The Upper Belvedere

For our Fine Arts class, we went and visited the Belvedere Museum. Just to throw it out there, this is the museum, currently, with the largest Gustav Klimt collection in the world. So, after our German classes, we headed for the stassenbahn.

What a bunch of obedient children. Maybe if we're lucky, we won't end up at the Belvedere, but rather in the middle of a protest...

Well dang, it looks like we made it to the right place. Maybe next time.

This is the front of the Belvedere Palace. It has a huge and magnificent reflecting pond, which is currently frozen. This is what people first saw when approaching the palace. This was the summer residence of the great military strategist Eugene of Savoy. This is the man that finally defeated the pesky Turks who were constantly invading and plundering in Vienna. An interesting thing about this Eugene is that he was a very small man, in fact, he was barely over five feet tall. He was not great of stature and he also had poor health most of his life. This just goes to show that careful, wise and clever planning wins over pure brute strength and force. That sort of reminds me of this.

This is the view from the back of the palace. Belvedere means beautiful view. It looks over all of Vienna. Down below is the Lower Belvedere. This is where Eugene resided. He just had the upper section for guests and parties, which he would normally slip out quite early to get away from everybody. For being such a war genius, he was quite humble and quiet about all of his amazing achievements. Pretty cool.

Now, on to the amazing art exhibit. Unfortunately, they do not allow any pictures inside the palace (Sorry Kristin. This would have been particularly interesting to you). If you want to see the paintings yourself, you're going to have to come all the way to Vienna to do it.

The Klimt paintings were very, very beautiful. His famous The Kiss hangs in this exhibit and it is something to behold. It is actually not as big as I thought it was going to be, but it was still magnificent. The contrast between the actually painting and the gold leaf is surprisingly pleasing to the eye. I have seen plenty of pictures floating around and they simply do not do this painting justice. It has a kind of glow to it especially with the different ways that the light hits the gold and silver. 

Klimt's father was a Goldsmith and his sons started out by taking up the trade of their father. This is part of the reason that Klimt started using gold and silver leaf in his paintings. 

The painting that I was most interested in was actually one of his unfinished works that is titled The Bride. It was amazing to see his creative process in action. Half of the painting is finished, a quarter of it is just sketches and another quarter is in progress. It was really interesting to see that he had actually painted his figures first in the nude and then he would paint over them as if he were dressing them. Now, I have no idea whether he did this for all of his paintings or if this was him trying something new.

During this painting, Klimt suffered a stroke and was rushed to the hospital. Because they were in such a rush to get him to the hospital, his studio was not locked up and this painting was stolen. Before they could find it and get it back, Klimt had died of a brain hemorrhage.