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back. April 2019
On my several trips to Vienna while I worked in Duhok, I stayed at the Ibis hotel close to the main train station. On the first trip I realized that a slight detour through the Belvedere Palace grounds would deliver me downtown - avoiding walking through city streets while enjoying the glory of a Hapsburg palace garden. The Belvedere Palace Garden became one of my favorite walks in the city.
On my first visit to the city plagued by rain, I ended up doing a lot of museum visits and one of them happened to be the nearby Belvedere Palace. The museum has the largest collection of Klimt (including the Kiss) in the world. As with most palace-museums, part of my attention was on the artwork and part was on the building. The Habsburgs knew how to build palaces. Beyond the Kiss, much of the collection has become lost in my memory fog of one week of museum viewing, but I did like the Belvedere collection and its relatively uncrowded galleries. The iconic painting of Napoleon on a rearing horse (Napoleon Crossing the Alps - Jacques-Louis David) also has a prominent position in the museum. I ended up buying a poster of that work for my shared office with RM back at American University of Kurdistan. R put it up behind his desk (he and Napoleon shared the same birthday - serendipity or what?).
The building was completed in 1723. The Sala Terrena, however, was at risk of collapsing due to structural problems, and in the winter of 1732–33 Hildebrandt was forced to install a vaulted ceiling supported by four Atlas pillars, giving the room its current appearance.
(Wikipedia)
One of the most striking parts of the palace itself was indeed those massive decorative pillars. I think not knowing they were functional probably improved my visit. After-the-fact engineering always tended to make me nervous - like the big iron bands that wrapped around tall brick towers in Italy. Accidents waiting to happen....
The gardens I loved had a strange theme of nymphs forcibly holding each other down with the pinned nymph then spewing water from its mouth - vaguely disturbing imagery to be sure. "Let's hold him down till he spits out water". I found it unsettling - a detail that most people never noticed since the sculptures casually appeared to be cherubic beings frolicking. Then there were the female sphinxes, bare breasted with exceedingly obvious nipples... who had made that place? Nevertheless, the gentle slope leading down to the Soviet War Memorial and onto Lothringerstraße made for a more pleasant entry into the center of Vienna than the busy streets that connected downtown with the main train station.
Schloss Belvedere and its gardens became a familiar friend (just like the Wien Hauptbahnhof). Something must be said about familiarity in an oft-visited place that gives some comfort. A coffee in the main train station, a charcuterie plate with beer at Mel's Diner, and a stroll through the Belvedere Palace Gardens - just those three things could make any day just a little more enjoyable for me in Vienna.
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