Oases of Tranquillity. The great Landscape Gardens of Central Europe.

6 June-18 Nov 2008. This exhibition is dedicated to the English landscape gardens, which became very fashionable from the last quarter of the 18th century until the first half of the 19th century. This mania spread from England to France and then to the rest of the continental Europe. Here the Austrian Imperial family first, and later the nobility and the aspiring upper-middle classes decided to remodel their geometrical Italian and French style Baroque gardens, on the new English style. The architects designed large landscape parks and created a series of "natural pictures" composed on painterly principles. These gardens offered many different amenities and became the locations where people spent their leisure time surrounded by triumphal arches, obelisks, picturesque ruins, pavilions, temples, waterfalls and artificial lakes. It is also possible to visit the near-by gardens of the Liechtenstein family, which provide a great example of an oasis of tranquillity in the heart of Vienna.