Reports    Published 10/09/10

Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
13 April–7 November 2010

by NINA STEIN

We can’t be sure how much the sibling rivalry between Marie Antoinette and her older sister, the Archduchess Marie Christine (Mimi) of Austria, led to a competitive acquisition of beautiful objects. Certainly, from the collection of silver exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer, “Mimi” gave her extravagant younger sister a run for her money (so to speak).

The Sachsen-Teschen Service, a collection that embodies the opulent style of Imperial Vienna circa 1780, was acquired by the Met quite recently, when most surviving pieces (long thought lost) were rediscovered in a private French collection in 2002 (to add to the two silver wine coolers that the Met had acquired only a few months earlier). The full collection had not been seen since the 19th century, and was thought to have been lost in one revolution, heist, or another.

The Met celebrates the chance to see this opulent collection embellished by fascinating scholarship and activity: a guest to this banquet (albeit one rather lacking in food) may learn to fold napkins by an origami expert in the field, the Bavarian Matthia Giegher, and then study the way in which the collection’s designer, Ignaz Josef Würth, took inspiration from French Neo-Classical styles as well as traditional Viennese details, to create the dazzling Sachsen-Teschen Service we see in the exhibition. We find out about Vienna’s role as a centre of Neo-Classicism, furthermore, and then recognise the fate of that period of extravagant art and life, and of how this rare silver service managed to survive the Revolution when its guests, infamously, did not.

The silver lasted longer than the aristocracy, that is for sure: and now the masses can enjoy (from a distance, at least) the after-taste of a war that has, in one way or another, plagued Europe for centuries. Here are the candelabra, the tureens and cloches, the candlesticks and plates, the porcelain and the silver. Here are the glistening forks that were hidden from the sickles and the pitchforks – the silver that would be smeared in red. Here are all those dazzling, glittering treasures that have and continue to cause the fiercest battles and the most vicious jealousy.