HIST 229: Spectacles of Power in Europe, 1550-1700 (HC): Habsburg Court (Austria)

Hassler focuses on the roles that the nobility played at the Habsburg court in Vienna. He draws on archives to analyze the functions of the chambellans de service and the wider networks established by the nobility.

This book introduces a nearly lost music culture: the Vienna court of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-37). During the Thirty Years War, Vienna was home to one of the largest, most resplendent musical organizations in Europe, making it an important hub for the assimilation of modern Italianate music in the German-speaking lands. Saunders looks at the music in its cultural context, showing how sacred music at this pivotal center was shaped by the composers, institutions, and ideas of the period, and he examines the life and works of the most important court composers, particularly the two imperial chapel masters Giovanni Priuli and Giovanni Valentini.

Between 1740 and 1780, Empress Maria Theresa governed the Habsburg Empire, a multilingual conglomeration of states centered on Austria. Although recent historical scholarship has addressed Maria Theresa's legacy, she remains entirely absent from art history despite her notable role in shaping eighteenth-century European diplomatic, artistic, and cultural developments. In Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art, Michael Yonan explores the role that material culture-paintings, architecture, porcelain, garden sculpture, and decorative objects-played in forming the monarchical identity of this historically prominent woman ruler. Through an examination of Maria Theresa's patronage, Michael Yonan demonstrates how women, art, and power interrelated in an unusual historical situation in which power was legitimated in women's terms.

This is the first study of the musical activities of Empress Marie Therese, one of the most important patrons in the Vienna of Haydn and Beethoven. Building on extensive archival research, including many documents published here for the first time, John A. Rice describes Marie Therese's activities as commissioner, collector, and performer of music, and explores the rich and diverse musical culture that she fostered at court.

This beautiful book tells the fascinating story of the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled most of central Europe, Spain, Belgium, and parts of Italy for nearly 600 years, from the 15th through the 20th century. The Habsburgs were acclaimed collectors and generous patrons of the arts. Franz Joseph I (1830-1916), the penultimate emperor of the dynasty, created the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to house the artistic treasures of the empire. Today, this museum possesses one of the most renowned collections in the world of Western art. An extraordinarily wide-ranging survey of the Habsburgs' collections, this volume features classical Greek and Roman works, medieval arms and armor, tapestries, early modern painting and craftwork, ceremonial gilded carriages, and opulent costumes.

Vienna's Kunstkammer (Art Room) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum showcases the Habsburg dynasty's exceptional collection of art and wonders. Here is a trove of sculptures and bronzes by such giants as Donatello and Giambologna, the world's greatest collection of Baroque carved-ivory figures, and glorious Baroque silver goblets and vessels, as well as magically endowed natural wonders, such as ostrich eggs mounted in jewels, gold, and silver gilt. With text by the museum's director and the curator of the Kunstkammer alongside specially commissioned photography, this book celebrates a marvelous collection.

This book brings vividly to life the courtiers and servants of the imperial court in Vienna and the royal court at Paris-Versailles. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material masterfully set in a comparative context, the book makes a unique contribution to the field of court studies. Staff, numbers, costs and hierarchies; daily routines and ceremonies; court favourites and the nature of rulership; the integrative and centripetal forces of the central courtly establishment: all are seen in a long-term, comparative perspective that highlights both the similarities and the distinctiveness of developments in France and the Habsburg lands.

This case study of the causes of the Thirty Years' War suggests an alternative framework to that of Absolutism, and views state-building as an interactive bargaining process that can engender challenges to political authority. It shows how selective court patronage changed the cultural habits of nobles in education, manners, and tastes, but failed to transform religious identities, which were intimately tied to noble interests. Instead, the confessionalization of patronage deepened divisions within the elite, providing multiple incentives for the formation of an anti-Habsburg alliance among Protestants in 1620.

A detailed look at the ambition and artistic legacy of Emperor Maximilian I and his passion for armor and chivalry Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) crafted a public persona and personal mythology that earned him the romantic sobriquet the "Last Knight" and that perpetuates his legend to this day. In his lifelong quest to establish himself as Europe's noblest ruler, he commissioned art, epics, and lineages, as well as exceptional armor from the most celebrated armorers in Europe. Published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of his death, this book discusses the ramifications of Maximilian's wide-ranging political aspirations and artistic legacy and is the first to concentrate on the importance of armor and concepts of chivalry in the construction of his identity.    Maximilian established the prominence of the Habsburgs through advantageous alliances, expanding their dominions across Europe and into the New World. He commissioned grandiose projects, some of which rank among the most ambitious in European history. But more than this, he created a profile for the ruler--a combination of idealism and vainglory--that not only helped shape the identity of the growing German nation but also has resonances in the current political climate worldwide. This superb volume provides a rare picture of how art, armor, and the cult of personality helped shape the politics of Europe at the dawn of the Renaissance.

The Sinews of Habsburg Power explores the domestic foundations of the immense growth of central European Habsburg power from the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years' War to the end of the Napoleonic wars. With a force that grew irregularly in size from around 25,000 soldiers to as many as half a million in the War of the Sixth Coalition, the Habsburg monarchy participated in shifting international constellations of rivalry from western Europe to the Near East and in some two dozen, partly overlapping armed conflicts.