In the Flesh

I have been teaching art history and art appreciation for almost 20 years and still get a thrill whenever I get to see works of art "in the flesh." I'm in Vienna and visited two of this city's amazing museums that face each other with a statue of Maria Theresa in the center of the plaza. The Naturhistorisches Museum and Kunsthistorisches Museum were designed by the same architects and opened in 1889. The collections house art collected over generations of Habsburg monarchs and later art plundered by the Nazis but that is another story that I'll talk about later in this trip.

Maria Theresa was the only female monarch of the Habsburg Empire and the mother of Marie Antoinette to give you an idea of how complicated the machinations of the Habsburgs was.

Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna)

Maria Theresa set against the Naturhistorisches Museum (Vienna)

Interior Kunsthistorisches Museum. On either side of the center arch you can see paintings by Gustav Klimt

How about several rooms filled with Rubens paintings?

Or a Roman statue in a niche with its shadow?

1st century Roman busts. Notice the body in the background with a head not attached. You could substitute whoever happened to be ruling at the time without having to carve a new statue.

Gustav Klimt's "Nude Veritas" (1899) in the Greek and Roman section. Why is it included here? It's almost a manifesto, a nude woman holding a mirror towards the viewer. Neither beautiful or idealized (as the other sculptures in the gallery are) asks the viewer how do we look at beauty and nudity today more than a century after Klimt?

And the most exciting of all the works to see "in the flesh" was the Woman of Willendorf (still titled Venus in the gallery). She looks so pristine, it's hard to imagine that she is 29,000 years old.