Maria Theresa's double tomb
She commissioned it showing herself and her husband looking at each other โ the most personal object in the crypt.
C.Stadler/Bwag โ CC BY-SA 3.0 at ยท Jerzy Strzelecki โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Morgan Davis from Seattle, USA โ CC BY 2.0 ยท Morgan Davis from Seattle, USA โ CC BY 2.0
Possible but not ideal: it is a real crypt with a heavy atmosphere, and some coffins carry skull ornamentation that unsettles small children. Older ones find it genuinely interesting.
In the Heart Crypt of the nearby Augustinian church, kept in small silver urns. It opens to limited visitors at very restricted times.
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Beneath the plain Capuchin church in central Vienna lie some hundred and fifty Habsburgs, twelve emperors and nineteen empresses among them, in a crypt working continuously since 1633 โ the most recent burial took place in the twenty-first century. The crypt reads as a timeline of taste: it opens with plain metal coffins from the seventeenth century, then erupts into baroque in the eighteenth with enormous caskets crusted in skulls, crowns and lions โ most famously Maria Theresa's double sarcophagus, which she commissioned showing herself and her husband looking at each other. Then, in the nineteenth century, the coffins return to severity; Franz Joseph's own is entirely austere. Here you also grasp the strange Habsburg burial custom: the body lies here, the heart in the Augustinian church, the entrails in the catacombs of St Stephen's. Three sites for one person, and three visits if you want the whole story.
She commissioned it showing herself and her husband looking at each other โ the most personal object in the crypt.
Three graves side by side that compress a dynasty's ending: a father, a son who took his own life, and a wife who was assassinated.
From seventeenth-century plainness to baroque excess and back to austerity โ a full art history in one room.
Neuer Markt, Vienna