Academic literature on the topic 'Vienna. Belvedere'

In the Second World War, Hungary was an ally of Germany, joining the Axis powers in August 1940 under the Second Vienna Award. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s Foreign Minister, and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano met with Hungarian and Romanian representatives in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. There they began negotiations on Hungary recovering the territory of Transylvania that it had ceded to Romania as a consequence of World War One. The confrontation between Hungary and Romania meant that Hungary’s demands were not accepted. As a result of Ribbentrop and Ciano’s mediation, the two sides agreed to redraw the boundaries of the territory to account for population composition and historical claims to sovereignty. Hungary failed to realize their ambitious dream of recovering the entire territory of Transylvania, and they had to be content with taking back the region of Székelys, where Hungarians were in the majority. Romania’s sovereignty over the rest of Transylvania, which Romania had taken control over post-World War One, was recognized. However, this deal would ultimately hurt Hungary. Because it was brokered by Germany and Italy, Hungary was treated as a defeated state in the post-World War Two peace negotiations.

This article analyzes the activity of female artists and the problems of their relationships in the society during the period of Viennese Art Nouveau of the late XIX – early XX centuries. The subject of this research is the works of female artists of the Vienna Secession and the materials of the Belvedere art exhibitions. It is noted that the problem of gender relationship during the period of Viennese Art Nouveau was given considerable attention; the cultural and artistic creativity were viewed from the perspective of the impact of this problem upon the mentality and minds of the society. The relevance of the selected topic is substantiated by the heightened interest in studying the specificity of the phenomenon of Viennese Art Nouveau and the role of woman in its formation. The novelty of this research lies in the attempt to determine the specificity of the impact of female beginning upon the culture of Viennese Art Nouveau, both as an artistic image that is the centerpiece, and in the image of female artists who supported its development. The conclusion is made that despite the shift in worldview orientations and artistic paradigms fin-de-siècle, the problem of gender relationship and apparent competition between female and artists for their position remained strongly pronounced. The author determines the considerable impact of female artists (many of whom were of Jewish descent immigrated or deceased during the World War II) upon comprehension of the phenomenon of Viennese Art Nouveau.

In the first half of the 19th century in literature on art the term ‘Old Masters’ was disseminated (Alte Meister, maître ancienns, etc.), this in relation to the concept of New Masters. However, contrary to the widespread view, it did not result from the name institutionalization of public museums (in Munich the name Alte Pinakothek was given in 1853, while in Dresden the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister was given its name only after 1956). Both names, however, feature in collection catalogues, books, articles, press reports, as well as tourist guides. The term ‘Old Masters’ with reference to the artists of the modern era appeared in the late 17th century among the circles of English connoisseurs, amateur experts in art (John Evelyn, 1696). Meanwhile, the Great Tradition: from Filippo Villani and Alberti to Bellori, Baldinucci, and even Winckelmann, implied the use of the category of ‘Old Masters’ (antico, vecchio) in reference to ancient: Greek-Roman artists. There existed this general conceptual opposition: old (identified with ancient) v. new (the modern era). An attempt is made to answer when this tradition was broken with, when and from what sources the concept (and subsequently the term) ‘Old Masters’ to define artists later than ancient was formed; namely the artists who are today referred to as mediaeval and modern (13th–18th c.). It was not a single moment in history, but a long intermittent process, leading to 18th- century connoisseurs and scholars who formalized early-modern collecting, antiquarian market, and museology. The discerning and naming of the category in-between ancient masters (those referred to appropriately as ‘old’) and contemporary or recent (‘new’) artists resulted from the attempts made to systemize and categorize the chronology of art history for the needs of new collector- and connoisseurship in the second half of the 16th and in the 17th century. The old continuum of history of art was disrupted by Giorgio Vasari (Vite, 1550, 1568) who created the category of ‘non-ancient old’, ‘our old masters’, or ‘old-new’ masters (vecchi e non antichi, vecchi maestri nostri, i nostri vecchi, i vecchi moderni). The intuition of this ‘in-between’ the vecchi moderni and maestri moderni can be found in some writers-connoisseurs in the early 17th (e.g. Giulio Mancini). The Vasarian category of the ‘old modern’ is most fully reflected in the compartmentalizing of history conducted by Carel van Mander (Het Schilder-Boeck, 1604), who divided painters into: 1) oude (oude antijcke), ancient, antique, 2) oude modern, namely old modern; 3) modern; very modern, living currently. The oude modern constitute a sequence of artists beginning with the Van Eyck brothers to Marten de Vosa, preceding the era of ‘the famous living Netherlandish painters’. The in-between status of ‘old modern’ was the topic of discourse among the academic circles, formulated by Jean de La Bruyère (1688; the principle of moving the caesura between antiquité and modernité), Charles Perrault (1687–1697: category of le notre siècle preceded by le siècle passé, namely the grand masters of the Renaissance), and Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi writing from the position of an academic studioso for connoisseurs and collectors (Abecedario pittorico, 1704, 1719, 1733, 1753; the antichimoderni category as distinct from the i viventi). Together with Christian von Mechel (1781, 1783) the new understanding of ‘old modernity’ enters the scholarly domain of museology and the devising of displays in royal and ducal galleries opened to the public, undergoing the division into national categories (schools) and chronological ones in history of art becoming more a science (hence the alte niederländische/deutsche Meister or Schule). While planning and describing painterly schools at the Vienna Belvedere Gallery, the learned historian and expert creates a tripartite division of history, already without any reference to antiquity, and with a meaningful shift in eras: Alte, Neuere, and lebende Meister, namely ‘Old Masters’ (14th–16th/17th c.), ‘New Masters’ (Late 17th c. and the first half of the 18th c.), and contemporary ‘living artists’. The Alte Meister ceases to define ancient artists, while at the same time the unequivocally intensifying hegemony of antique attitudes in collecting and museology leads almost to an ardent defence of the right to collect only ‘new’ masters, namely those active recently or contemporarily. It is undertaken with fervour by Ludwig Christian von Hagedorn in his correspondence with his brother (1748), reflecting the Enlightenment cult of modernité, crucial for the mental culture of pre-Revolution France, and also having impact on the German region. As much as the new terminology became well rooted in the German-speaking regions (also in terminology applied in auction catalogues in 1719–1800, and obviously in the 19th century for good) and English-speaking ones (where the term ‘Old Masters’ was also used in press in reference to the collections of the National Gallery formed in 1824), in the French circles of the 18th century the traditional division into the ‘old’, namely ancient, and ‘new’, namely modern, was maintained (e.g. Recueil d’Estampes by Pierre Crozat), and in the early 19th century, adopted were the terms used in writings in relation to the Academy Salon (from 1791 located at Louvre’s Salon Carré) which was the venue for alternating displays of old and contemporary art, this justified in view of political and nationalistic legitimization of the oeuvre of the French through the connection with the tradition of the great masters of the past (Charles-Paul Landon, Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain). As for the German-speaking regions, what played a particular role in consolidating the term: alte Meister, was the increasing Enlightenment – Romantic Medievalism as well as the cult of the Germanic past, and with it a revaluation of old-German painting: altdeutsch. The revision of old-German art in Weimar and Dresden, particularly within the Kunstfreunde circles, took place: from the category of barbarism and Gothic ineptitude, to the apology of the Teutonic spirit and true religiousness of the German Middle Ages (partic. Johann Gottlob von Quandt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). In this respect what actually had an impact was the traditional terminology backup formed in the Renaissance Humanist Germanics (ethnogenetic studies in ancient Germanic peoples, their customs, and language), which introduced the understanding of ancient times different from classical-ancient or Biblical-Christian into German historiography, and prepared grounds for the altdeutsche Geschichte and altdeutsche Kunst/Meister concepts. A different source area must have been provided by the Reformation and its iconoclasm, as well as the reaction to it, both on the Catholic, post-Tridentine side, and moderate Lutheran: in the form of paintings, often regarded by the people as ‘holy’ and ‘miraculous’; these were frequently ancient presentations, either Italo-Byzantine icons or works respected for their old age. Their ‘antiquity’ value raised by their defenders as symbols of the precedence of Christian cult at a given place contributed to the development of the concept of ‘ancient’ and ‘old’ painters in the 17th–18th century.

Sacheverell Sitwell’s 1928 German Baroque Art identifies Vienna as the quintessential baroque city, with Germany as a whole perfecting the baroque style and providing Bach, Handel and Mozart with a beautiful and inspirational cultural setting. Sitwell writes at a time when original baroque and rococo documents had come to light in both the British Museum and Vienna’s Hofburg Library, and, like many of his German counterparts, he responded with a reappraisal of the period. My analysis investigates these sources and Sacheverell’s subsequent use of ‘baroque’ as a historical term applied to architecture, art, theatre and dance. I question why and how Vienna was able to supersede equivalent French, Spanish and Italian cities during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, paying particular attention to the achievements of Lukas von Hildebrandt and Fischer von Erlach, the two architects responsible for the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna, the Schönborn, Prince Eugene’s Winter Palace and the Belvedere. My account does not focus exclusively on the city’s palaces and state buildings but acknowledges the importance of theatre in its own right, and as an influence on interior design and architecture. Alongside so much splendour and refinement baroque Vienna developed its own particular aesthetic of cruelty, with the Jew in particular suffering under the absolute regimes of the German princes and electors after the Thirty Years War.