Page - 395 - in Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums - Europäische Museumskultur um 1800, Volume 2

395 Meijers From an International Perspective Nonetheless this sort of faith in progress and patriotism was also present in imperial circ- les. One can see it in Joseph II for instance, and in the man appointed by him in 1779 to rearrange the Gemäldegalerie, Christian von Mechel from Switzerland.38 In this light Mechel’s German section on the second floor, which has so often been a subject of de- bate, suddenly takes on the traits of a Nationalmuseum before the term existed. Possibly this may explain why this aspect of his German nationalist redesign enjoyed little appre- ciation in Viennese court circles. As Kugler put it: “[…] the great, public imperial collec- tions didn’t amount to a Nationalmuseum. They established an identity with the dynasty and not with the people or the nation.”39 In the Hapsburg state with its variety of peoples, which was dominated by the German-speaking sector of the population, a German Nati- onalmuseum would have been inappropriate. Enquiry into a syndrome 2: from Berlin to Vienna It must be admitted however that there are cases elsewhere in the Europe of around 1855 of painting galleries being incorporated into a museum with a broader composition. But these were situations that dated from the eighteenth century and which still prevailed, like for instance the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Uffizi in Florence, or the Museo Borbonico in Naples where antiquities of all sorts belonged to their stocks.40 The typical feature of Vienna on the other hand was that what was involved here was not the survival of, but rather a reversion to an embedding of the painting gallery. Something similar was also true of the architectural lo cation. There definitely were some museums elsewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century that were directly linked to power centres; there too however it was a matter of a relation that had originated at an earlier stage and which was still maintained, as in the case of the Vatican.41 The situation in Vienna was quite different because there it was deliberately planned and repeated over again. Fig. 10 View of Friedrich August Stüler’s (New) Museum, connected to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s (Old) Museum. Coloured engraving after Albert Henry Payne, c. 1855