Beschreibung
Artworks speak to us. We must only listen, open ourselves to them. Then we can hear what they have to say. Specialists concentrate on styles and epochs, techniques and influences, but one can also look at these works very differently: as inspirations for highly personal observations, meditations and narratives. The Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum developed from the art collections of the House of Habsburg. Today it is one of the largest and most important of its kind in the world. The foundations of the collection were laid and its main emphases set in the 17th century: 16th-century Venetian painting (Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto), 17th-century Flemish painting (Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Anthony Van Dyck), Early Netherlandish painting (Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden) and German Renaissance painting (Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach). Among the other highlights in the Picture Gallery are its holdings of pictures by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which are unique worldwide, as well as masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Raphael, Caravaggio or Velázquez. Writer and historian Philipp Blom and his wife, the writer Veronica Buckley, have set off on numerous journeys of discovery through the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. In eight thematic tours they invite readers to cast a new gaze upon the collection.
Autorenportrait
The writer and historian Philipp Blom took degrees in philosophy, Jewish studies and modern history in Vienna and Oxford. In addition to his landmark books on the early 20th century, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 and Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 (Basic Books, 2008 and 2015), he has also published important works in several other areas, particularly on the French Enlightenment (A Wicked Company, Basic Books, 2010). Veronica Buckley is a writer who studied languages, music and history in her homeland New Zealand and also in London and Oxford. Among her publications are the historical biographies Christina, Queen of Sweden (Harper, 2004) and The Secret Wife of Louis XIV (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). Philipp Blom and Veronica Buckley live in Vienna. Their most recent collaborative book is Twilight of the Romanovs: A Photographic Odyssey Across Imperial Russia (Thames & Hudson, 2013).
