Friday, October 4, 2013

Travelling Hopefully

Vienna doesn't just have palaces and churches, my word no.  Vienna is a fully rounded city, it also has museums.  Actually it has museums and flaktowers but more on that later.

I dropped in on the Museum of Fantastic Art (at least I think that's what Phantasten Museum means) largely because it was situated between Stephansdom and the Hofburg and I was on my way from one to the other. The museum charts the course of the Viennese school of fantastic realism from its inception in 1946 (where if you believe the museum they were instrumental in returning civilisation to the war torn European lands) up to the present day.  In so far as I can tell (which isn't very far) fantastic realism developed from surrealism with an emphasis on "old masters" style clarity of depiction with a surrealistic approach to subject materials and interpretations.

I'm not sure if I understood a single word of the previous paragraph after the first sentence.  In my defence I cribbed most of it from wikipedia and a handout provided by the museum.  Anybody with more knowledge on the subject (ie anyone at all) feel free to correct me.  All that I can really say is I rather enjoyed it.  From now on if anyone asks me what my favourite style of art is I'm going to say fantastic realism.  I hope it's a real thing.

After the Fantastic Art museum I visited the Austrian Army museum.  In actual fact I visited this museum a few days later but I'm trying to build a narrative flow.  The Austrian army museum is situated, appropriately enough, on Arsenal Strasse in a huge domed building I thought was a church.  The ceilings decorated with paintings depicting famous Austrian victories (there were some), famous Austrian defeats are less in evidence.

The Austrian army really started towards the end of the Thirty Years War.  Albrecht von Wallenstein had raised an army at his own expense for emperor Ferdinand II.  At the end of the war (and after Wallenstein had been conveniently murdered) the emperor (by this stage one of Ferdinand's successors) decided to retain some of the regiments Wallenstein raised on a permanent basis and pay for them himself.

There are weapons, armour and uniforms from all stages of the army's history.  They also have regimental standards captured from Frederick the Great's Prussia and Napoleon's France (as well as a quiet acknowledgement that not all these wars necessarily turned out the way Austria might have preferred). There is quite a bit on the wars with Turkey although not as much as I expected.

The three great military heroes of the empire; Prince Eugene of Savoy (who joined the imperial service in a fit of pique after being rejected by Louis XIV), Archduke Charles (a local boy and a Habsburg to boot.  He is famous for defeating Napoleon; once) and Field Marshal Radetzky (who got a march named after him) are all well represented of course with paintings, busts, medals and other whatnots.  A blizzard of lesser military luminaries in Habsburg service are also there.  The army as a unifying force in the state is also a theme given heavy attention in the last decades of the old empire.

For an English speaker the museum is a little confusing as there aren't many English captions on the displays and the audioguide is a little substandard but it was interesting nonetheless.  I particularly liked their motto; "Because wars belong in museums".

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