6/2 Sunday
It’s our last day in Vienna. We need
to see St. Stephan’s Cathedral. We walk to the city center, even though it’s
another drizzly day again. The Cathedral is really beautiful. It’s being cleaned,
and there’s scaffolding all around. The interior is given an impressive
lighting treatment, with color panels along the high church windows, projected
lights throwing color and shadows onto the pillars and arches in the Cathedral,
with its elaborate altars and great central altar. We opt for a tour of the
catacombs. We go underneath the church floor, with a pretty big crowd, where we
see the copper coffins of the Hapsburg royalty, urns containing the intestines
of bishops who were mummified – the other body parts were shared among some
other church properties – and the storage room for broken statuary and
gargoyles. Another damp passage leads to rooms full of bone piles and bone
stacks, some from the last breakout of the plague in the 1700’s. There are
bones for about 11,000 people interred here.
Well, after all that, we need some
latte. We find another classic Viennese coffeehouse, Diglas, and get a little
marble-top table at a window. Lattes, banana bead pudding and Diglas torte.
Over the bar, there’s a tv showing the pastry masters at work. Pastry Porn, as
it were.
We grab the metro and get to the Art
History Museum, The Kunsthistorisches Museum, with two hours before closing for
our visit. The museum is huge, of course, but we’ll have time to see quite a
lot, including the interior of the museum itself, which is incredibly ornate,
fully encrusted in marble, gilt, statues, ceiling murals, majestic stairways,
everything your basic national treasure requires.
We make our first stop in the Greek
and Roman Antiquities area. The collection offers a recreation of classical
statues in their polychromatic glory, based on recent intensive research into
the particles of paint and patterns found on what we have been accustomed to
seeing as austere, perfectly white classical forms. The colors are bright and
jarring, and very interesting. There is also an outstanding collection of
Grecian pottery and jewelry.
Next, we visit the Flemish, Dutch,
German wing, 14th-18th century masters, rooms full of
Bruegel, Van Dyke, Rubens, Durer. Astounding stuff. We have time for a quick
pass through part of the Spanish, French, Italian wing, just some of the
Italian, as it happens, but we manage to see Tintoretto, Titian, Raphael, and
Caravaggio. Arcimboldo, meh. I’m so sad to miss the Velasquez, but I suppose
that’s just a reason to come back some day.
We head to the Museum Quarter for a
stop at the café at mumok, Halles, where we spend a cozy hour working on our
journals, then have a nice pork-free dinner.
2 Videos Included
Vienna National Gallery, Part 1
Vienna National Gallery, Part 2
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