Page - 209 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

“i then asked myself: what ist the ‘wiener schule’” 209 when his audience had gathered and the rather small classroom was brimful, he asked one visitor after the other, whether he knew Latin and Greek. After having the answers he stated: those who don’t know Latin and Greek are asked to leave the room. The society ladies left; but here remained still more than he liked and another difficulty was to be arranged in order to diminish the number. He tried to work with those students only who were willing to contribute something themselves and not to listen only. The last screening took place: it was torture. We had to read and translate and comment on the Liber Pontificialis7 chapter after chapter. Those who did not miss the scheduled hour, did not fall asleep but kept game were al- lowed to enter the inner circle and occupy a desk in the “Kunsthistorische Institut”. (I don’t know when the “Kunsthistorische Institut” was installed above the “Institut für österreichische Geschichtsforschung”,8 but at the time when I studied it still had kept its former character of a servants quarter: slits of windows, no ventila- tion, large iron stoves which we mostly served ourselves. It consisted of a hall and three rooms. Wickhoff had his room at the end of the hall; his assistant Mr. Dvořák had his on the left side, immediately where you entered the hall. Open shelves with books along the wall. A nightmare: which book should I take down and read? A nightmare which lasted almost a year long. I cannot remember how many we were who had been admitted to the inner circle; perhaps half a dozen only. All of us had the same back- ground: the Gymnasium (high school) with its “Matura” at the end. In 1901 when I finished high school the “Mädchengymnasium” was still a private school and therefore we girls had had to pass the “Matura” at one of the public boy schools. We had to pass examination in all fields which we ever had studied. A “pre-exam” in March included logic, psychology, religion and all the parts of natural history. I would like to tell here about a detail because I think it typical of my approach to all the problems I ever tackled in my life. I was shown the skeleton of a bird and asked to describe its essential parts. Instead of starting with the wings I drew the attention to a certain bone on which Goethe had commented. The written examination trough five days in May included a German composition, a German- Latin and a Latin-German translation, a Greek- German one and a Math test. We had studied for five years and this is quite a good foundation. No modern languages were taught. History ended with the Vienna Congress (1815), the following hundred years were too bitter for the Austrian Habsburgs. Our teacher in physics tried to per- form the X-Ray experiment, but it was too new a thing and he had to give up.9 Geography of the Americas appeared in small print only in our textbooks and we were allowed to skip it […].10 Wickhoff was not satisfied with the knowledge acquired in high School; he insisted that his stu- Ebenstein befand sich im Haus Wien 1, Kohlmarkt 5. E. Ebenstein, Der Hofmaler Frans Luycx. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Malerei am österreichischen Hofe, in: Jahrbuch der der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des al- lerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 26, Wien 1907, S. 183–254. Die in diesem Artikel abgebildete Collage wurde von Hans H. Aurenhammer entdeckt und publiziert: URL: http://kunstgeschichte.univie.ac.at/institut/profil-geschichte-des- instituts/archiv/collage-1904/ [01.09.2011], URL: http://kunstgeschichte.univie.ac.at/institut/profil-geschichte-des- instituts/ [01.09.2011] sowie H. H. Aurenhammer, 150 Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Wien (1852–2002): Eine wissenschaftshistorische Chronik, in: Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für vergleichende Kunstforschung in Wien, 54, 2002, S. 1–15. 7 Eine Sammlung päpstlicher Biographien in lateinischer Sprache. 8 Beide Institute bezogen das Universitätsgebäude am Ring unmittelbar nach dessen Errichtung im Jahr 1884. 9 Die Röntgenstrahlen wurden 1895 entdeckt. 10 […] markieren Auslassungen durch Erica Tietze-Conrat im Original.