Karma
Kunsthistorisches!
The Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of the pair of museums at Maria-Theresien-Platz may just be my favorite part of this trip so far. It was full of so much art that, despite being there for over 4 hours, I feel like I barely scratched the surface. Gretl gave us a very in depth guided tour and told us about so many pieces that it would be nearly impossible to list them all so I'm going to give a brief highlight reel of sorts. Luckily, as part of this program, we have a museum pass for the month that lets us come back here whenever we want for free so I will definitely be returning.
The first thing that caught my eye was the magnificent entryway. The entire museum, though it was purpose built as a museum, was built to mimic the palaces of the Florentine Renaissance. As a part of Franz Joseph I's Ringstraße construction project, the building looks a lot older than it actually is, having been built relatively recently at the end of the 19th century. It houses the considerable art collection of the Habsburg family and hasn't really expanded its collection much after the fall of the monarchy. The museum houses art from all around the world including Egypt, Rome, and Greece. Unlike in other art museums (cough British Museum cough) the pieces from cultures outside Austria were almost entirely acquired through legal purchasing and not colonial plundering, meaning the problems that typically plague museums like this are less of an issue here.
In the very first gallery we entered, we saw two of these shockingly load bearing columns that are the oldest things in the entire Kunsthistorisches. They were gifts to Emperor Franz Joseph and were originally displayed in the Upper Belvedere before being moved into the Kunsthistorisches. Moving them, however, was easier said than done and a team of 15 horses was needed to carry all 25 tons of column from the Palace to the museum. The columns were uncovered in Alexandria but were dated back as far as 26,000 BCE. If I'm being 100% honest, standing in a room being held up structurally by a 28,000 year old column was not the most chill I've ever been but, if it's lasted this long, I guess it'll probably be fine.
In the Greek gallery, we were able to see the combination of Greek and Roman cultures. Most of Greek and Egyptian artistic culture can be traced back to around 3200 BCE but Greek art culminates and reaches its artistic prime around 550 BCE. Their weakened military around 146 BCE means they get conquered by the Romans and a lot of their culture stopped or was morphed into a Greco-Roman hybrid. This sculpture is a Roman marble copy of an original Greek bronze sculpture. Greek bronzes didn't survive for long because the bronze was valuable metal that was melted down to make swords and bullets. A lot of Roman marble sculptures, then, are actually marble copies of bronze originals just like this one. Art historians like to say that the Romans saved the Greeks for the moderns. Because Roman art mimics the style of and, sometimes, straight up copies Greek art, the Greek aesthetic and artistic culture lasted longer than it would have had it died off with Greece's prominence.
In the same gallery was this bust of Aristotle whose writing is the basis of nearly all Western dramatic writing. While he was very brilliant, he was also decidedly wrong about a lot of stuff. He assumed that women were half baked men and that they had half as many teeth. It's clear this dude spent literally no time with women because half many teeth is easily disproven by looking at any woman. He was also deeply, and strangely, obsessed with eel reproduction. Eels have no visible genitals and Aristotle proclaimed that they must, then, spontaneously generate from "the entrails of the Earth." Weird guy.
Speaking of weird guys, this mosaic from a Roman villa near Salzburg depicts the myth of Theseus and Ariadne which contains one of the weirdest guys in all of mythology: King Minos. King Minos keeps a minotaur in a labyrinth in his kingdom and sends virgins into the labyrinth periodically so the minotaur can eat them. His daughter, Ariadne, realizes that this is wrong and chooses to be the next virgin sent to face the minotaur. Behind her she unspools a ball of yarn so her crush Theseus can find and save her. Theseus chases her into the labyrinth where he slays the minotaur and rescues Ariadne. Unfortunately, the story doesn't end there. After escaping, the duo sails to the island of Naxos where they plan to rest on their way from Athens to Crete. While there, Theseus abandons Ariadne to pursue a demigod he has fallen in love with, completely betraying her and leaving her heartbroken. For doing this, he is eternally tortured by the demigod while Ariadne gets to go off and marry Dionysus, the god of revelry and wine. It's like Jojo Siwa poorly sang, karma's a bitch, he should've known better.
If you're looking at this crucifix and think it looks wrong, you're absolutely correct! We're more used to seeing Jesus on the cross with 3 nails holding him up, putting him in a more vulnerable position that better shows the suffering of his humanity in spite of his divinity. Roman crucifixes are not like that and, instead, put a nail in each of Christ's limbs making him more static and conveying far less suffering and emotion.
This is the Saliera, a golden table sculpture designed by famed goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini in the 1540s. It depicts the connection of land and sea by showing Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and grain crops. Perhaps its most fascinating moment, however, came in 2003. A security guard at the Kunsthistorisches named Robert Mang was upset that a team of construction workers was seemingly able to enter and exit the museum, setting off several alarms, whenever they wanted. Mang complained that this was causing his security team to ignore the alarms because of how frequent they were and was endangering the valuable pieces of art like the Saliera. One night, after he had been out drinking, Mang walked right into the Kunsthistorisches, set off all the alarms, wasn't noticed, broke the glass around the Saliera, and took the sculpture to prove his point. The next morning, rather than do the normal thing and try to immediately return it he was like "guess I'm an art thief now" and sent a text to his bosses at the museum asking them for a 20 million euro ransom to return the piece. He was eventually caught on a store security cam purchasing a cell phone card and was about to be arrested when he turned himself in. Mang took the police to the sculpture which he had buried in a barn in lower Austria and was sentenced to 4 years in prison. Some damage from when the pieces of shattered glass hit the Saliera can still be seen.
The grand staircase at the Kunsthistorisches is meant to represent the Alps and, after climbing it, going North leads you to Renaissance paintings from Northern places like the Netherlands while going South leads you to Italian and other Southern paintings. Until around 1900, the Renaissance was largely attributed to Italy (largely thanks to the work of Italians who marketed themselves very, very well) but the Northern galleries here prove that idea wrong. One of these Northern paintings is Albrecht Durer's Adoration of the Trinity from 1511.
Durer was a German painter from Nuremberg whose work was notoriously ripped off by Marcantonio Raimondi, an Italian printmaker who pioneered printed art reproduction. He would copy Durer's work and then sell it as his own, even copying Durer's signature in the corner. Part of the reason Adoration of the Trinity is so complex is because Durer was upset that Raimondi was legally allowed to do this. Durer modified his own style to become more intricate and personally specific, resulting in more complex and interesting artwork, but the main reason for doing that was so that it would be harder to make a copy of his pieces.
There are so many things we saw at the Kunsthistorisches, again, we were there for 4 hours, but I have neither the time nor the artistic expertise to talk about all of them. Once our tour of the museum had concluded, everyone was pretty exhausted and we got sausages at a nearby sausage stand to rest for a bit and recover before a special screening of The Devil's Bath, an Austrian film based on Dr. Stuart's research. The film depicted a real life case of suicide by proxy, something Dr. Stuart wrote an entire, excellent, book about. This phenomenon from the early modern period in central Europe was based largely on the idea that those who committed suicide were unable to receive a proper Christian burial and would be denied entry to heaven. This gave people who wanted to kill themselves a strange loophole: commit a crime and turn yourself in to be executed. If you kill a child who has just been baptized, they will be free of sin and thus go to heaven. Then, once you turn yourself in for committing the murder, a priest will hear your final confession, absolve you of your sins, and then send you to be executed where you will be able to go to heaven upon your death. While, today, we view this as terrible, (and seeing it depicted on screen was quite horrifying) to people in that time period, it was the only way out and could be viewed as almost a win-win situation since everyone involved gets to go to heaven.
Today was fascinating but also very busy and, after the movie, I basically collapsed onto my bed ready for whatever tomorrow brings.
