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Friday, September 3, 2010

Picture Me at the Gallery

On any given day, I would rather spend my time with the paintings in the Kunsthistoriches Museum than at any other site in Vienna. I will say, nonetheless, that the two palaces we have visited--the Schonbrunn and the Hofberg Imperial Palace--and their associated sites and grounds are beautiful and inviting. The Ethnology Museum...not so much.

Recounted in the audio guides at both palaces is the slightly mawkish story of Empress Elizabeth, much adored in the latter half of 19th-century Vienna. Her biography has universal appeal and in particular is the stuff of country music: it confirms that rich people are unhappy. Born and brought up in a German principality, she was a beauty; at the age of 15 she was married to Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef, who was many years her senior. She hated court life generally, according to her letters and accounts of her conversations, and grew in particular to hate her mother in law, who continually watched her and criticized her. Franz Josef, by all accounts, doted on her. They had several children, two of whom met early ends--one from illness and one from suicide. The splendid dinnerware on display in both palaces adorned a table at which she rarely dined, preferring to be traveling outside Austria or else keeping herself apart in her own suite. She let her hair grow to ankle length--a Rapunzel imprisoned in her tower--and spent her mornings reading verse and brooding while her coif was tended. Her writings and other records reveal that she felt herself a victim during all her years as empress; she saw herself as no more than chattel, having been sold for a political alliance, and a prisoner of imperial custom and convention. Nicknamed Sisi, she saw her life chronicled by an eager press and an interested public, as she spent years ignoring her royal duties, shunning family, and being withdrawn and melancholy, sometimes expressing a wish for the release that death would bring. And all that occurred here in the Cradle of Psychotherapy. At the age of 61, she was mortally stabbed in Geneva by an Italian anarchist--and then deified by the public, a tragic figurine among the porcelain royals of Europe. Knowing Sisi's story did much to improve my attention to the tapestries and portraits; the bed; the writing desk; the mirrors; her exercise bars and weights; the gold lavabo that, as the audioguide put it, "served for ceremonial ablutions"; and, most of all, her blue and white porcelain chamber pot, in the shape of a dolphin, where I imagined her sitting and humming "She Is Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage."

At the other end of the spectrum....

A couple of weekends ago we toured the Ethnology Museum. The term "ethnology," we speculated, was created by a court attendant who was told by his Habsburg masters that they desired to clean out the palace attic. They wished, it appears, to dispose of all manner of items acquired in their travels or received as gifts from potentates in distant lands, yet they thought it inappropriate to put them in the royal dumpster. Thus, the Ethnology Museum was created--dignified by its scientific rubric--to arrange and display these items in geographic order. After 10 minutes in this museum, my back and feet began to ache inexplicably, and we made fairly short work of seeing these exhibits.

A loosely related ramble...

A number of years ago I worked with an Indonesian gentleman, a medical doctor by training. One of the kindest, gentlest, most even-tempered people I have ever known, he brought to his work tasks and his workplace relationships an objectivity and the kind of benevolent detachment I would expect of a Zen master. During a lull in our work one day, Doc mentioned having received from the widow of a friend in Indonesia a beautiful musical instrument--a wind instrument that the man had mastered and, for many years, had played lovingly. When I asked Doc whether he was going to learn to play it, he was astonished. He told me he could never do such a thing because the man's spirit was inside the instrument. What at the time seemed to me a primitive superstition now has a plausibility that I do not have words for. More than once I have idled my way through a second-hand store, one that resells furniture and personal belongings acquired in lots at estate sales, and seen trays of eyeglasses, and umbrella stands filled with canes, and books inscribed as gifts and marginally annotated; they have left me with an ineffable sense that such items are so personal--our culture's way of sensing what Doc sensed--that they should be left unsold, undisturbed. Perhaps they should be boxed up and passed through successive estate sales until they disintegrate.

I would enjoy visiting Sisi's things again, though it is not their fineness or elegance that would draw me back. I feel that with her there is the same psychological syndrome operating that creates long-suffering virgins into saints in Rome and sports figures into minor deities in the States. The items in the Ethnology Museum, on the other hand, had no story, no human connection.... There were for me no spirits inhabiting them. We won't be going back.


Blog Filler: A Cartographic Curiosity

Stumbled upon while browsing around Mapquest Austria for daytrip possibilities....a popular honeymoon destination?

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Start

Vienna, Wien, Wien, AT
Revise | New Directions | Map

End

Fuckersberg, Oberosterreich, AT
Revise | New Directions | Map



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