Viennese vaults

This precious sculpture called Saliera' by Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini of the 16th century.

This precious sculpture called Saliera' by Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini of the 16th century.

Published Mar 11, 2013

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Vienna, Austria - When the Kunstkammer reopened on March 1, Vienna came face to face with the extraordinary wealth and eccentricity of its first family.

For 640 years, the Habsburgs had run a vast Austrian empire that suddenly fell apart at the end of World War I, in the pan-European cataclysm known as the Fall of Eagles.

The Kunstkammer (literally “chamber of art” but often taken to mean “room of curiosities”) is a collection of unusual artworks acquired by different Habsburg rulers over hundreds of years.

Many royal families in Europe put together these collections, but the Habsburgs did it first and did it best. Emperors such as Ferdinand I and Frederick III – and various ambitious archdukes – built up several Kunst and Wunder Kammers: treasuries of beautiful works of art augmented by oddities from the natural world.

It was Rudolf II (1552-1612), Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, who put these various collections together in the first internationally famous Kunstkammer, assembled at Prague Castle.

Visiting diplomats and VIPs would be shown the family’s collection as a mark of favour, but also as proof of what Habsburg wealth could buy.

In 1891, Emperor Franz Joseph rationalised the collection by moving the Mexican headdresses to Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology and leaving the humorous drinking vessels and portraits of people with horrific disabilities in Ambras Castle near Innsbruck.

The remaining 8 000 pieces of art were then moved into the emperor’s new Kunsthistorisches Museum, just across the Ringstrasse from Vienna’s Neue Burg palace.

I got a sneak preview of the new Kunstkammer. The entire collection was crammed in here in 1891, piled up on shelves with only natural light for viewing.

It must have looked like a jumble sale, albeit one awash with gold, diamonds and rubies. No wonder that, in 2002, the museum withdrew the collection and embarked on a new way of displaying just a fraction of it.

Eleven years on, more than 2 000 pieces are on offer now in tall, brilliantly lit glass cabinets that throw the rest of the museum into shadow.

Pride of place goes to a 17th-century unguentarium (oil container) carved out of one single, 2 680-carat piece of Colombian emerald, and to a silver automaton clock featuring the goddess Diana riding a centaur, designed to move across a table surface on the hour.

There’s also a tankard made from the tusk of a narwhal embellished with 16 rubies and 36 diamonds, and a silver writing box with 10 compartments, each decorated with life-size silver insects.

There are quite a few objects made from natural exotica too, such as a goblet fashioned out of an ostrich egg supported by red coral, and a tortoiseshell drinking flask in the shape of a heart that’s trimmed in Indian silver.

Among the more grotesque objects are Commedia dell’Arte figures in Murano glass 22cm high, and three painted carvings 25cm taller depicting a young man, young woman and an ancient hag back to back.

Many of the objects were made simply to see if such ideas were possible. One of the best known is a salt cellar by Benvenuto Cellini. This golden cruet set depicts Neptune and an Earth goddess seated naked, a box for pepper near her right hand and a ship containing salt in his.

Today, when so much is available on the internet, it is difficult to imagine just how important it was for a ruler to gather every kind of object under his roof.

Cabinets of curiosities were not just for prestige, they were for knowledge. According to Sabine Haag, director of the Kunstkammer collection, Rudolf II instructed his agents across Europe, Asia and the Americas to bring him objects of unrivalled quality, exclusivity and rarity.

In the days before we understood the concept of curating a collection, the Habsburgs collected with zeal, building a baggy but comprehensive picture of the world at its most extreme – both beautiful and ugly.

An hour-and-a-half in the 20 refurbished rooms proved overwhelming. I was awestruck by the craftsmanship, amazed by the wealth of Habsburg patronage and also reduced to hilarity at times.

Why lavish an enamelled gold stand, lid and intricate clasp on a bezoar stone from the intestines of a cow? Why patronise the unknown artist who created a beautifully glazed figure of a naked woman sitting on a giant hedgehog? Because we can afford anything; that seems to be what the Habsburgs are telling us.

As I step outside the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the same level of opulence and eccentricity seems to envelop the rest of the historic city centre.

Vienna is a paradox, a capital city built to run an empire that stretched from Belgium and the eastern territories of France to the Netherlands and modern Germany as far as Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and Italy, but that now runs a country smaller than Iceland. Artists of all kinds flocked here for centuries. So much energy and ambition was bottled up within the city walls that Vienna turned into its own Kunstkammer.

The plague monument in the Graben is one of the most grotesque celebrations of deliverance. Emperor Leopold I’s reaction to the great pestilence of 1679 was firstly to flee the city and then to declare he’d erect a Pestsäule (plague column) when the all-clear was given.

The monument tactfully shows Leopold in prayer rather than flight, while Plague herself – an old hag tumbling to her destruction – is truly grisly.

The curious nature of Vienna did not end when the city wall came down. In the 19th century, the Viennese were able to indulge their love of coffeehouse life to the full with cafés dotted around the Ringstrasse.

As Herr Querfeld, the owner of Café Landtmann, told me when I was there for the day, coffeehouses were never about the coffee. That first cup is a down-payment on your table rental. Because most Viennese apartments were too small to entertain in, social life was conducted in the coffeehouse.

Many coffeehouses stay open all night for Fasching, the season of the balls, all 450. It’s a tradition kept up by Vienna’s 20-somethings – that you do not go home at four in the morning but go straight to a coffeehouse for breakfast.

The fact that thousands of young Viennese practise all year to be able to not just waltz but minuet in ballgowns and tails says something about both the city’s attachment to its Habsburg past and its sheer idiosyncrasy.

Nowhere else in the world maintains such a 19th-century tradition in its entirety. – The Independent

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