 |
It was 1898, and the devil himself seemed to dance in Vienna.This is the first line of the first chapter of: The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.
I stopped reading the book to do more research on the painting. As I looked closer at what I found online, I realized that the d
"designs" on Adele Bloch-Bauer's dress (the Woman in Gold) looked like some Egyptian heiroglyphic eyes.
Here is more, just from the first two pages:
For hundreds of years, the great Habsburg dynasty had reigned over this crossroad of East and West. Behind immense battlements, its frilly court united German, Italian, Polish Czech, Hungarian, and Croatian aristocracies into a single royal house whose multicultural capital was as ornate as a Faberge egg.
[...]
Now Vieanna's ancient ramparts had come tumbling down, and a wave of newcomers was crowding in from Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, and Transylvania.
[...]
This new Vienna was a city of contradictions. It was one of Europe's richest cities, yet its immigrants were among the poorest. The construction of opulent new palaces did little to hide a severe housing shortage. Vienna doctors were creating modern medicine - pioneering surgeries; discovering germs, the polio virus, and blood types - yet incurable syphilis spread unchecked. Sigmund Freud was illuminating hidden drives of sex and aggression at a time of xenophobia and anti-Semitism so crude that some believed Jews murdered children to leaven their matzoh with blood.
[...]
The dynasty that had united Europe and the Americas had become the empire's premier dysfunctional family.
[...]
...wrote the appalled director of the Burghtheater. "The devil is loose here...in one single night, the Viennese went with him."
[...]
Yet even in this "Gay Apocalypse" Vienna maintained a deeply old-fashioned charm, with its snow-covered palaces and strolling parks, its aromatic cafes and seductive pastry carts piled with petit fours and chocolate bonbons filled with sweet liqueur. Possessed of a childlike love of adornment, Vienna was a city where gilded iron roses climbed balconies and stone goddesses framed doorways; where gargoyles glared from cornices and Herculean men bared their immense chests from facades.
[...]
In 1989, Vienna was a place where illusions could still be preserved by well-to-do families like the Bauers, who gathered at their elegant apartment above the Ringstrasse on a March afternoon, when the musky sweetness of lilacs filled the damp air.
Adele Bauer was standing before the family in a white Grecian robe, revealing a slender frame as long and delicate as a vase. Her thick hair fell to her waist. At sixteen, Adele was crossing that mysterious line between girl and woman. Dressed as the spirit of Spring, she held a wicker cornucopia filled with Spring blossoms and sheaves. with her poise and regal bearing and her dark, heavily lidded eyes, Adele might have been an actress, like Katharina Schratt, who ruled a few steps down the Ringstrasse, at the Burgtheater.
CONT>>>>