Seite - 434 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 9434 and Antonio Pozzo were still providing window- and doorframes. Payments in the years following to glaziers, carpenters, plasterers, locksmiths, furniture- makers, stove-makers and so on, suggest that it was being decorated and fin- ished about this time. Unfortunately, as in the Hofburg itself, next to nothing of all this has survived, and the earliest description of its interiors dates only from 1660. This mentions a number of portraits and quantities of stuffed heads and antlers, hunting trophies that filled almost every room—as was fitting for what was essentially a hunting lodge—but says nothing about any fixed decoration.7 The modest size of Kaiserebersdorf, the simplicity of its design, and the ap- parent sobriety of its decoration are remarkable for an Imperial residence that was quite intensively used both for representative purposes and for private recreation. A ferry and later a bridge crossed the arm of the Danube separat- ing it from the Prater and its Lusthaus. Maximilian’s interest in animal life was expressed by his laying out, from 1566 onward, a Fasangarten or pheasant pre- serve, in the river meadows immediately west of Ebersdorf, halfway along the road connecting the castle with this bridge. Both the Prater Lusthaus and this new Fasangarten were favourite excursions for the Emperor, as is clear from his private account book for 1568 and 1569.8 Maximilian’s fondness of nature as exemplified in Tanner’s panegyric on the Prater Lustgarten finally found an expression in his acquisition, in 1569, of another small-scale retreat, the Katterburg [Figs. 9.11–9.12]. This was a mod- est manor house that had been built twenty years earlier for Hermann Bayr, a Bürgermeister of Vienna, as a tenant of Klosterneuburg monastery. Located to the west of Vienna on the banks of the Wien river, next to a ‘schönen Brunnen’, that is a ‘beautiful spring’, it was the nucleus from which, in the seventeenth century, the palace of Schönbrunn would develop. At the time it consisted of two simple rectangular blocks placed at a straight angle, one of which was topped by a clocktower, and a garden entered by means of an ornamental gate. Within easier distance of the Hofburg as either the Prater Lusthaus and Kaiserebersdorf, its modest size made it more convenient for the personal, private recreation of the Emperor and his consort, whose ownership was marked by the beautiful stone bearing a double M under an Imperial crown, for Maximilian ii or, more likely, for Maximilian and Maria, which is still pre- served at Schönbrunn. The same monogram was used in the dedication of 7 Travel diary of Johann Sebastian Müller, reporting visits made in April 1660; quoted in Müller/ Krause 2008, p. 49. 8 The Prater Lusthaus discussed above, Ch. 5.3; on the Fasangarten, see Lietzmann 1987, pp. 59–64; she cites (p. 61 and note 21) the Geheimes Kammerrechnungsbuch of Maximilian ii for 1568–1569 (önb-hs, Cod. 9089).