We met up with a friend/colleague of Dr.O’s who was to be our tour guide of the museum. Once we were all assembled outside of the doors, we went in. The building, like most museums and places of importance in Vienna, is massive and ornate. By now I have been in Vienna long enough to not be absolutely taken aback by how grandiose the interior was, but it was still quite an impressive building.
Our tour guide, unfortunately, was not as adept as I/we would have hoped. It was very hard to understand her quiet voice and what information we did receive was nothing that we could not have found out by reading the little placards next to each painting. She was very nice and a pleasant lady, but it was very hard to keep my attention focused on the things that she was talking about. Because of this, a fair amount of us decided to go and look at the paintings by ourselves. I have never spent time in an art history museum before, as I was never interested in art as much as I was interested in guns and battles of the past. However, because I had been learning about the artistic and historical contexts behind each painting it was much more interesting to see the actual visual representations of the things that we had been learning about.
The most poignant example of this was the comparison between the paintings of Catholic artists and Protestant artists. According to both the class lecture and the reading in Parsons, the Counter-Reformation heavily employed the Baroque artistic style in order to inspire religious fervor in those who gazed upon it. In the Kunsthistoisches Museum I saw that not only did this mean the construction of grandiose building but also the production of lavish paintings which depict scenes of angles, demons, and the general triumph of God. Specific to this point are the paintings of Rubens, who was a luminary artist of the Catholic Church. The painting of his that I was most captivated by was St. Ignatius of Loyola, which depicts people in the throughs of demonic possession along side the glorious saint.
It is very indicative of Catholic artistic propaganda that was aimed to invoke a deeper sense of religiosity in the Counter-Reformation period. In addition, and what I personally find more interesting, is how this painting sheds light on the mind-frame of mental illness at the time period. Our professor explained to us (as this is her current field of research) that the Church at the time saw mental illness as a form of possession by satanic forces. In today’s society we recognize that mental illness is not a form of possession but an affliction just like any other medical issue (well, at least most of us do). Two other paintings of his also exemplify the Catholic mentality: “Lamentations of Christ by the Virgin Marry and John” painted in 1614 depicts Jesus in a state of pain so real that the viewer cannot help but almost feel the same pain and thus gain reverence for the sufferings of Jesus. “The Miracle of St. Francis Xavier” painted in 1617 depicts the Saint calling in the forces of Heave to cure the sinners below him. This image is meant to evoke emotions of self-reflection with the intent of repenting. Rubens’ paintings propagated the idea of ‘mystical realism,’ which suggests that Saints in paintings must have visions so that those viewing the piece will desire one as well. This again proves how Catholic artists during the Counter-Reformation period tried to ignite a religious/Catholic passion among the people.
The same is not true of painters in the Protestant camp. In class we learned that a key theological difference between these two religious groups was/is that Protestants reject the idea of objects and practices outside of the Scripture having spiritual meaning whereas the Catholic dogma incorporates many religiously significant customs into the faith (see Day 4). Indicative of the absence of grandiose religious symbolism are the paintings of Rembrandt. The dominant themes in his paintings focused on portraits, landscapes, and stories. He has many self-portraits in the Kunsthistoisches Museum, my favorite being the portrait in which he looks older and shows the weight of his burdens (he outlived two of his sons and was buried in an unmarked grave in Westerkerk).
Whereas the art of Rubens was focused on the supernatural, Rembrandt’s art focused on things of this Earth. This became clear when we saw that the paintings of his that were in the museum were very simple, for example his “Portrait of a Woman” and “Portrait of a Man” both painted in 1632. They were literally portraits of a man and of a woman, with no message of higher beings. This disconnect highlights many of the differences between Catholics and Protestants in their view of how to allot their focus; Catholics obviously want everything to glorify God whereas Protestants prefer to keep the spiritual realm to only scripture. To me, seeing actual history in the paintings and reading into the contexts under which each one was executed made the whole experience much better than the other ones that I had in art museums. Not only is it more interesting to be able to understand how and why painters created what they did, but it is more fun to be able to fill in the lines between art and history. Perhaps next time I travel to a city, I will read up on some of the art history and visit the museums that house the great (and not so great) artists of all time periods
Today's blog was brought to you by the German word 'beantwarten,' which means 'to answer'
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