Vienna Day 2
We were allowed a full day on our own until 11:00 p.m. when the boat was to depart. Jan and I rode the metro to the Karlsplatz station to reach a long planned destination–the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Along with the Alte Pinakotek in Munich, we hoped to add this visit to past peak experiences at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The edifice displays symmetry and variation like that of the Opera House, but here the whole structure is reflected by the identical Natural History museum building across the wide plaza surrounding an enthroned statue of the Empress Maria Teresa. She ruled the Austro Hungarian Empire from 1740 to 1780 as an “Enlightened Despot” and achieved great military, diplomatic, and economic success.
Arriving before the 10:00 A.M. opening time, we faded into an organized tour group to enter the building early. The security chief noted that we had the wrong pass but Jan’s cane persuaded him to allow to us sit in the resplendent atrium until the general public was admitted.
Our first stop was the gallery housing paintings by Peter Breughel the Elder (1525-1569. We had both studied most of them in college, and I had a large print of The Tower of Babel on the wall over the desk in my bedroom all through high school.
The gallery wasn’t crowded yet, and the couches made it possible to give each of of the dense canvases extended attention.
Especially powerful was the arrangement on a single wall of all four of the paintings dedicated to the seasons.
The most famous of the Brueghel masterpieces in the room is “The Peasant Wedding”
Several items struck me in its live presence. Though one would expect to see a festive occasion, it shows no evidence of joy in the participants. The main activity is efficient distribution of coarse food and drink to hungry guests sitting around the table and the crowd pressing through the door. The central action is that of the man at the head of the table passing out plates of mush from a tray made out of a door. The small figure of the woman backed by a green cloth and paper headpiece hanging over her head, presumably the bride, has an ambiguous expression, either of devotion or stupefaction. No bridegroom seems to be present. The label next to the painting suggested that the black-robed sword-bearing man on the right is the land owner who’s paying for the party and waiting to exercise his customary droit de seigneur (right of the lord) to take the bride’s virginity.
A museum guard in a dark suit stood impassive in one of the great room’s doorways. I couldnt resist asking him if he was familiar with the film Museum Hours we had recently watched, which focuses on a lonely guard in this very location who makes friends with a poor Irish woman stranded in the city. The man punched the movie title into his phone.
This work by Rembrandt greeted us in the next gallery. Painted at the beginning of his long decline into poverty due to bad luck and bad judgement, it expresses the stoic pride of a hero in decline–a stance in many of his late self-portraits. Art historians disagree as to whether they were motivated by confessional introspection or by the high market value among wealthy collectors for self-portraits of famous artists.
In the gallery of Netherlandish paintings from the following century, we encountered this work by Vermeer known as “The Art of Painting.” As opposed to the flashy exaggeration of many of his baroque contemporaries, it projects quiet intensity in the shielded light on the woman’s modest but sensuous face, the glisten of metal in the chandelier and upholstery tacks, and the highlights and shadows of the heavy drapery. Black and white contrasts in the floor tiles and the artist’s clothing, set off the orange of his stockings and his alert yet relaxed posture. The small room’s depth is increased by the bulk of the foreground curtain and chair, the foreshortened sizes of painter and model and the distant geographic details of the creased map on the wall, which both flatten and deepen the space. Another subtle paradox emerges from juxtaposition of the model and her emerging representation on the pictured canvas.
After three hours in the presence of these mighty works, we walked back along the treed Ringstrasse and returned to the Gullveig for lunch and nap.
We had purchased tickets to a concert that night in the Annaskirche timed to allow return to the boat in time for departure. Jan was reluctant to take on the need to hurry and sent me off early by myself. I again roamed aimlessly through the beautiful streets
including the tiny homeless encampment at the foot of a fountain celebrating the end of a plague.
I was drawn by St. Peters Kirche, framed at the end of a short narrow street
circled by clopping horses drawing elegant carriages.
I took a seat inside
and gazed upward.
On the way to the concert venue, I passed through an immense plaza–the Imperial Palace of the Habsburgs and presently the seat of the Austrian Federal Government. Unrecognizable from a different angle, this was the same Hofburg whose garden I’d been in the day before.
With just enough time for a quick Wienerschnitzel dinner, I arrived at the Annas Kirche, smaller but similar to the one I’d just sat in.
The program of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven String quartets seemed fitting for that celestial space.
On the Undergound, attention was on cellphones broadcasting an international soccer tournament.
