Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
gio's
Madonna of the Rosary (Die Rosenkranzmadonna,
the biggest canvas in the room)
looks perfectly ordinary, and the saints kneeling around her have dirty feet. In
David with
the Head of Goliath (David mit dem Haupt des Goliath)
—in the corner near the win-
dow—Caravaggio turns a third-degree-interrogation light on a familiar Bible story. David
shoves the dripping head of the slain giant right in our noses.
When the Habsburgs ruled both Austria and Spain, cousins kept in touch through por-
traits of themselves and their kids. Diego
Velázquez
(in Room 10) was the greatest of
Spain's “photojournalist” painters—heavily influenced by Caravaggio's realism, capturing
his subjects without passing judgment, flattering, or glorifying them.
Northern European Art:
The other half of this floor features works of the “Northern
Renaissance.” This movement, brought on by the economic boom of Dutch and Flemish
trading, was more secular and Protestant than Catholic-funded Italian art. We'll see fewer
Madonnas, saints, and Greek gods and more peasants, landscapes, and food. Paintings are
smaller and darker, full of down-to-earth objects. Northern artists sweated the details, en-
couraging the patient viewer to appreciate the beauty in everyday things.
The undisputed master of the slice-of-life village scene was
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
(c. 1525-1569)—think of him as the Norman Rockwell of the 16th century. Saal X contains
the largest collection of Bruegels in captivity. Despite his many rural paintings, Bruegel was
actually a cultivated urbanite who liked to wear peasants' clothing to observe country folk
at play (a trans-fest-ite?). He celebrated their simple life, but he also skewered their weak-
nesses—nottosinglethemoutashicks,butasuniversalexamplesofhumanfolly.
ThePeas-
ant Wedding (Bauernhochzeit),
Bruegel's most famous work, is less about the wedding than
the food. It's a farmers' feeding frenzy, as the barnful of wedding guests scrambles to get
their share of free eats. Bruegel's
Peasant Dance (Bauerntanz)
shows a celebration at the
consecrationofavillagechurch.ThethreeBruegellandscapepaintingsarepartofanorigin-
al series of six “calendar” paintings, depicting the seasons of the year.
Also on this floor of the museum, don't miss
Rubens
' large, lush canvases (including,
inSaal XIII,
TheLittle Fur
/
DasPelzchen,
depicting hismuch younger,dimpled bride);
Ver-
meer
's
The Art of Painting (Die Malkunst),
showing the painter at work in his studio, with
a painstaking attention to detail (Room 17); and
Rembrandt
's frank self-portraits—one as a
defiant young artist, the other as a broken old man (Room 21).
The Rest of the Kunst:
The museum's ground floor has several world-class collections
of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Near Eastern antiquities. You can see a statue of the Egyp-
tian pharaoh Thutmosis III and the Gemma Augustea, a Roman cameo thought to be kept
by Augustus on his private desk. Or view the
Kunstkammer
—the personal collections of the
HouseofHabsburg.Amassedby17emperorsoverthecenturies,the
Kunstkammer
(“artcab-
inet”)isadazzlingdisplayof2,000ancienttreasures,medievalcurios,and
objetsd'art
from
800
B.C.
to 1891.
