Page - 385 - in Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums - Europäische Museumskultur um 1800, Volume 2

Debora J. Meijers The Kaiserlich Königliche Gemäldegalerie in Vienna seen from an International Perspective 1780 – 1855 – 1891: ITS ARCHITECTURAL SETTING AND MUSEOLOGICAL EMBEDDING* When viewed from an international perspective, the history of the Gemäldegalerie of the Hapsburg dynasty since the late eighteenth century displays a number of exceptional characteristics. (Fig. 2) From being extremely progressive in 1780, the gallery gradually lost its exemplary status after 1815 – at least in terms of its location and its museological situation – as compared with galleries in places like Berlin, Dresden, Munich, and London. A turn in the gallery’s fortune took place after 1858 with the planning and construction of the Ringstrasse.1 It is true that it made up for lost ground in terms of modernization, but the result – the new museum building designed by Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer – ensured that it reverted once more to being something of an anomaly in the European museum landscape of the second half of the nineteenth century. (Fig. 3) This was the case in at least two respects. In the first place, while elsewhere the gen- eral trend was towards greater specialization, the Viennese painting gallery was made part of a complex of two museums, which together continued to embrace the entire spectrum of art history and natural history departments. Secondly, whereas in the rest of Europe the newly built museums had gained independence from the traditional seat of power, name- ly the palace, the Viennese museums had their constituent parts moulded by the urban planners into a single unit with the Hofburg, known as the ‘Kaiserforum’. In this paper I should like to examine from an international perspective2 the extent to which the K. K. Gemäldegalerie remained an exception to the rule, and what factors could have played a role in this. In doing so I don’t intend to enter the gallery, but rather to make a tour around it to investigate its siting. Let us take as our reference point the year 1855 and see if the characteristics of the gallery in that period already tell us something about the new Hofmuseum designed and built between 1867 and 1891 in terms of the encyclo- pedic character of the collection in which the painting gallery was embedded,3 and of the dynastic character of its location, the Kaiserforum. A British traveller in 1855 A hypothetical art expert – an Englishman, for the sake of argument (Fig. 4) – undertaking a tour of Europe in 1855 would have visited Berlin, Dresden and Munich, towns where, since 1825, five new royal museums had sprung up. He would deliberately have chosen to travel by train,4 and to go in September of that year, because two of the museums would just have opened their doors to the public: in Berlin, Friedrich August Stüler’s Neu- es Museum (built, 1841–55/59, as a complement to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Königliches Museum of 1822–30, henceforth referred to as the Altes Museum); and in Dresden, Gott- fried Semper’s Neues Königliches Museum (1847–55). Fig. 1 Julius Victor Berger, Habsburg emperors as patrons of the arts, Detail: Maximilian I with Dürer. Vienna, KHM, ceiling painting of room XIX, 1891 385