Travels & Tales: The Blog – Page 6

July 29, 2018July 30, 2018

Vienna: Salt and Pepper

The Saliera, the only work of art undoubtedly attributed to the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini

In 1544, the Florentine artist Benvenuto Cellini sculptured an intricate little salt table, saliera in Italian, which, for different reasons, went on to become one of Vienna’s most famous works of art. The Saliera is insured for the breathtaking sum of 60 million Euros. And good that it is…

Created for Charles I of France, the Saliera is a virtuoso piece in the then fashionable style of Mannerism. While in Renaissance art natural beauty, symmetry and balance were enhanced, Mannerism exaggerated these qualities to an extent that artworks appeared asymmetric, artificial. Mannerism addressed intellect rather than emotion – complex and sophisticated, with style and technique outweighing beauty and – meaning. A characteristic that some might find quite suitable to Viennese etiquette and manners…

Made of ivory, gold and enamel, the Saliera depicts a man and a woman: an allegory to the Sea and the Earth. A small vessel next to the man holds salt, a temple-shaped box next to the female figure pepper. On its base it even has a set of roles, for convenience at dinner parties and banquets – or for pure appreciation.

Charles son, Charles II, gave the Saliera to the Habsburgers as a present to Ferdinand II of Tyrol, when the former married Elisabeth of Austria. The Habsburg emporers and archdukes were avid collectors of exotic and uncommon materials, like precious stones, ostrich eggs, shark teeth and their likes – many of which were believed to hold magic powers – and were turned into works of art by chosen artists.

The Vanitas Group – An Allegory of Transcience is another famous oeuvre at display at the Kunstkammer. Sculptured in Medival Ages by (most likely) Michel Erhart, it contrasts the chaste beauty of Youth with the frivolity of age. The world was in the tight grip of catholic chastity back then…

The Kunstkammern – arts and natural wonders rooms – were collections that attempted to represent the erudition of their time. When the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna was completed in the 19th century, the Saliera was transferred to Vienna, and has been at public display, well protected, since the Museum was opened in 1891. The Kunstkammer at KHM, Vienna, is still considered the most important of its kind in the world.

The Saliera sat idly among other spectacular, delicate or bizarre statuettes, clocks or automatons – until 15th years ago, on May 11th 2003, when during a renovation the museum covered by a scaffolding, the salt dish was stolen. No alarms went off, the Saliera was simply gone.

The KHM – Kunsthistorisches Musem – Museum of Fine Arts, Vienna – after renovation and without scaffolding.

The museum offered a reward of one million Euros for its recovery. Without success. It was in January 2006 only that the Saliera was discovered, buried in a forest 90km North of Vienna. The thief – one by occasion rather than training – had turned himself in. He had been caught by surveillance cameras and recognized by his friends.

Ever since then, the Saliera is the most popular piece of art in Vienna.

The Saliera advertised on Banners in Vienna.

June 8, 2018July 30, 2018

Rome: A Woman’s Place Is In The Kitchen

For over thousand years, from around 700 BC to 400AD, the Vestal Virgins tended to the eternal flame in the Forum Romanum. The Vestal Virgins were emancipated women, meaning, they did not belong to a man – a father or husband – like their female contemporaries, but were devoted to the Goddess of Hearth, Vesta, who unlike other deities of their time, was not represented by statues, but by fire.

remains of the Vestal temple at the Forum Romanum

The Vestal Virgins enjoyed most of the honors and privileges of Roman citizens, and were allowed to handle their own property. Yet – this came at a price: Chosen at a very young age from Patrician families, the girls had to take a vow of chastity for thirty years. They were to live like nuns in the house of Vestales, which was basically a kitchen with adjacent living quarters, next to the Vestal temple, where the fire was burning.

Besides tending to the fire, an important and responsible task in a densely populated city, their duties were most importantly the preparation of the mola salsa, the holy cakes used for state sacrifices, and the holding of the Vestalia Festival around the Summer solstice each year. During these festivities their home quarters were opened to other women for visits. As priestesses of Vesta, the Vestal Virgins were also considered guardians of luck and could intervene on behalf of those in trouble.

Everything in Rome, it seems, depended on the everlasting burning flame, and the Vestales’ virginity. Their purity promised to create a magic bond for the community. As long as their virginity remained intact – Rome would remain safe.

Punishment was brutal and merciless, should a Virgin fail in her duties. If the fire went out – which meant that the Vestal was impure and the health and safety of the Romans therefore under threat – the Virgin was whipped to death. If the virgin committed the worst of all crimes, lose her virginity, she was to be buried alive. She then was led to an underground chamber at the Campus Sceleratus, where a bed, food and even a lamp was provided. After she entered, the entrance was locked and covered with dirt. It was a clearly defined ritual. Control and administration of these punishments fell to the one man who had initially chosen them for the job: the Pontifex Maximus. If a Virgin finished the 30 years alive, she was free to do as she pleases. Only a few married.

The most famous Vestal to have broken the vow of chastity, was Rhea Silvia, mother of Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city of Rome. It is believed that Rhea Silvia was raped by an unknown man, but after discovering her unwanted pregnancy, she claimed immaculate conception and named Mars, the God of warfare, as the father. For fear of Mars’ wrath, Rhea Silvia was spared death, but the twin babies were to die – not by sword, but by the elements. Let fate decide! They were abandoned. The rest is history.

May 20, 2018July 30, 2018

Austria: Family Business

What a frenzy in the air! With flying colors, the gregarious bee-eaters have returned from their Southern African winter domiciles and are busy setting up shop in Austria. Using their beaks for digging and legs for kicking, they carve tunnels of up to two meter length in the soft sandstone near lake Neusiedl.

A bee-eater leaving home for the hunt. The bigger holes are bird’s nesting chambers, the smaller ones bees’. What neighborhood…

Bee-eaters are fast flyers. Spotting their insect prey from a distance of up to 60m they shoot like bullets through the air for the kill. Bees might be their preferred diet, but bee-eaters will do with any flying insect. They will however never eat from the floor. They have manners after all. They are social creatures.

The divorce rate among bee-eaters is low. Once a bee-eater found their mate, they will most likely stay together for years to come. Traditionally courtship ends with the presentation of a gift – not surprisingly a bee, or even a dragonfly – and then the bride leaves her family to move in with her in-laws. This is when all the trouble begins.

Prey is presented as a gift – or robbed- some individuals speialize in kleptoparasitism.

In-laws rarely have an interest in grandchildren. Rather, they want to have more children themselves and – since hunting is so demanding a business – they are in need of baby sitters, not grandkids. The in-laws will harass the newly weds and keep them from procreating mainly by blocking them access to their nesting chamber. To keep the peace, the young couple often obeys, delaying their own egg-laying for a few years.

The bride however, will feel short-changed. She left her own family for the groom after all. So she comes up with a scheme: She sneaks in with a completely different family, trespassing territory lines, and demands intercourse with a male. Upon return, she secretly lays her own eggs into her mother-in-law’s nesting chamber. She’s not scrupulous – without a flinch she will discard of already laid eggs. Yet, she must time her actions well – if her off-spring hatches too early or too late, they are doomed as well. The mother in law will know no mercy. Family – can’t choose them.

March 23, 2018March 23, 2018

Namibia: Two Leaves, Cannot Die

In 1859, the Austrian physician and passionate botanic Friedrich Welwitsch travelled to the then Portuguese colony Angola, where he came across a large, marvelous plant he had never seen before. He was amazed.

“I could do nothing but kneel down and gaze at it, half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination,” he wrote to Joseph Dalton Hooker of the Botanic Garden in Kew, England, in a letter accompanying a specimen. Hooker, upon seeing the plant, said the following:

“It is undoubtedly the most wonderful plant ever brought to this country, and one of the ugliest.”

And, since he was in a position to name things, he named it after its discoverer: Welwetschia Mirabilis.

For all we know, the Welwetschia itself could not care less about any names. Before Hooker, the locals called it n’tumbo, just “stump”. The Hereros in neighboring Namibia called it onyanga, “the desert onion”, then baked and ate it. So Weletschia Mirabilis is not the worst of all names. In Afrikaans the plant is called Tweeblaarkanniedood, which is the least inspired but most descriptive name of all: Two leaves, cannot die. For a Welwetschia really grows only two leaves, and lives up to 2000 years. From a human point of view, it is practically immortal.

Welwetschias were around 65 million years ago already. They survived ice age. They outlived fires and pests, they watched insects come and go, and viruses, parasites, animals, humans, roads and wars. If you ever come across a Welwetschia, honor the moment. You are looking into eternity.

A male Welwetschia somewhere in Damaraland, Namibia

Other than the rare specimen sent to England, the Welwetschia is endemic to Angola and Namibia, to most arid land. Welwetschias make ends meet with as little water as possible by sprouting deep taproots into the sand below. They grow slowly, with both leaves pushing out like dark green tentacles up to four meters long, their ends curled up and frizzled out. Like human hair, uncut and uncombed. Indeed, the Welwetschia Mirabilis is not a beauty. It is, however, a tree. Its very short trunk also likes to split into several lobes, which makes the Welwetschia look like flotsam, a giant starfish stranded on the beach. Only the beach is not a beach, but the dry Namib desert.

Like humans, Welwetschias are dioecious, with separate male and female plants. Fertilization is up to insects, flies and bugs. But the real specialist in Welwetschia Sex Life is the Odontopus sexpunctatus. Nomen es omen, you might think, but the bug was really named for the six dots on its back. (Not by Hooker, though).

Dandago, a Damara, showed me his homeland.

Dandago led me through his native land, Damaraland in North Western Namibia. The Damara people has lived in the Namib desert for thousands of years, long before the Hereros, the Portuguese, or the Germans came. They call the Welwetschia Nyanka. But don’t even try to say that loud. The language of the Damaras knows four different click sounds – unpronounceable for anyone not born a Damara – twisting the tongue like Welwetschia leaves.

Damaraland is of captivating beauty. A vast, ragged land, where wild animals like elephants, giraffes, rhinos and zebras still roam freely. It hasn’t rained in four years, however, and the animals, and the Damaras themselves face hard living conditions. The Welwetschias will live on. For unlike us humans, they cannot die.

January 26, 2018January 26, 2018

Vienna: Remembering The Lost

On January 27^th, Vienna commemorates the Holocaust Memorial Day. 72 years ago, on January 27 1945, the Red Army liberated the concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest Nazi concentration camp.

More than six million Jews were killed in the holocaust, plus an estimated number of 200,000 Roma and Sinti, 250,000 mentally or physically disabled people, and 9,000 homosexual men. To never forget the tragedy, the United Nations declared January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

80 years ago, in 1938, Austria was annexed to the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler famously welcomed by the masses in the streets of Vienna. In the following seven years, more than 65,000 Austrian Jews lost their lives and the Jewish community was extinguished.

Judenplatz, the Jewish Square, in the center of Vienna, is now a sleepy, little square. Once it was the center of the Jewish community, Instead of a synagogue, a holocaust memorial stands on Judenplatz today, to remind the passers-by of the Jewish lives that vanished in the third Reich. The concrete cube, designed by the British artist Rachel Whiteread, resembles a library, but the books are turned inside out. They are inaccessible, unreadable, a symbol of the many biographies, the untold, unheard stories, that were irreversibly lost in the holocaust.

The statue of Ephraim Lessing stands opposite the holocaust memorial at Judenplatz. Lessing wrote the novel “Nathan, The Wise”, a plea for religious tolerance, in 1779.

It was WWII that ended the abhorrent Third Reich, a war that came at a high toll for the city of Vienna and its inhabitants. Thousands of civilians lost their lives in the cruel fights over the city. It was also the Red Army that liberated Vienna from the Nazis.

Today, Vienna is again capital city of the Austrian Republic, but still high bunkers are scattered all over Vienna. These towers, unique to the cities Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna, and equipped with canons to fight hostile bomber planes, were built by the Nazis in a last and futile attempt to withstand the allied bombardments.

As the sun sets, Joggers pass by a high bunker from WWII in Vienna’s Augarten.

This year however, the commemoration day is over shadowed by the recent inauguration of Austria’s new government, a right-wing neo-liberal coalition, which – following an international trend – fails to distance itself from fascist thinking. Are the tragic events of 20^th century already forgotten in Austria?

This high-bunker was turned into a Zoo and Museum. There are no canons on its rood any more. “Smashed to pieces in the Still of the Night” it reads instead – a reminder of dark times in the Third Reich.

Two weeks ago, on January 13, the streets filled again. Despite the bitter cold winter weather, an estimated number of 70,000 people, peacefully demonstrated the Austrian new government’s program of economic aggravation and xenophobia, reminding many of the bitter days of the Third Reich. But instead of bombs, it rained hearts. For a day, Vienna was filled with love – and hope that history will not repeat itself.

December 21, 2017December 21, 2017

Rome: The Best Of Days

The Forum Romanum. The Saturn Temple at the base of the Capitol Hill

When days were shortest and darkest, the Roman poet Catulla found them the best of days. For a week in the end of December, the law courts closed in Rome, and the schools. No business could be transacted and to commence a war was regarded impious. People offered little presents, mostly wax figurines, to the children and the poor, and decorated their homes with greeneries and lights.

The streets of Rome were governed by a general spirit of merriness. Public gambling was allowed, and foolish tricks were played. People dressed in loose, colorful gowns instead of their white togas, and wore cone shaped hats. All of them! Slaves, freedmen, citizens suddenly were indistinguishable. “Io, Saturnalia!” The crowds exclaimed.

From December 17 to 24, the Saturnalia, the festivities to honor the God Saturn, were held in ancient Rome. Saturn had reigned the worlds in the Golden Age, when humans still enjoyed the earth’s bounty without having to work for it. Therefore Saturn was considered the God of agriculture and the Saturnalia were celebrated as a kind of harvest-home; by December the hard work in the fields was completed and people brought evergreens and lights into their homes.

Citizens, freedmen, slaves were indistinguishable for the week of the Saturnalia.

That the Saturnalia were held at the time of the winter solstice was not a coincidence: Sol Invictus, the invincible sun, was returning to enlighten humankind again. The migratory aspect of the sun’s trajectory and the seasons was reflected in much older myths that had Saturn down as an immigrant from Greece. As can be learned from the writings of Ovid and Virgil, Saturn was dispelled by his own father, Jupiter, an expulsion that ended the Golden Age and left humans waiting for Saturn’s return.

Until then, the Saturnalia brought a short comic relief. Social roles were reversed. In fact, slaves were not only exempted from their chores and toils, but were served by their masters, granted freedom for a week.

The Colosseum in Rome, where gladiators fought for their lives – as a sacrifice to Saturn. Wealth, Ops, only followed Lua, destruction.

While the Romans considered Saturn a liberator who brought with him wealth and peace, they also recognized his ambiguity. He was two-faced. Saturn’s wife, Ops, incorporated abundance and resources – but he also had a first wife, Lua, the goddess of destruction. It was for her that in the beginning of times, human sacrifice was offered during the Saturnalia, in form of dead gladiators. It took a hero, a shining light, to come along and end this inhuman rite, it is told. This savior was, of course, Hercules.

Hercules, the savior, through the eyes of a Pope (bronze statue at Vatican Museum.)

October 28, 2017October 29, 2017

Rome On Ecstasy

This month 500 years ago, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther published his 95 theses and thereby started the Protestant Reformation. He called for purification of the church, who in the run of the centuries had turned into a self-serving system of greed, nepotism and decadence. Christians should have faith in God and the Bible alone, Luther declared, and not in the army of angels and Saints, nor “immaculate” Mother Mary and least of all the Pope.

An angel fighting off vice – or killing a Protestant. Interior Chiesa San Luigi Dei Francesi, Rome

The Catholic Church stroke back: in arms (the bloodthirsty Thirty Year War broke loose) and arts. In a meticulously planned propaganda campaign (conspired at the Council of Trent 1543-63) they called for artists to flock to the eternal city and create buildings, paintings and sculptures that were so formidable and awe-inspiring they’d resurrect faith in Angels and Saints and Mother Mary, and most of all the Pope. But above all, they should instill fear of hell and punishment into an illiterate people. And so Baroque was born. Mesmerizing to this day.

Ceiling Fresco inside Villa Borghese, built around 1600 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an admirer, collector and protector of Caravaggio

The world’s biggest church was built, St. Peter’s Basilica, in honor of the first Pope. Michelango was bullied into adorning the ceiling with formidable depictions of God’s grandezza. Michelangelo grumbled – he was a sculptor, not a painter, after all – but gave in.

Caravaggio self portrait as decapitated Goliath. ( David and Goliath Vienna KHM)

By the end of the 16th century, the Church found another Michelangelo, whose realistic and detailed depictions of beheadings and other pains very much satisfied their need for intimidation. On the downside, the guy was unpredictable and prone to outbursts of violence. Worse, he was a murderer. His name was Michelangelo Merisi, but he went by the name of Caravaggio.

St. John the Baptist hugs a ram. Caravaggio 1602, at Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome

Caravaggio first rose to fame through extremely realistic depictions of delicious fruit baskets and boys. The Cardinals, whose predilection for youth was well known and documented (The insider account Il puttanismo Romano was published anonymously) went crazy for both the painter and his canvases. Caravaggio himself, however, was also leaning towards women. While he complied with the church’s demand to glorify Mother Mary, he did so by using full-busted, sensual courtesans as models, and not thin pale nuns. It was a problem with him – women in the Catholic Church of course had to be chaste. Raped, if anything, but not lascivious. Finally, they had him paint old men as dying Saints, paintings they could display in their chapels. The martyrs of St. Mathew and St. Peter were immediate block busters: The contrasts of light and dark, the depth of field, the intensity, the drama were breathtaking, and still are, 400 years later.

A busted Mother Mary steps on a snake – the model was a well known courtesan, the painting, despite commissioned by the Vatican, was finally not accepted.

The council of Trent had outlawed any worldly pleasure. Dances and carnivals were forbidden, books banned and priests were asked to spy on their parishioners. (Easy, they had to confess anyway.)

Art became a surrogate for bodily desires and should channel them into spirituality. Saints and martyrs were shown in the moment of rapture, in the throngs of ecstasy. Ex Stasis meant the experience of being taken outside of oneself, to where one catches a preview of heaven, the moment when one is united with the beloved, with God. A little Death, as it was later called. Or: orgasm.

The church enlisted architects to turn the city into the shape of a star and sculptors Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini and Pietro da Cortona to beautify it with sculptures, fountains and staricases.

Pope Innocent X commissioned Bernini, whose sculptures were ummatched in expression and elegance, to design the famous Fountain of the four Rivers at Piazza Navona. The four rivers represented Rome also a colonial world power. Innocent X himself went down in history for his greediness – and for his even greedier sister-in-law and lover Pimpaccia. Pimpaccia was said to pull the strings behind Innocent. Their residence, Palazzo Doria Pamhilj, by coincidence at the Piazza Navona, is a vestige of their insatiable greed.

Detail of Fountain 4 Fiumini at Piazza Navona, Rome

The fountain was of course constructed on public expense – during the great famine of 1646-48 – and not surprisingly it was not met with much enthusiasm by the starving people. Riots lay in the air. Under cover of the night, protesters stuck posters on the stone blocks, so called Pasquinades:
“We do not want obelisks and fountains. It is bread that we want. Bread, Bread, Bread!”
In a spirit of Christian compassion, Pope Innocent X had the protesters spied out and arrested.
The fountain was built, but Pope Innocent X met a terrible end. While he lay on his death bed in Palazzo Dori Pamphilj, Pimpaccia robbed all his money and fled the city. His agony lasted three days, three days of ecstasy for Innocent X, 200 years for Rome. Then, the era of Baroque was over.

Splendor and Passion: Bernini’s sculptures attract tourists from around the world. At Galleria Borghese

October 10, 2017

Rome: Watching the Sky

In ancient Rome, augury was the major kind of divination. This included watching the sky, thunder and lightning, but most importantly the auspices, watching the birds. Eagles and vultures were Jupiter’s most important messengers.

Nothing was decided without consulting an augur, a priest who could interpret the flight, the song and dance of birds. Most notoriously, Romulus and Remus settled their dispute on where to found the city of Rome by an augury. Romulus, of course, had the better auspices. He spotted more vultures than his brother Remus, which also granted the former the right to fratricide.

The she-wolf that raised Remus and Romulus against a purple, thunderous Roman sky on the Capitoline Hill, where Romulus founded Rome.

The auspices was restricted to certain species, which are hard to come across in the busy city nowadays. Like in any other coastal city, giant gulls and pigeons seem to outnumber the rest of Rome’s avian population.

A giant gull over-looking his city from the Palletino, the power center of ancient Rome.

Since the Roman Empire extended over a vast part of Northern Africa, tropical birds were imported as sought-after pets. Emperor Nero famously owned an African Gray parrot, Pontius Pilatus’ wife, Claudia, kept lovebirds in a cage, who looked not unlike the Monaco Parakeet.

A Parrocco Monaco sneaking from behind a tree in the beautiful Borghese gardens.

Today’s most flamboyant Roman bird, the gregarious Monaco Parakeet, only arrived in Rome in the early 1970ies. The striking, green parrots have since seamlessly integrated into Italian lifestyle, not causing any harm to local Wildlife, according to the Italian Wildlife Fund. These bright flying jewels color the ancient buildings, which, when built, where not as marble-white, but painted in manifold colors.

Pigeons at the Tiber at sunset, Ponte Vittorio Emanuele in the back.

September 21, 2017September 21, 2017

Vienna: The Caged Birds Fly

Opened in 1752, the zoo of Vienna is the oldest in the world. Mary Theresa of Austria had the zoo installed into the baroque gardens of her imperial summer residence of Schönbrunn, back then still in the outskirts of Vienna. Until 1778 only members of the royal family could wander among the cages to marvel at the elephants, giraffes, camels, bears, wolfs and exotic birds.

Today one of Vienna’s major tourist attractions, Schönbrunn with its zoological, botanical and baroque gardens as well as a lavishly decorated golden interior, was styled after Versaille in Paris. Mary Theresa sought the alliance of the Bourbon Empire to fortify her empire against her archfiend Frederick II of Prussia. On her court, French was spoken. To eternally strengthen the relationship between Austria and France, she further sent her youngest daughter, Maria Antonia, to marry the future king Louis XVI – against the teenager’s wish. However, the French empire did not last as long as the Austro Hungarian monarchy. As Queen Marie Antoinette, Maria Antonia was beheaded during the French Revolution of 1791.

At Schönbrunn castle, six year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played for Mary Theresa. Little Mozart did not have to go to school as other children his age had to: As citizen of the independent state of Salzburg and therefore no Austrian, obligatory schooling did not apply to him.

Mary Theresa, despite her well-groomed image as the warm-hearted mother to the peoples of her multinational empire, was an absolute and strict ruler, and it was only her successor, her son Joseph II, who talked her into a slightly more liberal thinking and therefore reforms, such as opening the zoo to the public. In fact, the citizens of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy might have seen life in catholic, narrow-minded Austria comparable to living in the cages of the zoo. Definitely her own children did.

An ardent catholic – the Roman Catholic Church is still state church in Austria – she believed her power to be god given. Mary Theresa controlled her own children the way she controlled her subjects: with an iron fist. She introduced compulsory schooling for all children between six and twelve. Other faiths than the Roman Catholic were not tolerated in her empire: Jews as well as Christians of protestant faith were dispelled from the country – as long as they did not weigh in when it came to financing her wars against Frederick II. Wars she kept loosing.

Today, 300 years after Mary Theresa, the Zoo attracts two million visitors per year. In its more than 250 years of existence, it has gone a long way from its first exhibitions in baroque cages and adorned follies. Waldrapps, or hermit ibis, a central European bird species that went extinct in the 18th century, was bred anew at Schönbrunn Zoo. A complex re-introduction program which involved glider planes taught the birds, born in captivity, to fly long distance and find their migratory routs to Tuscanny, Italy, where their free ancestors spent their winters. The population of these striking birds is still small – they are among the rarest birds worldwide. Yet they are alive and free again – ironically thanks to Mary Theresa’s Zoo.

Every body is beautiful. A Waldrapp at the zoo, soon to be released.

September 8, 2017September 10, 2017

Vienna: Tu Felix Austria, Nube

When her husband died, Mary Theresa had her bedroom wallpapered in grey silk. She had her jewelry given to her court ladies, dressed in black and wore a black veil for the rest of her life. Often she was found sitting at her late husband’s sarcophagus in Vienna’s capuchin crypt. After her own death, sixteen years later, a piece of paper was found in her prayer book, on which she had noted the duration of her marriage:

29 years, 6 months, 6 days, equals years 29, months 335, weeks 1540, days 10,781, hours 258,744.

Mary Theresa, sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Galicia and Lodomeria, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma had been lucky to marry the man she loved.

To her father, Emperor Charles VI, she had been a disappointment. He had wished for a son, a heir to the throne. And while he had her raised to become a lady of the court – Mary Theresa was excluded from education and contemporary erudition, but trained in painting, dancing and the French language, he still did everything to ensure she and the husband he would chose for her would follow on his throne. He chose Francis Stephen of Lorraine, by pure coincidence the man Therese loved.

At the age of 23, after her father’s sudden death from poisoned mushrooms in 1780, Mary Theresa stepped up, literally.

Detail of the Vienna Burgtheater, the most important german speaking theater. It was built under Mary Theresa.

By the time of her coronation, she had been married for four years, pregnant and mother to three. The empire she inherited was run down and bankrupt, the army non-existent. On top, a female reign was considered a liability by the adversary powers. The empire was attacked right away. Yet, Mary Theresa proved herself an astute leader. She charmed other nations into supporting her.

While she negotiated successfully to have her husband crowned Holy Roman Emperor – due to her gender Mary could not be crowned Empress herself – she did not grant Francis I, as he was now called, a say in leading the Empire. On the contrary, Mary Theresa led the country as a matrone, a mother figure. Soon the country prospered under her leadership and Mary Theresa honed her image of a generous, warm mother, who loved her people as much as she loved her own off-spring. She had sixteen children. The fourth was a boy, the later Emperor Joseph II.

Bella Gerant Alii, Tu Felix Austria Nube. – Let others wage wars, thou, happy Austria, marry.

While Mary Theresa did not dispose of a powerful army, she used her 16 children to set up agreements and deals. She wedded them off all over the continent to ensure coalitions, territorial gains or military support. Her children’s feelings or love interests were of no concern to her.

Mary Theresa was an ardent catholic. She believed her power God given, and her life style reflected a puritan and strict view of the world. Yet when it came to marrying off her youngest daughter to French King Louis XVI, she even negotiated the deal with the notorious Madame Pompadour, chief mistress on the French court, of whom she did not approved. Mary Theresa believed in absolute conjugal faith. Sadly, her husband, Francis I, did not.

tourists take in the sun by Mary Therese’s statue in front of the museum of art history, where her portrait in black is at display

To the children of the Habsburg Empire Mary Theresa was as strict a mother as to her own children. She introduced compulsory education to all between six and fifteen. Her relationship to her own sons and daughters was as distant as their geographic location: Mary Christina was married to Saxony, Mary Amalia to Parma, Mary Karolina to Naples, Ferdinand Charles Anthony to Modena, Maximilian Francis became bishop of Cologne, and Maria Antonia was beheaded as Mary Antoinette in Paris in 1793. But this Mary Theresa never learned.

She had died in 1780 already, wearing her beloved husband’s housecoat.