Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (29 page)

These coins were collected avidly by many of the Habsburgs and they must have created a powerful sense of private communication with their ancestors, and have been an enjoyable pastime. To spend an idle morning messing about with small drawers of medals commissioned by your predecessors and handed on to you must have been both a form of extraordinary intimate connoisseurship and a history lesson, one seen through the prism of how well or badly your own reign was going. With each of the Habsburgs, one of the great comforts must have been the degree to which even if things were hitting some fresh nadir there was always a precedent – gazing at the seemingly commanding profiles of Rudolf II and Matthias – for things being worse.

Museums are obliged to denature and make dreary the impulse which led to an object’s original creation. Serried rows of coins are like Panini football stickers in a more ponderous form. But as objects to be handled they tell an extraordinary story, from the most over-the-top gold monster to a clipped, almost featureless little square of rough metal used as emergency currency in the Siege of Vienna.

Coins were for obvious reasons a famous form of intimate Imperial collecting, but the Emperors would have been surrounded by a mass of fine objects, prints, miniatures, table-settings and so on, all needing to be both the best in Europe but also up-to-date and reflecting the latest taste. Again, this is an area that is so difficult to access. We cannot know the gusts of fashion-panic on news that some other court has been showing off an elaborate new silver-and-coral banqueting centrepiece just in from Florence, or the word on the street that there is a new portraitist who makes everyone else look positively medieval. Some Emperors clearly just delegated such things to courtiers or relatives who understood them and contented themselves with praying, hunting and procreating, but the cusp between public display and private taste was always a curious one. Rudolf II by any measure was the most extreme example of an Emperor who used his public role for his private pleasure. His dodo was both his own obsession and a means by which he could show his realm’s grandeur by securing a creature all the way from the Indian Ocean for his own chilly palace (its much diminished remains are now in the Strahov Monastery in Prague). Much of his collection was clearly and greedily (if not crazily) for himself. The thousands of objects heaped in room after room at some point must run out of control and become an external clue to a brain also run out of control, but before it went wrong – and perhaps even towards the end in specific, quiet spaces – Rudolf must surely have taken huge pleasure in what he had. So a cassowary or a lump of fossilized wood was both something for the Emperor to rub his hands over and a more public indicator of power (even if only at the level of hearing dismal squawks from the cassowary enclosure).

Rudolf’s very broad collecting mania made him one of the first Europeans to be genuinely European, with interests that extended from Italian gem-makers to Dutch painters. In a sense his own mind was the first continent-wide museum. His obsession with Dürer, a very old-fashioned part of an extinct tradition, led him, after endless and costly negotiations, to buy the extraordinary
Feast of the Rosary
, a painting commissioned for the altar of the German traders’ church in Venice. The Dürer, following Rudolf’s direct instructions, had to be carried by four extremely strong men from Venice to Prague over the Brenner Pass, ensuring that the picture remained upright and was not rested on the snow. How wonderful it would be if we knew what they talked about on their strange journey.

Rudolf must have taken an active, private delight in this picture. Could the highlight of his reign have been the opportunity over many days simply to sit in front of it? In the following centuries, this dream-like picture suffered many vicissitudes and was much battered. Appropriately it has now come to rest in the National Gallery in Prague. And there, still, in the painting that Rudolf spent so much time with, is the Emperor Maximilian I kneeling before the Virgin, who has put a crown of roses on his head, surrounded by a crowd of now anonymous German grandees and soldiers and with Dürer standing in the background (looking as usual just like Rick Wakeman – how did people understand Dürer’s strange hair and beard in the centuries before
prog rock?).

As with Rudolf himself, it is very hard to write about this intimate world without wallowing for paragraph after paragraph in what he enjoyed, so I will not even mention the
Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta
– a collection of miraculous pages of calligraphy by Ferdinand I’s Imperial secretary which Rudolf commissioned Joris Hoefnagel to decorate with paintings of tiny creatures, fruit and flowers. These were of such vividness and beauty that it makes everything else seem a bit grey – a definitive blackberry, slug, peach or blossom, but each painted in a format only accessible to the individual holding that small sheet (i.e., the Emperor), an utterly private and surely unbeatable pastime. It is perhaps one of the most startling aspects of the Internet that for the first time it is possible to regain some of that same sense of intimate, hop-from-branch-to-branch joy that had previously been available only to a black-eye-bagged reclusive in Prague Castle.

Perhaps the other major and mysterious aspect of private artistic pleasure was music. There was a whole world of public music – fanfares, marches, mass settings, associated with the different Imperial and archducal offices – and these were regularly updated, with the result that earlier generations of music tended to just moulder in cupboards. Since the 1970s musicologists have dug out much of the surviving material so that it can be heard again. It is a shame that the almost apostolic succession of musical greatness is so relentlessly established, as there are so many wonders that fell out of circulation for the simplest reasons of function and fashion. For the Habsburgs a crucial event was when in the 1590s the young future Ferdinand II at his court in Graz began to collect together the Italian musicians and singers (many Venetian) who would do for the Counter-Reformation in sound what Ferdinand planned architects should do in white stucco and gold paint. He took them with him to Vienna when he became Emperor in 1619 and – in the usual non-paradox – there is no link that can be made between the horrors of his reign and the excellence of its soundtrack.

The tradition continued down through the reigns of Ferdinand III, Leopold I and Joseph I. Figures such as Giovanni Friuli, Antonio Bertali and Massimiliano Neri (a favourite of Ferdinand III, who ennobled him) should be familiar to everyone – varied, grand, poignant, more than capable of coming up to the awkward challenge of the sort of all-engulfing blow-out needed for a coronation. I mention them here because alongside their official duties they also provided all kinds of small-scale and occasional music just for the immediate family circle. All these Emperors seem to have been very musically alert and these private forms of music-making must have been for Rudolf’s successors the aural equivalent of buying a cassowary.

This enthusiasm was so great that – in a move that would baffle, say, most of the British royal family – the Emperors themselves became composers, perhaps as intimate a form of deeply interior enjoyment as handling medals or sheets of calligraphy. Even more surprising, much of what they wrote is extremely good, if rather hard to listen to objectively. Ferdinand III’s hymn ‘Jesus, sower of human salvation’ is a floating, elegant thing of beauty
²
and Joseph I’s ‘Queen of Heaven’ would win any devotional Marian cantata competition even if the piece’s author had his name blanked out. There is a problem with knowing how much of this excellence stems from toadying by people like Bertali helping out with the actual notes. There is also a problem with so much seventeenth-century music working within such tight, Sudoku-like compositional rules that perhaps anyone could have a go and come up with a nice result. But even so, for Emperors who could have just filled their time slurping from ostrich-egg goblets or killing herons, it is striking that their leisure should have been filled with the infinitely unfolding, almost alchemical world of instruments and annotation.

Leopold I was undoubtedly the most obsessive and talented musician and in the pluses and minuses of his reign it is possible to balance his fleeing the Siege of Vienna by throwing into the scales his sacred music and
Sonata piena
for brass and strings. He was perhaps unique too in being able to write a requiem for his first wife, Margarita Teresa, after her early death – an appropriate final flourish, in memory of someone who in her short lifetime provoked much remarkable art.

So alongside the public life of the Emperor there was a private or at least intimate one, one which has in many ways survived very effectively. We ought to care about the wearying progress of the Long War, but Rudolf now conjures up for us a far more intense interest in the manias which were meant to be a mere subset or by-product of his main task in life. We can be shaky about the details of the interminable struggles between Leopold I with the French, while valuing far more his role in nurturing the rich musical life in Vienna, with astonishing consequences in the century after his death.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jesus vs. Neptune
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The first will
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Devotional interiors
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The second will
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Zips and Piasts

Jesus vs. Neptune

Leopold’s greatest obsession was probably with the music of the Tuscan monk Antonio Cesti, whose brilliance as a singer, instrumentalist and composer made him bounce back and forth between the sacred and profane during his short but travel-packed life. He worked at the court of the unpleasant Ferdinand Karl in Innsbruck, but on the latter’s totally unlamented death moved to Vienna and produced a series of grand operas in the 1660s for the young Leopold, most famously
The Golden Apple
for Margarita Teresa’s seventeenth birthday (a special present from ‘uncle’), to which Leopold himself contributed several genuinely beautiful arias. This opera must have been something to see, so scenically unwieldy that it took two days to put on, but with spectacles of flames, thunderclaps, flying dragons and shipwrecks of a dangerousness and scale that we are sadly sheltered from today. Cesti’s peculiar status, a Franciscan monk writing operas about the ancient gods, is a good example of an important but very baffling aspect of court life across Europe, certainly from the fifteenth century and in many ways not really expiring fully until the nineteenth century. How was it possible to square a triumphant, militant and no-nonsense Holy Trinity with all these palaces being cluttered up with people like Jupiter? The soprano allegorical figure who warbles the prologue to Cesti’s interminable opera
The Disgraces of Love
is aware of this problem and makes clear that Faith has ‘crushed beneath her feet’ the false gods of ancient paganism. She then makes way for wave after wave of static dialogue between Cupid, Venus, Vulcan and their friends of a kind that must have made members of the original audience privately pray for the evening to be brought to a halt by an Ottoman invasion.

Everywhere in the Habsburg lands the classical gods and their helpers have almost as secure a presence as their modern, jealous and notionally monotheistic replacement, God. They writhe in fountains, hold up doorways, festoon ceilings. As someone who grew up with the simple and exciting tales of Greek and Roman heroes it became a chief pleasure for me to see how town after town, from Trentino to Transylvania, had its own suite of classical decorations. More often than not there would be a central market square featuring a little, pallid and agonized Jesus glaring from his cross at a colossal fountain of imported white stone filled with a lolling, hirsute and heavy-loined Neptune romping with a selection of nude water-nymphs (various Habsburg rivers embracing the ocean, apparently).

One argument for the coexistence of the two religions is that the earlier is mere decoration – it is there to provide the sort of sexual or royal panorama missing from the New Testament. The inspiration of Rome was central to Charlemagne’s insistence that Europe was its true inheritor and the ancient gods were in practice religiously neutral. This has to an important extent to be true: nobody at all was actually worshipping Jupiter and his friends. It was no threat to the Church that the secular and religious ruling classes were so steeped in the classical world and read and recited Latin so broadly that its gods and heroes were as vivid as the mass itself.

I had been despairing of getting my great seventeenth-century hero, the painter Claude Lorrain, into this book as his long career of painting matchless landscapes filled with classical (and occasional Christian) figures was carried out with no involvement from the Habsburgs. But much to my happiness it turns out he made a series of prints to celebrate the lavish festivities in Rome which marked Ferdinand III’s election as King of the Romans at the end of 1636, so I can just wedge him in. Ferdinand was crowned with little time to spare, as his father, Ferdinand II, died only a few weeks later, allowing him to progress easily to the role of Emperor. In the interim the Spanish ambassador decided to put on an extraordinarily lavish celebratory display in Rome, where Claude lived (and whose key patrons for his classical scenes were in the papal bureaucracy). This was at the high point of Austrian–Spanish friendship, in the wake of young Ferdinand and his Spanish cousin Ferdinand
¹
destroying the Protestant army at Nördlingen (the scene immortalized by Rubens) with its aftermath offering a chimerical chance that the Thirty Years War might be at an end. As the war was fought in the name of Catholicism, Rome was a place where Ferdinand’s succession would be importantly celebrated and the Spanish ambassador was the man to do this. He arranged a series of completely boggling displays (of a kind which would be familiar in the next generation to the audience for Cesti’s operas) and commissioned Claude to create his equally masterful prints to celebrate his own cleverness. The objects assembled in the principal squares of Rome could not have been more explicit about the link between the classical world and the present. In the area now dominated by the Spanish Steps there was a twelve-metre-high statue of Neptune with sea monsters and a Habsburg eagle, floating on an artificial sea filled with artificial fish. Nearby was a smaller but bulkier square castle with a Habsburg eagle on top and allegories of the four continents at its corners. In what must have been a ridiculously enjoyable scene, once it got dark the whole lot blew up in a massive sequence of fireworks, the square tower first exploding to reveal a smaller round tower underneath, and then the round tower itself exploding to reveal a statue of Ferdinand on horseback, which then trundled across the square and into the Spanish ambassador’s palace thanks to (frustratingly imprecise)
occulte macchine
, ‘secret machines’. This last scene must have been happily redolent of the immortal
Horror Hotel
ghost-train ride on Brighton Pier.