The academy began in 1688 as the private project of Peter Strudel, a court painter who modeled it after Rome's Accademia di San Luca and the Parisian Academie de peinture et de sculpture. Emperor Joseph I rewarded Strudel with a barony in 1701, making him Freiherr of the Empire. When Strudel died in 1714, the academy closed. It took until 1725 for Emperor Charles VI to revive it, appointing the French painter Jacob van Schuppen as director and rechristening the institution as the Imperial and Royal Court Academy of painters, sculptors, and architecture. Under Maria Theresa's reforms in 1751, and later during the deanships of Michelangelo Unterberger and Paul Troger, the academy's prestige grew steadily. By 1767, archduchesses Maria Anna and Maria Carolina had become its first honorary members -- a signal that art education had become a matter of imperial concern.

For nearly two centuries the academy moved between borrowed quarters. That changed in 1872, when Emperor Franz Joseph I elevated the institution to the supreme government authority for the arts and commissioned a building worthy of the title. Architect Theophil Hansen designed the new headquarters as part of Vienna's grand Ringstrasse development, that sweeping boulevard carved from the old city fortifications. The building on Schillerplatz opened on April 3, 1877, though interior work -- including Anselm Feuerbach's ceiling frescoes -- continued until 1892. Hansen gave the academy an Italian Renaissance facade that announced its ambitions in stone. Inside, the art collection had been growing since 1822, when honorary member Count Anton Franz de Paula Lamberg-Sprinzenstein bequeathed a collection that still forms the backbone of the gallery's holdings. Today the Kupferstichkabinett alone holds approximately 150,000 drawings and prints.

The Anschluss of 1938 brought the academy under Nazi control. Like all Austrian universities, it was forced to purge Jewish faculty and students under the Nuremberg Laws -- the same racial ideology that its most infamous rejected applicant had helped to create. The institution that had refused Hitler became an instrument of the regime he built. After the war, reconstruction was slow. The academy was not formally reconstituted until 1955, when Austria regained full sovereignty. Secretary Eduard von Josch was dismissed for Nazi Party membership. The institution had to reckon with what it had become and what it had lost -- not just the art and scholarship destroyed during the war, but the people expelled from its halls who never returned.

Walk through the academy today and the range is striking. Thirteen departments span everything from Abstract Painting and Figurative Painting to Art and Digital Media, Video and Video-installation, and something called Textual Sculpture. The six institutes cover fine arts, art theory and cultural studies, conservation and restoration, natural sciences in art, teacher education, and architecture. About 900 students study here, nearly a quarter of them from abroad. Faculty have included the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, and alumni range from Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose riotous, organic architecture rejected everything the Ringstrasse stood for, to Gottfried Helnwein, whose hyperrealist paintings confront viewers with imagery they would rather not see. The library holds roughly 110,000 volumes. Three centuries after a court painter's private experiment, the academy remains one of the most internationally recognized art schools in the German-speaking world.