Baroque meets bizzare

Day One at the Kunsthistorisches Museum

Vienna is home to a score of world-class museums (the Habsburgs were rapacious collectors with surprising good taste for dynasts) and the crown jewel, as it were, is the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History). In true Vienna style, the KHM starts trying to impress you long before you’re actually looking at art of any sort.

*The Holbein, Burgkman, and Dürer special exhibit was incredible…unfortunately, photography was forbidden, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Sorry!*

The “history” in “art history” here is Western and pre-1700, so the collections are less far-reaching than the museum’s name would suggest. But within those confines, what’s on display is overwhelming. One floor is given over to the standard antiquities triad: Egypt, Greece, and Rome. However, there are also collections of Etruscan and Cypriot pieces, which are unusual and rather fascinating. Another substantial collection comprises fussy Baroque bric-a-brac, the perfect tchotchkes to flaunt your wealth if you couldn’t be bothered to worry about good taste.

And then there are the paintings. They fill an entire floor: Spanish and Italian painters in one wing; Flemish, Dutch, and German works in another. There were lots of Habsburgs collecting lots of paintings over several centuries, so it’s unsurprising that the KHM has sizeable collections of several individual (and celebrated) artists. It’s the kind of museum where, for example, you can see enough of Titian’s body of work to decide that you like his portraits but sort of hate his historical paintings. Or notice that in a giant room stuffed to the gills with enormous Italian religious paintings by a dozen artists, the sole Caravaggio grabs your attention and refuses to let it go.

It should be evident that I deeply love this museum, enough to devote two days to roaming its galleries. However, the beauty of what’s on display is only one reason to visit. Another is the bizarre gems sprinkled among the Serious and Important Art that appeal to my twisted sense of humor—a less lofty pleasure than Appreciating the Masters, but profoundly satisfying nonetheless.

Let’s look at some of these, yes?

The Queen of the Nile visits the Red Cross

The last ruler of an independent Egypt famously took her own life by encouraging a venomous snake to bite her (sparing her from being the centerpiece of a victory parade in victorious Rome).

It’s a little odd that she’s shown as a blonde (not a shade of hair that springs to mind for a North African monarch), but I’ll withhold judgment. It’s never good manners to speculate on whether a woman’s hair color is natural or born in a bottle. What is arresting is that she appears to be donating blood: her limb turned outward and resting on the arm of a chair, and the asp curling around her forearm like medical tubing.

It strikes me as a missed opportunity this image hasn’t been used to promote plasma donations, perhaps under a slogan like “Don’t linger in denial—give blood today!” or “If Cleopatra’s doing her part, why aren’t you?”

This can’t be what Beyonce meant by a “single lady”

Here, we see one of those strange celebrations of martyrdom that were so popular in Renaissance historical paintings. According to legend, young Catherine was mystically engaged to Christ, so she had to turn down the advances of a Roman emperor and, as a result, was put to a messy death.

The artist captures the moment when the Christ Child literally “puts a ring on it.” No one (including his beaming mother) seems put off by an infant proposing to a grown woman. And just make everything super weird, one of the approving onlookers is St. Peter Martyr; the museum’s description notes that he has “an axe in his head.”

Try as I might, I couldn't quite make out the axe (it was in a dark part of the painting that the gallery lighting failed to illuminate). I really wanted to see that axe — it would dial this painting’s level of weirdness up to 11.

Just a curtain rod shy of perfection

Here’s Marie Antoinette, the doomed Queen of France, before everything went to hell. Her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, was very happy with this portrait when it arrived in Vienna (sending it was possibly the only thing the poor girl ever did that pleased her nightmare of a parent). And it is a lovely picture—there’s a reason Le Brun was considered (even by male contemporaries) the greatest portraitist of her age.

The architecture (there’s really no other word for it) of Marie’s dress is patently ridiculous by today’s standards but would have raised no eyebrows in 18th-century Paris. What I can’t get past are those enormous corded tassels hanging from its waistline. I immediately thought of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, turning Tara’s curtains into a fancy evening gown to entice her intended paramour, Rhett Butler. It’s even more reminiscent of Carole Burnett’s classic parody of that scene.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the sketch, titled Went With the Wind, you can find it on YouTube. Here’s a clip of its most wonderful moment, along with Burnett’s commentary some years later. This alone should secure her place as one of the greatest American comedians, living or dead.)

Diego Velázquez invents Instagram (17th Century)

**L to R:** *Infanta Margarita Teresa in Pink-Colored Dress* (Diego Veláquez 1654); *Infanta Margarita Terese in White Dress* (Veláquez 1656); *Infanta Margarita Teresa in Blue Dress* (Veláquez 1659); *Infanta Maria Teresa* (Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo 1661)

These four portraits (three by Velasquez) show the same little girl, the Infanta Margarita Teresa, daughter of King Philip IV of Spain. They were painted for the child’s doting grandfather, Emperor Ferdinand III, in Vienna (which is how they wound up in the Kunsthistorisches Museum).

Painted over several years, they chronicle the Infanta’s early childhood—essentially the sort of thing a grandparent carries around in his wallet and makes everyone look at. Margarita was also the subject of Velázquez’s most famous painting, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), which hangs today in Madrid’s Museo del Prado.

*Las Meninas* (Veláquez 1656/57; Museo del Prado, Madrid). I’m sure by now you can spot which one of the sitters is our girl Margarita.

This might all seem very sweet but it goes sour when you understand what her family had planned for this little girl. The pictures were intended to document her growth into a suitable teen bride. A member of the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, she was intended to shore up the Austrian branch of the family by marrying her maternal uncle (simultaneously her paternal cousin), the future Emperor Leopold I.

Pairing uncles, nieces, or first cousins was standard procedure for the incestuous Habsburg clan. Margarita somehow dodged the genetic bullet that afflicted her sole surviving sibling (the unfortunate Charles II, whose fate I discuss in my Habsburg article), which encouraged hopes she’ could bear a healthy heir. An early marriage (at age 15) followed by six pregnancies in as many years (two miscarriages, four live births, but only one child surviving its infancy) proved to be too much for Margarita. She died at age 21 during her seventh pregnancy.

To the end, she called her husband “Onkel” (Uncle), which was accurate but still incredibly disturbing. And lest you forget that she was a child of privilege as well as a child bride, she demanded that her uncle-husband persecute Vienna’s Jews for somehow causing her fertility issues—obviously, these folks were more likely culprits than generations of incestuous marriages.

Well, at least we got some lovely paintings out of this sad little shit show.

Fragments of Roman statuary to fuel your next nightmare

Sculptures from classical antiquity have rarely survived intact. And I know there’s no ideal way to display random pieces of broken sculpture.

But surely there’s an arrangement that doesn’t look so much like the trophy room of a Hollywood serial killer. I kept waiting for Brad Pitt to show up and start wailing What’s in the box?

Not everything ages gracefully

The KHM has one of the world’s largest collections of cameos (carved gems and semi-precious stones) and showcases a profusion of unbelievably intricate works in sculpted ivory.

Each remarkable object displays astonishingly skillful craftsmanship and attention to detail—pictures honestly don’t do them justice (despite my efforts here). One’s jaw should drop in awe. But unless said jaw-drop took place earlier than 1950, there’s a teensy little problem.

*The Gemma Augustea* (carved sardonyx with gold frame, 9th-12 century CE)

To modern eyes, these works of art look like they’re made from boring old plastic. I kid you not. Their glossy opacity, perfectly formed edges, and delicate lightness scream “injection molding” to a contemporary viewer, robbing them of their magic.

It's like one of those optical illusion posters, where you must somehow relax your eyes to see a design hidden beneath the surface. Staring at these objects, I could momentarily glimpse ivory or stone and be astonished. But the rest of the time, I kept looking for the seams of the molds or those little nubs where the object had been snapped free of a surrounding frame.

*All of this is carved ivory. But if they swapped the pieces out with plastic reproductions, who could tell the difference?*

I left these collections frustrated and unsatisfied, wishing I could genuinely appreciate the carvings and saddened at yet another instance of magic giving way to mass-produced mediocrity (even if it was just in my head).