The Albertina museum numbers among Austria’s leading art museums and is open to the public 365 days a year. In 1776 Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen begin assembling a graphic arts collection which was taken over by the Austrian state together with the palace that housed it in 1919 as a museum for art ranging from Renaissance masterpieces to contemporary works. Today’s Albertina museum is deliberately positioned as something of a Janus-faced institution: the renovated and authentically re-furnished staterooms stand for the princely lifestyle once maintained at this former Habsburg residence, while the Albertina museums large-scale temporary exhibitions plus its permanent presentation of modernist and contemporary paintings attest to its character as a thoroughly modern museum.