Vienna ranks among Europe’s foremost centers of art and culture. Alongside the imperial collections, extensive collections of art were assembled here from the 17th century onwards and right up to the modern era, not only by Vienna’s leading aristocracy, but also by its aspiring, newly affluent bourgeoisie. Almost without exception, these collections are today scattered. In the case of the nobility, they include the Colloredo-Mansfeld, Daun, Esterhazy, Harrach, Kinsky, Liechtenstein and Schönborn collections, and in the case of the bourgeoisie, the Birkenstock, Figdor, Geiger, Gsell and Rothschild collections. The objective of the Vienna Center for the History of Collecting is to systematically document the collectors, collections and collecting cultures in Vienna and Central Europe and to situate them in the broader context of art and art history.
Large numbers of collection inventories and sales catalogues, as well as correspondence and travelogues, are available to us as sources. On this basis, it will be possible to reconstruct lost collections and identify many of their art works, which are today dispersed around the world. Building upon the pioneering work of Theodor Frimmel, the new research center aims to document collections in Vienna and Central Europe in a comprehensive fashion and to examine their far-reaching significance. The spectrum of collection objects ranges from antiquity to the modern era, and from painting and sculpture to drawings, coins and magnificent pieces of furniture. All the major schools of European art are represented, as well as the art of East Asia and Africa. Key areas of enquiry include the housing and presentation of objects within their respective display spaces, and equally the motivations, purchasing policies, acquisition strategies and roles of the stakeholders involved, who include artists, art dealers and art historians as well as the collectors themselves. Artistic and aesthetic questions, as well as economic and socio-historical considerations, thereby play a central role.
The Vienna collections took shape in a pan-European context. Viennese collectors kept an eye on Florence, Madrid, Paris and Berlin and were in turn seen as models and emulated far beyond the bounds of Vienna. Collecting is fundamentally driven by the competitive desire to achieve prestige and social status. The research center would like to illuminate Vienna’s significance in this European context and thereby make an important and timely contribution to the broader subject of “Collectors, Collections and Collecting Cultures”, which is currently particular topical in international research. The research center understands itself as a platform, bringing together different strands of research, fostering international collaboration and expanding the methodological and theoretical frameworks of this subject.
The Vienna Center for the History of Collecting is a cooperation project between the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna and two institutes at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, namely the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and the Institute for History of Art and Musicology. The project is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research within the framework of structural funding for Austria’s higher education system.
