Palais Lanckoroński, Riemergasse 8, Vienna - four interiors by Rudolf von Alt, 1881

Morning room.

The painter Rudolf von Alt met Count Karol Lanckoroński in Nuremberg in August 1881. In the autumn of that year, he executed a series of ten interiors of the Count’s apartments. These paintings are sometimes mistaken as being depictions of interiors of the count's better known, now lost, palais at 16-18, in the Landstraße District.. The paintings, however, are of his former residence at Riemergasse 8, in Vienna's Innere Stadt. The watercolor series represent various rooms closely decorated with paintings and sculptures; in some, the Count can be seen sitting in an armchair, reading a book. Von Alt very precisely depicted all the works of art in the various rooms. Many are easily identifiable, including works by Gainsborough, van Ruisdael, and Waldmüller, among many others.

The Count's office.

The library.

Salon.

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The noble Lanckoroński family, aristocrats originally from Galicia, assembled a major private art collection over several generations, a collection which included Italian Renaissance paintings as well as German, French, and Dutch pictures, antique sculptures, bronzes, glass miniatures, and porcelain. Count Karol Lanckoroński continued his family’s interest in the collection. He was a collector, archaeologist, art patron, author, and conservator; he also served as chamberlain to Emperor Franz Joseph. His additions to the collection included antique sculptures, as well as paintings by Tintoretto, Canaletto, and Rembrandt. The art collection in the Lanckoroński palace became one of the largest in Vienna under his stewardship; he had a new neo-Baroque Palais Lanckoroński built between 1894-95, with special attention given to the display of the Lanckoroński collection. After World War I and the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Count returned to Poland and began to move a large part of his collection to the family’s ancestral estate in Galicia. The Count died in 1933 and the Nazis confiscated what remained in the Vienna palace when they annexed Austria in 1938. The remainder of the collection was confiscated the following year after the invasion of Poland. Many pieces were destroyed in World War II, and what survives of the collection has been scattered among various museums and private collections.

(Not knowing its provenance, earlier this year I did a post on one of the most important items from the Lanckoroński collection, Dosso Dossi's Giove pittore de farfalle, Mercurio e la Virtù.)

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Rudolf Ritter von Alt (28 August 1812, Vienna – 12 March 1905, Vienna), Austrian landscape and architectural painter. (Born as Rudolf Alt, he was able to add the von and bear the title of Ritter - which translates approximately as Sir - after he attained nobility in 1889.) Born into a family of professional artists, he studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. Hiking trips through the Austrian Alps and northern Italy awoke a love for landscapes, and he painted using watercolors in a very realistic and detailed style. In 1833, inspired by a visit to Venice and neighboring cities, he also made a number of architectural paintings. The painting of interiors also became one of the genres he was most noted for. His later works came closer, stylistically, to Impressionism. 

Giove pittore di farfalle, Mercurio e la Virtù, by Dosso Dossi, circa 1523-1524

"Jupiter painting butterflies, Mercury and Virtue". I'd never seen this painting before, and I think it's rather wonderful. An unusual, complex, but perfectly balanced composition. Lighting that is forceful but also nuanced. And, most of all, I find the color harmonies extremely beautiful. There are lovely details - the feathery trees, Mercury's feathered sandals/feet, Jupiter's lightning bolts, tossed at his feet - and many of the highlights look to be picked out in gold leaf. It also has that something extra I'm always thrilled to find in an otherwise merely beautiful painting: it's pretty damn nutty. I'm sure there are art historians, experts on Renaissance iconography and/or classical mythology who could explain the thing to us; there are probably innumerable scholarly treatises on just this single painting. I suppose it's some kind of allegory of painting. And from what I understand, the story goes that Virtue and Fortune were having a row and Virtue trotted off to Jupiter to get him to intervene. But Mercury told her to hold on, saying that the gods were busy "making cucumbers blossom and painting the wings on butterflies". Alright, fair enough. That still doesn't explain one very particular detail, one rather perverse artistic choice: having left off his typical macho styling and godly bravado, why is Jupiter - so languid his posture, head tilted back, legs coyly crossed - sitting there in that terribly fetching nightgown?

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Dosso Dossi, né Giovanni di Niccolò de Luteri(circa 1490, San Giovanni del Dosso – 1542, Ferrara), Italian Renaissance painter. Little is known of his early life or training, but his father was employed by the Dukes of Ferrara. By his early twenties, Dossi himself had begun work for Alfonso I and Ercole II d'Este, Dukes of Ferrara and Modena; becoming principal court artist, he would continue for three decades, until his death. He often worked with his younger brother Battista Dossi, who had trained in the Roman workshop of Raphael.