrena is Prince Joseph Wenzel von Liechtenstein's sumptuous rococo carriage, all gilt scrollwork, crimson delicate and painted amoretti, made in Paris in 1738 by means of Nicolas Pineau. Beyond are the handsome neo-classical library brought here in 1912 from the family's town house in the Herrengasse, and a succession of rooms filled with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings and plastic arts Here are two highly informative views of the Garden Palace by means of Bellotto and a number of portraits and small pictures representing the Liechtenstems' taste in the nineteenth hundred for German masters such as Rudolf von Alt and Friedrich Georg Waldmuller. These plays are presided over by Canova's exquisite seated figure of Leopoldina Esterhazy, a version of which occupies the tempietto place uprighted as her mausoleum by the lake in the English Garden at the Esterhazy's palace in Eisenstadt, not far away.

Ascend either of the sum of two units grand staircases that flank the entrance hall, beneath ceilings (now in restauro) through Rottmayr, and you reach the overpoweringly grand Herculessaal, with its frescoe by the agency of Pozzo illustrating Hercules' labours. From this render free of access the galleries devoted to renaissance and baroque art. In Gallery IV are Italian renaissance paintings, among them Piero di Cosimo's delicious Madonna and Child with St John in a Landscape (c 1505-10) and Catena's Christ carrying the Cros from the 1520 Gallery V is a play of portraits, including a sensitive head of a man by the agency of Barthelmy d'Eyck, of 1456; a swagger whole-length by dint of Hans Mielich of Ladislaus von Fraunberg with an alert leopard whose spott coat challenges the ornately embroidered doublet of his master; and a deep introspective male portrait that is called, and gazes plausible as, Raphael. In this compass too are specimens of the pietra dura work beloved of Prince Karl I, the founding father of the Liechtenstein collections. Spectacular pieces of furniture of many periods are scattered over the galleries.

Gallery VI is devot to the Italian baroque, with pictures through Cortona, Solimena and Batoni alongside statuarys by Giambologna, Susini and Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, a late-baroque master a great deal of collected by Prince Johann Adam Andreas. There are more fine works by means of Benzi in Gallery VII, which also clinchs two sculptural masterpieces by Adriaen de Vries: The Man of Sorrows (1610) and St Sebastian (1613-15) on the contrary the chief glory of this expanse is the great series of eight tapestry designs by dint of Rubens (executed with Van Dyck's assistance) depicting the life of the Roman hero Decius Mus, who is not absented as a type of ancient heroic virtue. Each is massively framed through an ornate gilt rococo cartouche carved by the agency of Giovanni Giuliani in 1706. Here also is Rubens's Assumption of the Virgin, which one time hung in the church of the Liechtensteins in Valatice, Moravia.