With the generous support of the Kimbell Art Foundation, eight graduate seminar students and Kay Fortson Chair in European Art Jeffrey Smith spent a week in Vienna as part of a fall 2018 course on Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As it happens, Bosch enjoyed an elaborate jubilee in 2016, the 500th anniversary of his death, with major exhibitions in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, his hometown, and Madrid (Prado). 2019 also marks the 450th anniversary of the death of Bruegel. The museums in Vienna jumpstarted the celebration with an extensive exhibition of his prints and drawings at the Albertina Museum (2017) and the current show of his paintings, drawings and prints at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The jubilees and resulting activities afforded UT students an excellent opportunity to investigate how these two artists are studied, to consider future avenues for research, and, most importantly, to look at great art.
The first few days of the trip were consumed with orienting to Vienna and visiting several museums, including the Schatzkammer (the imperial relics and regalia as well as items for the Order of the Golden Fleece), the Upper and Lower Belvedere, major churches, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The group visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum three times to explore the exhibition carefully. They met with Sabine Pénot, curator of Netherlandish art and one of the chief authors of the Bruegel show and catalogue. She talked about some of the challenges she faced in securing loans, arranging works so there are dialogues between objects, and her goals for the exhibition. The group also met with Elke Oberthaler, the chief painting conservator of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, who discussed the restorations that she and her team had done on the museum’s twelve Bruegel paintings. As they toured her laboratory, she explained some of technical methods used for investigating Renaissance and Baroque paintings.
The seminar had a special session in the print study room of the Albertina Museum where they examined drawings by Bosch, Bruegel, and two of their contemporaries as well as several prints not in the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s exhibition. Laura Ritter, the curator of Netherlandish art, provided a lively discussion about these works and some of the questions they raise. Christof Metzger, the chief curator, took the seminar group down in the museum’s vault where he showed three of Albrecht Dürer’s most famous watercolors: The Hare, The Large Tuft of Grass, and The Wing of the Blue Roller. He talked about these and explained a bit about the exhibition on Dürer’s drawings that he is preparing for next fall. One afternoon the students met with Professor Dagmar Eichberger of Heidelberg, who is a visiting professor at the Art History Institute of the University of Vienna. She reviewed the exhibition that she co-curated this past summer on the patronage of Margaret of Austria and two other powerful Habsburg women at Schloss Ambras, above Innsbruck. Another afternoon the group visited the Theater Museum where there is a temporary display of some of the paintings, including Bosch’s huge Last Judgment Altarpiece, from the Academy of Fine Arts, whose building is currently being renovated. This was a highly stimulating and intense trip, one which allowed the group to see many of the original works that they have been studying.