Seite - 394 - in Die kaiserliche Gemäldegalerie in Wien und die Anfänge des öffentlichen Kunstmuseums - Europäische Museumskultur um 1800, Band 2

394 Meijers From an International Perspective seums as pursued in Vienna?30 These questions should be viewed in the context of the pe- culiar constitutional history of Austria, which displays ever more conflict between the cen- tre of power and the ‘periphery’ during this period. Due to its complexity this question is beyond the scope of this article and deserves separate study. I will therefore only touch tentatively on some aspects. Enquiry into a syndrome 1: the Hapsburg Länder As I have shown above, Vienna was slow off the mark in developing museums compared with the German states. From today’s point of view we would expect that the new build- ing works in Vienna would have been fostered by this realization. Especially in the earlier writings about the his tory of the Kunsthistorisches Museum however reference is made not to activities abroad but to the situation in the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy itself. Ac- cording to Alphons Lhotsky, the museums which had already been founded in the first decades of the nineteenth century in most of the parts of the empire formed one of the most important stimuli for the court and the city of Vienna to undertake new internal mu- seum developments.31 One might deduce from this that internal competition weighed more heavily than that from outside. This sounds not improbable, because with these new internal museum developments patriotism played a considerable role, finding its expression for instance in the claims some of the Länder had begun to make on archaeo- logical finds in their own regions, and in the growing tendency among the aristocracy to donate their art or other collections to their native land. This was the Länder’s response to the automatism by which since at least the mid-eighteenth century the most valuable col- lection items were transferred to Vienna.32 Moreover in some instances, these museums, which were built up in an encyclopedic fashion, aspired not only to provide a distinct lo- cal accent but also to collect work of international significance. The aim was to compare one’s own flora, fauna and archaeological finds with those from elsewhere, and the same applied to the arts and objects of antiquity.33 With the arts the national criterion could also lie in the origins of the collector instead of that of the art collected. This for instance was the case with the Viennese Esterházy collection, where Italian, Spanish and Nether- lands masterpieces were sold to Hungary, the collector’s native land.34 Correspondingly in the case of the Tyrolean Stände a dominant factor was the wish to get back the Ambraser Sammlung that had been moved to Vienna, even though this collection did not actually contain any ‘Tirolensia’.35 In brief then, the founding of these museums could have formed a threat to ‘Vienna’, and yet we get the impression that Franz I initially embraced the founding of museums in the Länder, as did the heir to the throne, Ferdinand (Innsbruck) and the archdukes Joseph (Pest) and Johann (Graz).36 Whether that was still the case after 1848 is not certain. It is a known fact that the relations between the central authorities and the Länder were subject to major changes in this period. The museum policies implemented by both parties should not therefore be studied in isolation but in relation to each other and in the context of nineteenth century constitutional developments – something that has regrettably oc- curred all too little up till now. It is doubtful whether the wide scope of these local museums bore any relation to the equally generous composition of the imperial collections in Vienna – for instance, through having roots in a similar tradition. The Nationalmuseen and the Landesmuseen were gener- ally encyclopedic in contents, but their backgrounds were different. They did not origin- ate as the imperial collections did in an older, royal Kunstkammer tradition, but in the eight eenth-century optimism of the Enlightenment and they were often related to socie- ties of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie, who documented, studied and encouraged the countryside, crafts, agriculture, arts and literature of their region.37