Imperial Vision

Now, a confession. The pieces noted—Zeus and Danaë and the rest—may or may not have been among those seen at the Belvedere in 1781. But they do shine in this traveling exhibition of nearly a hundred pieces from the imperial trove, which, having shown in Minneapolis and Houston, is now here in Atlanta. Since few of these sumptuous works have ever appeared in America, the effect on the viewer proves much the same as on my raggedy precursor bedazzled in the Belvedere. Everything in Habsburg Splendor comes from the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, built by the Emperor Franz Joseph (1830–1916) to merge collections scattered around the city.

At greatest reach, in the first half of the 16th century, the Habsburg Empire spanned much of Europe. With gaps here and there it spread from Spain east to Hungary, and from Italy north to the Netherlands, taking in the vast Spanish conquests in the New World as well. The collecting of artworks—paintings, sculpture, and more—was not a mere whim of courtly aesthetes; it played a lively supporting role in the politics of empire. Resplendent art was an emblem of imperial fortune and power, especially when it took as its subject a ruler, his spouse and spawn, and his military or moral exploits.

In Habsburg Splendor this role is plain to see. A spectacular tapestry, in oddly pacific tones of pink, gold, and aqua, depicts Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) reviewing a snakelike procession of mounted troops before his conquest of Tunis in 1535. A bronze bust of Charles shows him with rippling armor, a pendant of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and a shoehorn beard masking the jutting Habsburg jaw. Heroic busts may not be ideal vehicles for irony: This one, by the Milanese sculptor Leone Leoni, was finished in 1555, only a year before Charles, beset by deficits and weary of war, abdicated and thereby split Spain and its colonies from the

Habsburg Empire.

Sometimes the depictions are symbolic or allegorical, as in a finely modeled relief in pinkish limestone of Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519), portrayed as St. George on horseback with a freshly slain dragon underfoot. The portrayal seems quixotic, almost whimsical: Max/George sports a fancy hat whose scrolling plume copies the curve of the dragon’s tail, while the horse holds up a hoof in the instant before stomping the head and wiping off its face a final evil grin. The German artist Hans Daucher, working about three years after the death of Maximilian, may have taken the liberty of a lighter touch than would have been welcomed by a living sovereign.

Even more figurative is the proto-surrealist painting Fire by the quirky Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Created for Emperor Maximilian II (1527-1576), it pictures a bust which is not the emperor himself but a personification of his armed power. The cheeks are flints, the hair a knot of flame, with the torso formed by the barrels of a pistol, mortar, and cannon. It seems a conglomerate not only of arms but of aims, a meta-comment on the very idea of a heroic bust—the flesh burnt away to reveal the true bones.

Paintings figured also in the rounds of matchmaking: “Let others wage war,” ran the cheery motto, “you, happy Austria, marry!” Portraits of nubile daughters were dispatched to inflame the scions of coveted realms. Infanta Maria Teresa by Diego Velázquez equips its 14-year-old subject with a rouged complexion, a corona of gold curls, and a buoyant hoop skirt upon which dangle (perhaps as a spur to timely bachelor response) a pair of watches on pink ribbons. Multiple copies were produced by the Velázquez workshop for a trio of suitors. To reaffirm the unity of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs, this comely daughter of Philip IV of Spain and Elisabeth of France might have married either the son or the brother of the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand III (1608-1657); in the end, she wed Louis XIV of France, doing her bit for the loss of Spain to the Bourbons.

A woman of the same name but sterner priorities was Queen Maria Theresa (1717-1780), whose marriage and arrangement of her children’s marriages (16 offspring in all, 13 surviving infancy) won her the epithet of “Europe’s mother-in-law.” In Maria Theresa as a Child by the Danish portraitist Andreas Möller, she appears, at 10 years old, already to own the composure and resolve of a Habsburg ruler. The silken teal of her gown suggests the wing of a waterfowl, as if she were about to take flight, while her flaxen hair forms a close-set halo in which floats a discreet jeweled tiara. Small wonder that her father Charles VI (1685-1740) decreed in 1713 that succession in Habsburg domains be expanded to include the daughters of ruling princes.

Not all the works collected by Habsburgs are Habsburg-centric. Most are merely great art, and the emperors and archdukes did have an eye for it, on the strength of this exhibition. Charles V was said by his early biographers to have bent to pick up a brush dropped by Titian: True or not, the story marks the esteem in which art and artists were held.

From the hoard of Archduke Ferdinand II (1529-1595) and his successors at Ambras Castle comes a lissome bronze, Venus Untying Her Sandal, of the Roman first century. Balanced on one foot, she glances to her side, positioning the viewer to face her gaze and observe her crosswise pose—right hand to left ankle—from the ideal angle. Three Philosophers, acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614-1662), is a mystically creepy composition by Giorgione. In a woodland setting, three sages, robed and carrying arcane scientific instruments, confront a cavernous bluff whose root-haired brow seems to embody the dark core of man’s nature. Also from Leopold Wilhelm is Guido Cagnacci’s Death of Cleopatra, perhaps erotic but surely perverse, serving up a bevy of handmaids and the lolling queen herself, bare above the pubis, with an engorged pink-brown adder fastened to her forearm.

Seduction, in one form or another, often its more forceful variants, is a vivid motif. In Titian’s Danaë the gold coins showered down by Zeus, hovering in the guise of a rosy cloud, puddle beneath the thighs of the nymphet on a rumpled bed. The stormy king of the gods pops up again in the masterwork Jupiter and Io by Correggio, which the curators have made the bodice-ripping logo of the exhibition—except that there’s no bodice. The divine cloud, dark as Dickensian factory smoke, enwraps the nude Io with a paw-like appendage as she reclines on a riverbank, her head thrown back in abandon.

These myths of seduction, with their flopped bodies and chiaroscuro, bear a fleshy likeness, when seen in the same museum space, to scenes of the Passion. Caravaggio’s The Crowning with Thorns features Pilate’s enforcers roughing up the husk of Jesus, who bends like the broken Vatican statue called the Belvedere Torso. In Rubens’s Lamentation of Christ, the fallen Jesus is mourned by his mother, three other Marys, and John, with the axis of the pallid corpse pointing to the blonde Mary Magdalene, whose radiance outshines the savior of the world.

Rounding out the show is a wealth of lustrous miscellanea: a gold and silver “many-sided equatorial sundial,” the pint-sized suit of armor worn by Archduke Philip the Fair (1478-1506) as a boy, the gilt and velvet Princes’ Carriage of the Vienna court, spangled uniforms and gowns, and the flintlock with monocle made for the myopic Charles VI after he fatally shot Prince Franz Adam Schwarzenberg, mistaking him for a stag.

The exhibition closes, fittingly, with an elegant painting by Gyula Éder, rendered in gold and crimson and titled—a sort of verbal fanfare—Empress/Queen Zita and Crown Prince Otto Descending from the Imperial Carriage before the Coronation in Budapest on December 30, 1916. Completed 13 years after the coronation, which would be the last in six centuries of Habsburg history, it has the advantage of rueful hindsight. Little Otto, 4 years old, steps down from the carriage in a long coat of gold brocade trimmed with ermine—the garment itself appears in the exhibition—while his mother peers out at the painter, and through him to the present day, in no evident hurry to rise and step down herself. Her form is layered in silk and ermine that swells to fill the rococo cavity of the carriage; on her head a crown rests heavily.

In the long wake of that regal occasion, Otto von Habsburg lived in exile, partly in America, from 1918 onward. He died in 2011 in Bavaria, having served many years—in a role unthinkable to his imperial forebears—as a member of the European parliament.

Parker Bauer is a writer in Florida.