Review: Lavish display in High’s ‘Habsburg Splendor’ rich in context

Bottom line: A stunning, smartly curated and organized exhibition filled with beautiful artworks and objects.

"Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces From Vienna's Imperial Collections" at the High Museum of Art is a fabulous, fascinating display of the premium stuff accumulated by Europe's 1 percent.

“Habsburg” has it all: a king’s ransom in gold and silver; endless swaths of velvet fashioned into gowns and upholstery; gleaming suits of armor; exotic drinking cups carved from rhinoceros horn; sex and grotesque violence rendered in oil; magnificent horse-drawn carriages; lascivious satyrs and centaurs and outrageous plumed headdresses that would do a Vegas showgirl proud.

Pile sumptuous on top of lavish and you have some sense of the sheer excess of this display, which speaks to the off-the-chain opulence of this legendary royal house that ruled the Holy Roman Empire from the Middle Ages until their World War I decline.

This traveling survey of some of the remarkable objects collected by the Vienna-based and exceedingly powerful Habsburg clan features 93 objects, each one more sumptuous or beautiful than the last. Outrageous embellishment and lavish displays of wealth marked this royal dynasty, and two rooms alone are devoted to the exquisite oil paintings — many never before seen stateside — by Correggio, Titian, Arcimboldo, Caravaggio, Rubens and Velazquez, which connoisseur of the arts, Archduke Leopold William, brought into the family collection. Among them is a breathtaking, photorealistic Holbein portrait of Jane Seymour that glows with an almost sentient light, as if enchanted by the presence of the artist.

Though the history of oil painting tends to be skewed toward female nudes, the male form gets some attention in this show, too. The Guardian critic Jonathan Jones rightly called Giovanni Battista Moroni’s portraits of men “erotically charged,” and that certainly holds true for his startlingly poetic “The Sculptor Alessandro Vittoria” featuring a soulful artist in barista beard cradling an impressive sculpture of a male torso.

But there are also functional objects in “Habsburg” that make one appreciate the degree of pageantry and decadence that defined this royal house, from court uniforms embellished with mink and gilt thread to a full-size gold sleigh like something out of a fairy tale, used in the royal family’s ceremonial winter promenades. The emphasis on male costume, from armor to swords, to ecclesiastical garb and court dress reveals a peacock-strutting vanity, and a Habsburgian obsession with rank expressed in ceremonial garb.

All of the works in "Habsburg Splendor" hail from Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, a repository created by Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph to house the dynasty's incredible collection of artwork, a consolidation that helped establish Vienna, into the present day, as one of the great art capitals of the world.

The exhibition is curated by Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, director of the Imperial Carriage Museum, Vienna, who has done a remarkable job of synthesizing an enormous collection into this selection of objects that provide a window into the Habsburgs, while also looking at history with a refreshingly shrewd eye.

Much like today, great wealth itself was seen as validation of one’s fitness to rule, and as curator Kurzel-Runtscheiner notes, the acquisition of master works by Europe’s greatest artists only solidified that sense of manifest destiny, “exploiting art to glorify and secure their rule.”

There has been a tendency with some High Museum masterpiece spectaculars, to assume that merely showing these works to the public is gift enough. “Habsburg” goes the extra mile, striving to educate and enlighten with smart and careful dissections of the meaning and context in which these objects were acquired and displayed.

There are subtle indications that the curators are not simply trotting this work out as a stroll down masterpiece alley, but striving to give context and insight. To that end, there is a frank acknowledgment of what all that gorgeous naked female flesh meant for monarchs: a secret erotic stash to be shared with other gentlemen of means in private chambers. There are fascinating detours into codes and customs and narratives of the day, like the adoption of a monocle viewing lens on royal firearms after Emperor Karl VI accidentally shot his companion, in a very Dick Cheney moment, while aiming at a stag.

Curator Kurzel-Runtscheiner has done an admirable job of enlarging our understanding of how these paintings were used to not only convey the wealth and power of their owners, but to affirm lessons of self-control, to confirm moral righteousness on their owners, to arouse and to self-promote.

Because in addition to exercising the buying power of a monarchy in accumulating unforgettable artwork and objects, the Habsburgs understood the power of branding, this show asserts, and used artwork to prop up the family name.