Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
• Looping back to where you began, head down the hallway into the residential part of the
castle (in the hall, notice the yellowed, 700-year-old Herberstein family tree on your right).
The first big room is the...
Countess' Salon:
Also called the “Chinese Salon,” this room reveals the fascination
many 17th- and 18th-century Europeans had for foreign cultures. But the European artists
whocreated these worksnever actually visited China, instead basing their visions onstories
theyheardfromtravelerswhomayormaynothavehadfirsthandexperiencethere.Theres-
ults—European depictions of imagined Chinese culture—are highly inaccurate at best, and
flightsofpurefantasyatworst(lookaroundforanimalsandinstrumentsthatneverexisted).
This European interest in Chinese culture is known as
chinoiserie
. We'll see a similar fixa-
tion on Turkish culture soon.
• Head through the next few rooms (countess' bedroom, countess' dressing room, old
chapel, chambermaid's room). Before entering the 14th-century core—and oldest part—of
the castle, keep your head up to see a very unusual chandelier: an anatomically correct (or
surgically enhanced, by the look of it) female dragon. Continue into the...
Bedrooms:
Thefirstshowsoffwhatprimandproper17th-centuryEuropeansconsidered
tobe“erotic”art(withamythicalcreaturetryingtowooawoman),whilethesecondisdec-
orated in Napoleonic-era Empire-style furniture. In this room, pay special attention to the
stove: Water (which could be scented) was poured into the top, and emerged at the bottom
in the form of steam. Fancy. The third bedroom brings the survey of furniture up to date:
19th-century Biedermeier...simple, practical, comfortable, but still beautiful.
• Going into the arcade, turn left to find the...
Festival Hall:
Then as now, this hall was a preferred place for banquets and concerts.
Decorating the walls is Europe's biggest collection of
turqueries
. Like the faux-Chinese
stuffwesawearlier,this isa(usually highly inaccurate) European vision ofTurkishculture.
After the Habsburg armies defeated the Ottomans and forced them out of Central Europe,
the two powers began a diplomatic relationship. In the late 17th century, many Austrian of-
ficers went to Turkey and came back with souvenirs and tall tales, which were patched to-
gether to form the idiosyncratic vision of the Ottoman Empire you see here.
The left wall shows Ottoman politicians of the day—many with European features (pre-
sumably painted by artists who'd never laid eyes on an actual Turkish person). Along the
back wall, we see portraits of four sultans' wives. Imagine how astonishing the notion of a
harem must have been in the buttoned-down Habsburg days. But even though these paint-
ings are unmistakably titillating, they're still appropriately repressed. The first woman (on
left) wears two different layers of semi-transparent clothing (what's the point?). And the
fourthwoman(onright)reachesforsomefruit(symbolicof...well,youknow)andteasingly
pulls open her dress so we can see what's underneath, which is...more clothes.
