Patrick Bade
Cultural Life from the Siege of Vienna 1683 to the Enlightenment
Patrick Bade - Cultural Life from the Siege of Vienna, 1683 to the Enlightenment
- Thanks, thanks, Wendy and Lauren, and it’s great to be back with you and I’m really excited about this new course that we’re doing as a team on Vienna and the Habsburg Empire. And my introductory talk today is looking at the century that followed the great Siege of Vienna in 1683. So obviously that’s a very big subject, whole century of cultural activity in the Habsburg Empire. So the way I decided to do it is to look at just six individuals, two architects, a sculptor, a painter, a pastellist, and a musician. And each one of these great artists seems to me to throw a particularly interesting light on the culture of the 18th century in the Habsburg Empire. But just to start with some historical background, and of course, the siege itself, which is usually regarded as one of the great turning points in Western history. It marked the maximum expansion of the Ottoman Empire. Thereafter, the Ottoman Empire was in retreat and greatly enfeebled and never thereafter a very serious threat to Western Europe. But it was an extremely close run thing. The siege lasted two months, from July until September 1683. The Grand Vizier brought, it’s estimated, around 150,000 troops, including the fiersome and terrifying Janissaries. And inside the city there were just 15,000 men defending the city. And the Ottomans were brilliant engineers and they brought these miners who tunnelled underneath the great walls of the city that I’ll tell you a little bit more about in a minute. And really, they were within a day or two of being able to blow up the walls of the city and flood into the city.
So as I said, it was an extremely close run thing. So here, these walls, these great mediaeval walls that lasted until the 1850s, they’d actually been built at the expense of the English taxpayer. It’s a famous story how during the third, on his return from the Third Crusade, King Richard the Lionheart, Coer de Lyon. I think actually a better name would’ve been Richard the Thug. He was a very unpleasant, very brutal character. And he had actually, in a gross way, insulted the Holy Roman Emperor, and rather foolishly, well, he managed to get shipwrecked and he fell into the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor, who took him prisoner and ransomed him for an enormous sum that the smaller image you see here on the right is of a famous incident. Richard II was imprisoned in the Castle of Durnstein on the banks of the River Danube. And he was located there by his servant Blondel, who wandered around the castles singing underneath the windows, and that’s where he finally had an answer from King Richard and located him there. That’s a 19th century illustration on the right-hand side. So with this huge sum of money, the emperor built the great defensive walls of Vienna, which saved it from the Turks twice, ‘cause the Turks besieged Vienna in 1529 and then again, as I said, in 1683. And it was a pretty good investment, I would say, because if the Turks had taken Vienna on either of those occasions, they would’ve been well into Western Europe and much of Europe today might be Muslim rather than Christian. You can debate that, whether that would’ve been good or bad, at least from a Jewish point of view.
So in the end, Vienna was saved, was on the brink of falling, and the Polish King Jan Sobieski came down and at the battle of the Kahlenberg Mountain, his troops charged and routed the Turks. And that’s what you can see here. Now, this great achievement, of course, Jan Sobieski, he’s the great hero, but here are the four main protagonists. They don’t include the Habsburg Emperor, who had, he had buggered off, to put it crudely. He’d left the city to its fate. And so Jan Sobieski, 'cause he was paid to do this. And on the right you see the Jewish banker Samuel Oppenheimer, who raised the money to pay for the whole expedition, Bottom left, the Grand Vizer, who his gamble, of course, failed, and he paid with his life because the Sultan ordered him to be strangled with a silk thread. And bottom right is the Pope Innocent XI, who actually gave a lot of the money that paid for the armies that saved Vienna. So it’s a kind of interesting odd alliance between a Catholic pope, a Jewish banker, and a Polish king. And so the Turkish army fled in great disorder and the victorious army found all sorts of fabulous treasures, gorgeous embroidered tents. And you can still see some of these in the fascinating Museum of Military History in Vienna. And on the right-hand side, this is very weird.
This is a priest’s vestments which have been made out of embroidered materials that were part of the Turkish tents taken in 1683. So as I said, after this, of course, the Turks were in, the Turkish empire was in permanent decline, shrinking and moving towards, I suppose, its inevitable disaster, which didn’t, of course, happen until the First World War, in the First World War when the Ottoman Empire finally breaks up. But what we see here, after this very decisive defeat, the Habsburgs were able to take the initiative and they were able to seize back much of Hungary, which had been under Turkish rule for nearly 150 years. So this is the extremely, another extremely brutal siege that this time succeeded. This is the siege of Buda in 1686 when the city was taken with great cruelty, great violence. And I have to say inevitably who suffered most, actually, when the city fell, it was the Jewish population of Buda who were then seen as collaborators by the Habsburg troops and treated very harshly and massacred. Now, if I were a Turk, I would feel quite uncomfortable in Vienna because almost wherever you look in Vienna, you can see monuments and sculptures with Turks in chains. This is an interior in the palace of the Lower Belvedere that I’ll be talking about in more detail shortly. It’s the palace of Eugene of Savoy. And here again, you can, wherever you look, you see trophies, symbols of victorious battles and Turkish prisoners in chains. So here is Prince Eugene of Savoy. Before I get to the artists, I want to say a little bit about some of the political figures.
He was the great military genius of the years around before and after 1700. This is his statue actually in Budapest. But he is born in France. Here are his parents. His father was the prince of Savoy. His mother was a woman called Olympia Mancini. She was the niece, and I say that sort of inverted commas, because when you talk about nieces or nephews of popes and cardinals, it’s usually a euphemism for their illegitimate children, that she was a “niece,” inverted commas, of Cardinal Mazarin, who was the effective ruler of France in the middle of the 17th century. And for a while she was a mistress of the young Louis XIV. She’s got rather a sly, naughty look, and that sort of certainly confirms her reputation. And she was involved in one of the biggest scandals of the 17th century of France, the affair of the poisons. And she’s believed to have poisoned her husband, who you see on the left. And she’s also, what really got her into trouble was that there was some kind of conspiracy to poison the king himself, and she may have been involved in that. And I tell you this because it explains that Prince Eugene, who was her youngest son, was not in favour with the king. Prince Eugene, as the youngest son, he was supposed to enter the church and become a priest and probably a cardinal, but already as a teenager, he showed a strong vocation for the military and he wanted to join the French army.
And he seemed as the youngest son and also somebody who was physically ill favoured and he was not good looking and not strong, and he was by reputation also homosexual. So all of these things would’ve been strikes against him. And he was rejected for the French army. This turned out to be the biggest mistake that Louis XIV ever made, because as I said, he became the most reputed general, greatest military genius of the age, and he was working for Louis XIV’s enemies. Here he is. Look at that fabulous wig. This amazing Baroque wig. This was the late 17th, early 18th century is the period of these wigs that said you could wear them on the battlefield and shake out the bullets at the end of the day. So he actually, in a minor role, was there before the relief of Vienna, but it’s later in the later wars, I mean, the war against Turkey continued right up until 1699. He’d shaped many, many victories against the Turks. And he was also together with Marlborough. He worked very closely with Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, and they won a whole series of stunning victories over the French in the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasts from 1702 until 1713. The greatest these victories we see here is at the small Bavarian village of Blindheim, or Blenheim, as we call it in English.
So that’s the battle of Blenheim in 1704. And another of his great victories in 1719 was the taking of the fortress city of Belgrade from the Turks. I talk about him not just really because of his military importance, but he was also a great patron of the arts, in particular of architecture. And this brings me to the first of the six artists I’m going to be talking about this evening, and that is the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. And what we see on the screen here is the town palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy that was built for him by Fischer von Erlach. Fischer von Erlach wearing another one of these great Handelian massive Baroque wigs, as you see top left. And he’s generally considered to be the most original and remarkable architect in central Europe at the beginning of the 18th century. He’s Austrian born. He’s born in the city of Graz. His father was a sculptor. He was trained as a sculptor and then moved to Rome and spent several years in Italy and came under the influence of Bernini. Now, in the 17th and early 18th century, there weren’t schools of architecture. You couldn’t go and train as an architect. So the route into architecture, there were basically two routes, either one from painting or sculpture, and that was his route, and the other route to becoming an architect was as a military engineer, and that is the case for the other architect I’m going to be talking about in a couple of minutes, which is Lukas von Hildebrandt. So here is the town palace called Central Vienna still behind its mediaeval walls, tiny, narrow streets. It’s quite difficult.
There are all these palaces. It’s a city that’s full of wonderful Baroque palaces, but they’re all very cramped together in very narrow streets. This is the entranceway, the staircase to Prince Eugene of Savoy’s palace. Staircase always are a big thing in Baroque buildings. Staircases are wonderful opportunities for theatricality, and the Baroque style, of course, the ultimate theatrical stuff. And you have these Atlantes figures, and Atlantes are male. Caryatid is the female versions. You all know the ones, of course, from the Parthenon. And I remember seeing a delightful TV programme many years ago about Vienna narrated by Michael Frame. And he made a big thing of these male Caryatids, these Atlantes that we see all over Vienna, about how they’re always huffing and puffing and straining. They always seem to be saying, “Oh my god, this building I’m holding up and it’s so heavy.” Here’s another view of the same staircase. But the greatest architectural masterpiece commissioned by Prince Eugene of Savoy is the Belvedere, the Upper Belvedere, which you see at the top right hand of the screen, and the Lower Belvedere at the end of the gardens you see lower down on the left. They’re twin palaces. So the palace by Fischer von Erlach was his town palace, his winter palace, 'cause you have to have a winter palace and a summer palace.
And all the princes of of Europe and kings of Europe, kings and queens of Europe, they had winter palace and summer palace. So this, and now, because the Turks were no longer a threat, it was possible to build these palaces outside of the city walls of Vienna. So this palace is by Lukas von Hildebrandt, who took over from Fischer von Erlach as Prince Eugene of Savoy’s architect of preference. And he was somebody who took a different route to architecture through, he started off as a military engineer and that probably recommended him to the prince. And of course it’s quite a good idea to have an architect with a background in engineering 'cause at least you can be sure the building’s not going to collapse or fall down halfway through construction. This is, again, the same room I showed you before in the wonderful Lower Belvedere with all these rich marbles scagliola and so on. And here is the magical, magically beautiful palace. And it’s one of the most beautiful palaces of all of Europe, the Upper Belvedere. And of course it’s an absolute must when you go to Vienna you go and see this, 'cause it now houses the Österreichische Galerie all the Klimts and the Schieles are. And here’s a detail of the facade. I love this particular view, which is from the top of the hill. You always see tourists standing there taking pictures of it 'cause it’s a wonderful piece of illusionism. From this angle, it looks like the palace is floating on water. And here we are inside.
This is the entrance. Again, you’ve got these poor heavily laden groaning male Caryatid figures. It’s deliberately quite low, so you have a real sense of the weight of the building. And you walk through that arch up into the next stage of the staircase and it’s all air and lightness, and instead of sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger groaning over-muscular figures holding up the building, you’ve got all these little delightful cherubs frolicking on the balustrade. And then you get up to the top and you can see this palace, the Upper Belvedere, is a party palace. It was for great receptions. And the great receptions, of course, would’ve ended up in this room. And from the Belvedere we’ve got one of the most famous views in Europe back down the gardens towards the city of Vienna still behind its walls, and the Stephansdom and the Karlskirche, which I’m going to talk about in a minute. And here, this is how it looks today. That view has not, this is a view of it painted by Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto in the 1740s, and this is how it looks today. Now, back right in the centre, the heart of the old city, this is Graben, and in the middle of Graben is this crazy-looking monument which is called the Pestsäule. It’s the plague column. And Vienna was afflicted by the bubonic plague for the very, very last time in 1713. Of course, the last time in London was 1666.
This bubonic plague, which had arrived in the Middle Ages, and there were periodic outbreaks up until, this is one of the last major ones in Europe. And all sorts of theories about why it died out. I think the accepted theory is that, is it brown rats taking over from black rats or the other way around? 'Cause it was spread by fleas that were carried by rats. Anyway, this is a great celebratory monument to mark the passing of the plague. And this building also, it’s a very celebratory building. We’re back with Fischer von Erlach, and this is his greatest masterpiece. It’s the Karlskirche, the Church of St. Charles. And the particular Charles that this church is dedicated to is St. Carlo Borromeo, who’s one of the patron saints of plague victims. This is such an astonishing building. It’s a totally freaky over the top mad building in a way with so many different elements drawn from so many sources. I suppose the most striking feature we’ve got in the middle. You’ve got, of course a classical temple facade with a pediment and columns, and above that you’ve got a dome which has, I think, references in particular to the dome of St. Peter’s. But you’ve got these two enormous columns which are based partly on Trajan’s columns, so they’re Roman in origin, but they also suggest the minarets of a mosque. And then you’ve got these two side pavilions on either end, which have really even they look sort of oriental. They look like Chinese pavilions. Now, this is Fischer von Erlach’s design for the church, and actually, this comes in a book that he published. You can see the title here, the title page, “Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur.”
This is a design for historical architecture. He was immensely curious, and this is one of the things I really want to emphasise in this lecture today and my next two talks, which are about the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment is about curiosity. It’s about being interested in the world in a really objective way. I often think that that is one of the greatest qualities that Jews have, and that’s curiosity. It’s a thirst, I mean, hey, look at what this whole enterprise, look at everything that Wendy has set up and the following she has. It’s all about a desire for knowledge and to understand the world. So in fact, of course, travel opportunities were limited in the 18th century. So Fischer von Erlach had not been, had not actually seen a lot of the buildings that are illustrated in his famous book. And some of the buildings and structures in any case didn’t exist anymore, like the Colossus of Rhodes. This is how he imagines the Colossus of Rhodes looked at this great temple of Jupiter at Olympia. Of course, the ruins did exist, but he hadn’t seen them. And this is Mecca, certainly a place he had not been to, and Chinese temples. But he’s interested. He’s open to all these different types of architecture from all over the world, and this amazing, freaky building is the result of that. Here is a section of the building. You can see, you can actually, I’ve never done it, but presumably, and it might be a bit narrow for tourists, but you can actually go inside these great columns to the top, to the bells at the top. But what’s really interesting is the plan of the building, because you can see that the nave of the church, as is very typical of Baroque architecture, is ovoid.
But what is really striking when you see the plan is that you understand that the facade has absolutely nothing to do with what is behind it. And when you look at the facade of the church, because it’s facing a very broad place, a very broad square, and he wants to take advantage of that. So you’ve got this very extended facade. Do I have another picture of it? No, I don’t. Let me go back for a minute. So here, as I said, from this angle of the church, you have absolutely no idea what is behind facade, what the shape of the church is behind that facade. This is his design for the Great Palace of Schönbrunn, which is, of course, the summer palace of the Habsburg emperors. I can’t say I love it any more than I love Versailles. In a way, I think they’re both of them land up, they’re too big. They’re actually not terribly well-proportioned buildings. They both to me land up looking a bit like military barracks. Now, how about this for a bed? This is a bed in the Monastery of St. Florian. It’s another place I strongly recommend you visit if you go on a tour of Austria. It’s a fascinating, huge Baroque monastery that contains many wonderful treasures, including this extraordinary bed. And you sort of think this is a monastery. What were monks doing in a bed like this? And the answer is, it wasn’t really a bed for monks. It was a bed that was made for Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was, he was immensely powerful. He was the next most powerful person in the Habsburg Empire to the emperor. And these monasteries, of course, Austria remains very, very Catholic.
The Habsburg empire is officially Catholic. And right up to the end of the 18th century, the monasteries were immensely rich. They’re very, very powerful. They owned huge swathes of land and they’re incredibly magnificent buildings. They also served really as royal palaces so that when the emperor or Prince Eugene travel around the Habsburg lands, they could stay in these monasteries. And they were also great centres of culture and great learning. When you go to any one of these great Austrian or South German monasteries, of course, the churches, the interior of the church will be very magnificent. There’ll be a Kaisersaal or Marmorsaal, I’ll talk about that in a minute, which is for grand receptions. But the other most magnificent interior in any Baroque monastery will be the library. And they were great repositories of culture and learning. The rather strange structure you can see on the left is in the Austrian monastery of Kremsmünster. And you sort of think, oh, it looks sort of almost art deco. What kind of a building is this? It’s actually an observatory built in the 1740s. Now, one of the most magnificent of all the monasteries is Melk on the river Danube not far from Vienna. If you take the Autobahn from Munich to Vienna, as I’ve done on countless occasions, there is a very thrilling moment where you first see this incredible structure in the distance towering above you. It was a mediaeval monastery, and you can see just a few bits of the mediaeval buildings have survived at the end of it on the right-hand side. But like so many of these monasteries, there was a sort of tremendous energy of rebuilding in the late Baroque period.
So this was entirely rebuilt between 1703 and about 1730 by an architect called Jakob Prandtauer. You can see it’s on a promontory overlooking the Danube, and actually, if you’re on a boat, 'cause the Danube was one of the main highways of Europe right up till the 19th century. There’s a lots of traffic on the river going up and down. And you may see on the left-hand side there’s an aperture. And the idea is that if you’re on your boat, it’s a bit like, of course, as an Orthodox Jew, you are allowed to travel on the Sabbath because you can’t very well stop the boat in the middle of the sea or river on the Sabbath. But for a Catholic, of course, you’re obliged to attend mass on a Sunday, and you couldn’t do that really if you’re on a small boat on the Danube. But you could be on your boat and you could look up to the monastery, you could see, and if the doors of the church are open and you had a telescope or something, you could actually look directly up through that aperture, through the open gates of the church up onto the high altar where the tabernacle is. So there’s the aperture. Oh, this is the Kaisersaal or Marmorsaal. As I said, every great monastery has one of these for great imperial receptions. They’re all very, very magnificent.
Even though they’re often referred to as Marmorsaal, the marble hall, this is not marble, of course. You’re not looking at marble. You’re looking at scagliola, which is a kind of faux marble which to my mind is often much more attractive than real marble 'cause you can make it any colour you want to. So you can have very delightful colour combinations. And here we are on the left, this is the high altar of Melk, and what a riot is going on there with all these saints who all seem to be disco dancing, all moving ecstatically and flailing arms and so on. It’s a real piece of opera. It’s grand opera on the high altar. And of course I put the famous Bernini Cornaro chapel on the right-hand side 'cause Benini is really the inspiration for this late Baroque style in Austria and Germany. Here is the main altar, as I say, which is wildly disco dancing saints and lots of legs all over the place and flailing arms. This is another monastery called Altenburg. Very late Baroque. You’re almost into the Rococo and the sweet colours, the light colours, the airiness, and the little frolicking cherubs and so on. Again, it’s the Baroque where it’s on the brink of becoming Rococo. This is the, again, fantastic library. How about that for a library? But it’d be quite hard actually, I think, to concentrate on your book quietly with a riotous decor like that. And this is not a monastic library. This is now, of course, the Austrian national library. This was the library of the Hofburg, the town palace, the winter palace of the Habsburgs, and again it’s a design by Fischer von Erlach, although it was largely built and certainly completed by his son well after his death.
Now, Maria Teresa, she’s the… It’s interesting in the 18th century how it was dominated by very powerful women. Catherine the Great, of course in Russia. Madame de Pompadour, the royal mistress of Louis XV, and she was in one of the most powerful women in Europe. Incidentally, she and Maria Theresa, who was very, very, very Catholic. But they corresponded with one another on almost equal terms and they referred to one another as dear sister. I’m assuming that they must have corresponded in French, which was the lingua franca of Europe in the 18th century. She looks rather stuffy here. In a few minutes I’m going to show you a much more sympathetic portrait of Maria Theresa. She’s a very, very remarkable woman, very courageous woman, very, very Catholic, very intolerant of both Jews and Protestants. But her dislike of Jews, I think, is not antisemitism as we would understand it today because it’s not based on race. It’s based purely on religion, that she thought everybody should be Catholic. So she disliked Protestants every bit as much as she disliked Jews. She was very happily married to Francis of Lorraine and they had 16 children. And somehow or other he also found time for a lot of infidelities and illegitimate children, which pained her, but still, as I said, the marriage was basically a very happy one. And she had, there are lots of images like this that I think she was a good mother. She loved her children. She took a real interest in their education. And after her slightly wayward daughter Marie Antoinette went off to France to marry King Louis XVI, she continued to be very interested in her daughter’s wellbeing and education. Here she is as a widow with her, I think most of her, well, some of her surviving children.
So 13 of the 16 of her children survived, which is already remarkable for the 18th century. But the gentleman on the right-hand side is her successor, Joseph II, and I’ll be talking more about him because he’s one of the major figures of the Enlightenment. I’ll be talking about him on Sunday. And here this is a rather sweet picture of the three children who didn’t survive on clouds on their way to heaven. And this is by an artist called Franz Anton Maulbertsch. And now, German art and Austrian art is very, very little known outside of Germany and Austria, particularly not in Britain. The National Gallery have, I mean, they tried to rectify the situation, but basically they have very, very few German pictures between, well, nothing after, really, very little after Dürer. But actually, there are a great many very gifted, very interesting South German and Austrian painters in the 18th century who deserve to be much better known. And on my list of names I’ve listed some you might like to follow up. Altroger, Klemzer Schmidt, Daniel Grahn. There are a whole lot of them. Un my days where I used to go to Munich to stay with friends every summer we’d go off on a Kunstreise in South Germany and Austria visiting churches, pilgrimage churches and monasteries to find the art of these artists. Here is a self-portrait of, I’ve just chosen Maulbertsch. He seems to me to be the most remarkable and interesting of all these artists. This is his self-portrait. Now, he spent a great deal of time painting frescoes in monasteries and archbishop’s palaces in what is now Hungary and even Poland.
And these I have mostly not seen. I’m more familiar with his, oh, this is in the Archbishop’s palace in Kroměříž in Hungary. So this is a fresco. You can see it’s in the late Baroque style, these kind of frothy pale colours and illusionism and figures flying all over the place. I find him most interesting, actually, not as a frescoist, but as a painter in the medium of oil. Here are two characteristic altar pieces. These are very extraordinary pictures. Very fluid, expressive, dynamic handling of paint. Very flashy, brilliant brushwork and a very sort of excited, almost expressionist, rather distorted view of reality. There are wonderful works by him to be seen in the Lower Belvedere in Vienna. This is his altar piece of St. Thecla where, I think you can see rather better in this image what I mean about this very late Baroque with this rather agitated drapery and really juicy, luscious, very free brush work. So these late Baroque artists, when they were undertaking altar pieces or frescoes, of course, they’re completely under control of the patrons, who might be princes or aristocrats or the Catholic Church, and they needed, it’s the same as with Rubens, really. They needed to produce these modelli, small-scale versions of the subject, to get approval from the patron, and a great many of these survive.
It’s interesting, by the 18th century, this kind of spontaneity, this freedom was appreciated and the sketches were preserved and collected. And this is a modello of a religious subject. I’m not quite sure what the subject is here. It could be the freeing of, somebody being free, isn’t it? By supernatural means. But anyway, you can see what I mean about this incredible looseness and freedom, almost expressionist handling of paint. And I was very thrilled when about four or five years ago, the National Gallery finally bought their very first painting by an 18th century German or Austrian artist. And this is not a terribly good reproduction, but those of you in London, I do hope you’ll go and see this. It’s a tiny picture, actually. It’s an allegory of Asia. So again, very typical of this Enlightenment period where you’re interested in other parts of the world. And it must have been one of the cheapest purchase in real money that the National Gallery have ever made, 'cause they bought this, I think, at auction for £7,000. I’m sure that it’s been many decades since they bought a painting for as little as that. It’s a delicious, frothy, juicy thing. You feel you could sort of eat it up with a spoon. It’s almost sort of painted in sorbet and ice cream. It’s a very lovely thing.
I mean, they had the problem, though, of course, they’ve got this one, as far as I know, it’s still the only painting in the National Gallery by an 18th century German or Austrian artist. So where do you put it? You’ve got to put it somewhere else. I suppose they could’ve put it in the 18th century French room. It would’ve fitted in more or less. In the end they decided to, it’s normally exhibited in the 18th century Venetian room. I suppose it’s with Venetian art that it has the closest connection. Now, one sculptor, I want to talk about, very special, extraordinary vigour. And this is Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. And his work, soon after he died, he became something of a cult and he’s continued to fascinate later artists well into the 20th century. There are plenty of 20th century German artists, for instance, who refer to his work. And again, he’s one of a crowd of very, very gifted sculptors who are working for churches, monasteries, and palaces. Very accomplished. But there are two aspects of him that make him, I think, especially interesting. One is that he spans one of the great stylistic pendulum swings in Western art from late Baroque to Neoclassicism. And so we see quite a radical change in his work from his early work to his late work. The early work is very Baroque. Frothy, full of movement, very theatrical. And the later work has some of the simplicity and clarity of the neoclassical stuff.
And the other thing that makes him interesting is that he was thoroughly bonkers, that he, as they would’ve, at the time, they would’ve said he’d gone mad. Today we would, well, there’ve been lots of attempts to give diagnoses of what was wrong with him, and he was probably a paranoid schizophrenic. Now, here are early works of the emperor and the empress. This is Maria Theresa and her husband Francis in this typical late Baroque style where they seem to be dancing and the wind seems to be ruffling their robes. Full of movement, full of theatricality, full of animation. Here is a bustling portrait of of Maria Teresa. Here we see him moving towards a rather more sedate style. This is his portrait of Baron van Swieten, whose name may be familiar to music lovers amongst you. He was a Dutch-born Austrian diplomat who’s famous today because he was a great supporter and patron of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. And here again you see him moving towards a crisper, clearer, smoother, more Neoclassical style. But it’s these heads, which all seem to be basically self-portrait heads, on which his reputation rests. They’re called his Charakterköpfe, his character heads. And his behaviour became weirder and weirder and he actually lost his position teaching at the academy in Vienna because his behaviour had become so strange and he seemed to suffer from paranoid delusions that he was being attacked by evil spirits. And according to some contemporary accounts, these sculptures were an attempt to in a way trap or control the evil spirits that were attacking him. And they’re quite amazing. I think they’re about 60 altogether.
And the more you can see them together, there’s one in London in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Probably the place where you can see the most together, again, is the Lower Belvedere. But it’s when you, I think they have a cumulative effect. There was a big exhibition at the Louvre about 10 years ago when they got nearly all of them together, and the combined impact of them is completely extraordinary. And they’re kind of timeless. You think that they could be from today rather than from the late 18th century. Now, the last visual artist I want to talk about is Jean-Étienne Liotard. This is his portrait of the Empress Maria Teresa. And I think if you really want to know what she was like as a woman, this is the portrait to look at. And I think it gives a very sympathetic impression of her as warm, maternal, really quite good humour. So this is, of course, a pastel portrait. And although he did paint in oils, Liotard is largely known as a pastellist. Strictly speaking, of course, he’s not a Habsburg subject.
He was of French Huguenot origin, born in Switzerland. But he was completely peripatetic. He moved around Europe. He didn’t invent pastel as a medium. The artist who first really popularised pastel portraits was the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera. She also travelled around Europe. And 18th century aristocrats and royalty, they really liked these pastel portraits, partly because they could be done relatively quickly. So you didn’t need endless sittings and you could get a very vivid likeness really quite quickly. Oh, here is Jean-Étienne Liotard as a young man. That’s an oil painting. And as an old man. I find that a very moving portrait, very, very moving, very touching. It has that, he did extraordinary self-portraits that I think could be compared with the greatest, with Rembrandt, 'cause they have a kind of honesty and they also have a sense of genuine, he’s curious. He’s curious about himself. He’s looking at himself in the mirror with great objectivity. Now, for a period of four years, he travelled to the Ottoman Empire. He lived in Constantinople. And by this time, of course, this is, we’re now well into the 18th century. The Turks are no longer a threat. So he’s interested in them and he’s curious and he records the costumes and the manners of the Ottomans. And again, I’m going to talk quite a lot more about this in my next talk, which will be about Mozart and the Enlightenment.
So these wonderful drawings recording, as I said, the costume and the manners and the customs of the Ottoman Empire. Well, having lived, he sort of went native and he grew a most amazing beard. Of course, people, unless you were a peasant, nobody in the 18th century was wearing a beard like this in Western Europe. Most men of the upper classes were clean shaven in the 18th century. So this really made him stand out and it proved a kind of selling point for him. And he travelled all over Europe, London, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam. And, of course, it was a thrill for people 'cause although he was Swiss of French origin, he masqueraded as a Turk. And it was absolutely thrilling for an aristocratic lady or gentleman to pose for this exotic Turkish wild man. And he took with him, I suppose, a big trunk of Turkish costumes so when he came to England, he could hand them around to his sitters. And here’s the Earl of Sandwich on the left-hand side and William Ponsonby, Earl of Bessborough on the right-hand side, all masquerading as Turks. This is the Countess of Coventry fantasising presumably about being an in a Turkish harem. And I can’t resist showing you these. He’s actually, this is so much the spirit of the 18th century. This is a very famous pastel, I think this is in Dresden, of a young girl serving a hot chocolate. And another, this one is in Munich in the Alte Pinakothek.
And I’m going to finish off with Joseph Haydn, who, of course, for us, he is a giant because he pioneered, he virtually created two of the most important musical forms in the Western classical tradition, the symphony, he wrote 104 of them, and the string quartet. I can’t remember how many he wrote of those, but many dozens of string quartets. And he was the one, he laid the foundations on which Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, all of them are building on the foundations created by Joseph Haydn. So we think of him as a great genius. Here he’s showing, you can see he’s looking like a rather respectable man of the . He’s wearing a fashionable powdered wig. But this is towards the end of his life. Most of his career was spent as a servant of the princely Esterházy family working in the great palaces of Eisenstadt and Esterházy. And it’s rather extraordinary to think that for the first decades of his career, he was just, that’s what he was, he was a servant and he was wearing a servant’s livery. So he would’ve been on the same kind of level as a valet or a butler or a cook or whatever, in a very, very menial role.
So I’m going to lay great emphasis when I get to Mozart on Mozart being a transitional figure who leaves behind the regime and he’s moving into this new world, the world of revolutions, profound changes in the status of the artist in the late 18th century, and Mozart, in a way, is the representative figure. Very interesting going from Haydn through Mozart to Beethoven, the changing role status idea of the artist. Haydn for much of his life completely the just a servant, a sort of slave to the aristocracy. But this changes in the later part of his career, and in the last decades of his career, he was given permission and all his music was up to, I think, 1779 was the property of his employer. Everything he wrote was for his employer. He wasn’t allowed to write for anybody else. But after 1790, he’s starting to get an international reputation, and he was actually largely through London. London publishers were publishing his work, his string quartets and so on, and they became popular all over Europe, and he became famous. You can see some Haydn music published in London on the right-hand side. On the left, a very famous portrait of the Marquess of Villafranca by Goya dating from the 1790s where the Marquess is perusing a publication of string quartets by Haydn. And I’m going to finish my talk today. This is, of course, a 19th century image of Haydn playing a string quartet. I’m going to finish with a little blast of Haydn, the final movement of the so-called Rider Quartet. And Dennis is going to be talking about, he’s going to devote a whole session to Haydn later in this series. Anyway, that’s a nice upbeat way to finish my talk. And I’m going to see what we have.
Q&A and Comments:
Entwurf. I don’t think you saw the word Juden inscribed there. I’ll have another look on that thing, but I can’t see how that would’ve come into it.
Q: What is the name of my favourite bistro?
A: It’s La Fresque, as in fresco. And if I describe to you the lunch I had today, which was so unbelievably delicious, you’d all be on the next available plane or train to Paris, I promise you. Thank you, Carla.
“I read somewhere that,” this is from Jackie. “I read somewhere that to celebrate the victory over the Ottomans in 1683, the Viennese bakers,” That is, that’s often said. I’m not sure, there are a lot of myths about the siege of Vienna. And the other, of course, famous story is that, which may or may not be true, is that it was finding sacks of wonderful coffee beans in the tents of the Ottomans that led to the Viennese obsession with coffee, 'cause you get the best coffee in the world, really, in Vienna. But I think probably coffee was known to the Viennese before 1683. Who paid the British tax, not the English taxpayer, the poor English peasants, they paid taxes that ransomed Richard the Lionheart.
Q: “Wasn’t the ransom King John had to pay for his brother Richard the cause of all the chaos in England resulting in the Magna Carta?”
A: It may have been one of the, may well have been one of the factors. Viennese pudding called . I don’t think I know that Viennese pudding.
Q: “Wasn’t it damaged during the war?”
A: Are you talking, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Vienna, of course, was quite heavily damaged, but not as badly as the German cities. I suppose the most, the cathedral was damaged. That was actually by rioters who accidentally set fire to it. And the opera house was partially destroyed. But actually, Vienna is pretty remarkably intact. If you, of course, if you go to, if you remember what Vienna looks like, if you’ve all seen, I’m sure you’ve all seen “The Third Man,” which is filmed in post-war Vienna. You can see the buildings with the bomb damage on the buildings. But it wasn’t flattened like Berlin or most of the German cities.
Yes, 'cause “Woman in Gold,” she used to be in the Upper Belvedere. That’s a complicated thing, that whole thing. I’m not sure that the right solution was really found for that one.
Emperor Franz Joseph’s favourite dessert was Kaiserschmarrn. Imperial, yeah, imperial rubbish. Yes, I suppose not one of my favourites. I think there are better Viennese desserts than Kaiserschmarrn.
There is a star of David somewhere in the ceiling. That’s very possible. Evidence that bubonic plague was not spread by rats, but as a coronavirus. Oh, I don’t know about that, yeah. Perhaps this is a result of a lack of restraint on Jews with knowledge. I might suggest that other religions put some lines of inquiry out. That’s, well, of course, the Catholic church certainly did. That is very true there. Actually, funnily enough, in my lunch that I was with French friends and they were discussing Philip Roth, and the guy sitting next to me said something that really made me think. He said that he found that in Jewish writers and thinkers, that there was a kind of universality that one doesn’t necessarily find anywhere else.
I mean, that sounds to me like a topic for a very interesting discussion that David could do. Danube river cruise stops at Melk. Yes, you can do that. You can go, yeah, you can do a day trip from Vienna to Melk on a boat. It’s a lovely thing to do.
Q: Have I come across this opera which I can’t even pronounce, Croatian national opera?
A: No, I haven’t actually, but sounds very interesting. I’ll look it up. Where did the money to build and maintain these opulent, the peasants, of course, the hardworking peasants, their taxed tithes and so on. That’s where the money comes from.
Q: Theresia, yes. Well, if you were to write it the Austrian way, Maria Theresia, yeah. Was he influenced by church gargoyles?
A: I’m not sure about that. I don’t think so. It’s Messerschmidt as in the… The names will always be on the list that are sent to you. But it’s as in the Second World War fighter planes, Messerschmitt. The Liotard portraits. The National Gallery have just bought an absolutely, oh, no, yeah, I think they were, I think it may have, they may have been given it as a tax thing.
National Gallery in London has a wonderful new, it’s a family portrait, actually. But Liotard, well, they’re around Europe. They’re Louvre, Alte Pinakothek. You can travel around Europe to see them. Of course, they’re not always on show because pastels, actually, Switzerland, I think it’s Geneva has a particularly good collection of them. Neue Galerie had a Messerschmidt exhibition in 2010. It was probably the same one that was in the Louvre. It would’ve been about that time. And paintings certainly do offer a wonderful, in fact, I had a colleague at Christie’s who was a great expert on fashion and clothing, and it was very good for the students to learn about this because you can date a picture and learn a lot about the picture if you understand the fashion and clothing depicted. Huge monastery on the Danube is Melk. Yes, Vienna. I mean, theoretically I’m supposed to be, I think, doing a Vienna visit later this year for Kirker, so I hope that’s all going to be possible.
The string quartet playing the Haydn at the end was my favourite string quartet, which is the Franco Belgian quartet the Pro Arte quartet. They made the first nearly complete set of recordings of the Haydn quartets in the 1930s.
Q: And what did I have for lunch? I
A: ’m going to tell you. I’m going to torture you. I had these three wonderful, I had eggs, a soft boiled egg with, what’s it… Oh god, what’s the word for it? You know, the smelly mushrooms. I had, oh wait, I really suddenly can’t remember the words for everything. I’m losing my mind. Oh, it was all, a little bird, little tiny birds, caille in French. And I should’ve written it down. Anyway, it was all delicious.
Thank you so much for revisiting architecture in Vienna not visited by me since my student days in the 1950s. Thank you. 16th, 17th century castles always seem to be designed for much, well, people were shorter in the 16th and 17th century. Messerschmidt, again, you’ll find it, so there’s always a list of names that’s sent to you with your invitation. Oh, I’m just trying to think of… I’m sorry, my brain’s gone an absolute mush as far as what I had for lunch today. I think I’m still probably suffering from the effects of that delicious lunch.
Another person’s coming up with a different theory about bubonic plague from person to person by direct physical contact.
Q: Did the artists who moved into architecture collaborate with others who knew about the structure?
A: Yes, I mean, all those buildings really are collaborative efforts, because they also had to collaborate with the painters of the frescos and the sculptors who made the sculptural decoration. And there were, of course, architects like Vanbrugh in England, who was essentially an amateur, and he needed professional help with the structural side of the building.
A talk on the universality of certain Jewish writers. I think that David would be great for that. That would be a very interesting talk or a discussion, perhaps.
Truffles, yes, thank you. Yes, it was soft boiled eggs with truffles, and oh God, that was so good. And little fish with this spicy sauce, and the caille, which again, I’m trying to think of the English word of what caille is. Those little tiny birds. Quail, thank you.
Oh, you’ve anticipated me completely. And the name of the restaurant is La Fresque. So, quail, other people say, and truffles, yes. I didn’t have a dessert. Believe me, with three starters, that was quite enough. No, it’s not La Frasca, it’s La Fresque, Q-U-E.
And we seem to have got to the end. And thank you all. As I said, it’s lovely to be back in harness again, and I’ll be with you on Sunday for Mozart and the Enlightenment.