Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Hunters in the Snow,” from 1565, at the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna.
I cried during my first visit to Vienna, in 1988. It happened in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, where there are many moving and impactful paintings by artists such as Dürer, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, and Caravaggio. It was the Breughel gallery that caused me to weep. It’s a large room, empty save for the walls, which are covered with the greatest works by the magnificent 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder—I was overwhelmed. His paintings are more joyful and humorous than sad, so it wasn’t the subject matter that moved me to tears. It was the sheer privilege of spending time with The Hunters in the Snow, The Tower of Babel, The Peasant Wedding Feast, and his many other large panel paintings in the collection.
A storehouse of carriages at the Kunsthistoriches.
I have spent more time in Vienna since then, especially in the last three years as I worked on our current exhibition, The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Treasures from Europe’s Greatest Dynasty. Emperor Franz Joseph united the Habsburg collections—paintings, decorative arts, antiquities, arms and armor, musical instruments, ethnography, and carriages—that had been scattered in palaces and other buildings across the city. He opened the Kunsthistoriches Museum, in 1891, to display them to the public, part of a grand remaking of the imperial city. Since the theme of our exhibition is the Habsburgs as collectors, there were a lot of masterpieces in the museum that fit the bill.
The Brueghel paintings are too fragile and important to leave the museum, so it was impossible to include them in our show. But we spent days “shopping” the museum’s galleries and storerooms—the highlight of organizing any exhibition—to narrow down and secure the checklist of objects to display.
In one of the museum’s costume storage areas.
It was especially exciting to see the costume storage areas, which are astonishingly clean; you could operate on an emperor in them. The costume collection is vast, including clothing worn by most levels of men at the highly stratified court. They were definitely the peacocks, strutting around at court in civilian uniforms with elaborate gold embroidery, fashioned from real gold. Most of costume collection is stored in archival boxes, but occasionally my eye would alight on a worn leather valise high up on a shelf, firing my imagination with thoughts of what might have been in the case originally and what kind of journey through history brought that case to its current location.
Ultimately, tough decisions had to be made, concessions to space and budget constraints. We reduced our initial checklist from 150 objects to 94. Luckily, I know I will return at some future time to Vienna, to visit the works we had to leave behind…including the paintings by Brueghel.