2010 Trip: Vienna Day 1
21st May 2010
Today, I headed to the centre of town and started my day with a jaunt along Mariahilfer Strasse, to the Museum Quarter. Yes, the city has an entire region/area dedicated to museums! Vienna is very modern in some respects and very traditional in others.
It has a modern transport system that rivals the punctuality of its German counterparts, most people don’t own cars, the inner city streets feature modern materialistic goods (some exceedingly posh), the gardens are beautifully maintained, and rubbish is just not an issue here.
The traditional side is a little more subtle and difficult to see. Vienna has the hallmarks of a strongly religious history, even if many of it’s inhabitance no longer follow those traditions. In fact, the same is true of most of Austria (unlike most of the surrounding countries). On Sundays, everything except the train stations closes up shop, including supermarkets and the like. In addition, Austria celebrated a wide variety of Christian holy days. These days are enforced and nothing opens.
In addition, while one can find high store chains selling sushi and Asian foods, most Austrians eat fairly traditional fare at home and you can’t find many ingredients in the supermarket that we, in New Zealand, would consider normal - for example sushi rice, popadoms, mango chutney, cumin seeds, coconut cream. On the flip side, of course, dill, caraway, various types of pastry, mushroom etc are not to be found in normal New Zealand supermarkets.
So, after walking through the Museum Quarter, I headed to my primary destination, the reason I had actually come to Vienna. I had not visited this museum last time I was here - the particularly spectacular Kunsthistorisches Museum. This museum was designed as a museum in the middle of the 19th century. It has been purpose built to house its collections; many of the rooms are adorned with designs and patterns that are traditional to the particular style depicted. One good example of this is the Egyptian Galleries that are bedecked with hieroglyphic inscriptions copied from various historical texts. The room even incorporates into its design columns taken from a temple in Egypt.
The entire building is a triumph! The central staircase and dome above the entrance way are absolutely beautifully decorated with baroque gilding and fluting, at the top of the first flight of stairs is a specially commissioned marble statue of Theseus killing a Centaur, an allegorical representation of knowledge and society besting ‘barbarism’.
I spent about 7 hours in the museum and even then only saw two-thirds of the collection in sufficient detail. The collections included the Egyptian - with a whole well preserved scroll of the book of the dead, tablets from the early dynasty with their original colourings, a very fine collection of devotional statues, and a very interesting collection of mummified animals. The Roman, Greek and Etruscian exhibitions held some amazing finds - a perfectly preserved floor mosaic with stories from Theseus' life, some of the most impressive Roman bronze and gold work I have ever seen (including an entire room devoted to the figures of gods and goddesses kept in individuals' homes - on a lararium), and a beautiful collection of seals and medallions.
The top floor featured the coinage exhibits, which I only briefly looked at. It is vast and also features the world’s largest and smallest gold coins (the largest being a 100kg behemoth of pure gold, minted in Canada).
The middle floor of the museum is dedicated to renaissance and baroque art. I spent about 4 hrs on one half of this floor alone. A classic collection and I would guess one of the best in Europe, up with the Uffizi, the Prada, and the Lourve. I mainly concentrated on works by the Flemish, Dutch and German artists. Of particular interest to me were works by Durer and Peter Bruegel the Elder. The latter’s paintings are very clever - highly detailed scenes, usually with interesting allegorical elements. He was also particularly well known for depicting the everyday peasants, rather than just the nobility.
After this, I headed home and as Maria had to get up early tomorrow and both of us were exhausted, we had a quiet night in. Maria did make a rather nice spread, its very simple but surprisingly good: peeled and mashed potatoes, with finely chopped raw onion, sour cream, cream, cayenne pepper, salt, & pepper, all mixed together. It’s better warm, but yummy with crusty bread. We also dessert-ed on chocolate and strawberries. Yum!
NB: for anyone who has been reading this and noticed discrepancies in the dates, take posting date is when I actually have written the post and get to a place that has internet, this often takes far too long. It is also working on New Zealand time, so it looks even worse than it actually is.