I enjoyed this museum, not just because of this painting though. I liked it because it was not as crazy as everything that we saw yesterday during the holiday. Sometimes with more time in a building and not feeling as rushed, I can actually step back, or sit down, and enjoy the art. I start to pick up more of the details and can then try to see what the artist was trying to express on the canvas. It is weird but it does happen. Also, sometimes in the smaller museums when you have the audioguide you have more time to listen to them in depth and you are not doing “Power Art” and running around like crazy.

So we tried to take full use of our “discount” and ended up seeing three museums today. First was the National Treasury where the jewels of the Hapsburg’s were stored. It was once again a museum where I got to look at precious stones so big that they don’t look real. Then we were off to the Natural History Museum to mainly see the Venus of Willendorf statue which is this little clay thing that is 25,000 years old and supposedly one of the oldest things hand-made things that exists. It was supposedly a model of fertility and sexy-ness. Judging from all her rolls though, God please don’t ever let me get that “sexy”. Also in this museum were a large collections of rocks and minerals, I.e. quartz, malachite, bauxite, etc. There was also the largest collection of taxidermy’d animals and insects that I have ever seen. And we aren’t talking like little things, there were huge giraffes and hippos and lions. It was very creepy. It started to feel like I was Noah inspecting all the creatures. The weird thing though was that even though they were stuffed, they were all in lifelike poses looking at me. They were also behind glass in a “natural” setting, like they are at the zoo. Freaky man! Last on our museum list was the Kunst Historisches Museum with alot of artwork. We were both so exhausted by the other museums tough that it took a coin toss to convince us that we needed to see it. We went fast, but saw a alot of cool artwork, none of which I can clearly recall at the moment. LOL Oh well, Happy Osterreichischer Nationalfeiertag to us!

In all of my art history books from high school to college, the very first picture of art was 25 thousand (yes 25,000) years old, give or take a 1000 years.  Each year I would remember seeing this piece in my school books.  It was a primitive sculpture of a woman called the “Venus of Willendorf”.  Imagine how old that is.   I mean Egypt was not even hitting the good times until 3000 B.C.   That is one old sexy bitch!   The experts are not quite sure what she was for.   Some say that she has no face because of the hair style, while other say she could have been a faceless  fertility symbol.  Having all that fat makes for good babies.   I am sure that it was not easy gaining all that weight while doing the hunting and gathering thing.   No McD’s around.   A healthy child bearing woman may have been a plump woman.   So being voluptuous was dead sexy back then. 

  

 

 The next day we saw one of my favorite artists Gustav Klimt.  His golden works are amazing and I loved his most famous painting “The Kiss”.   It’s golden delicious.  The paint was so beautiful and yummy looking like you could eat it.  Klimt actually painted gold leaf on to the canvas to give it that shiny golden colour.  His use of colorful patters in the flowers, background and especially the robes is exquisite.  Note how the man’s robe is made of more powerful rectangles in comparison to the woman’s softer circular patterns.

That sums up 2 days in Vienna!