Echt tierisch! Die Menagerie des Fürsten / Real Animals! Princely Menageries
Forthcoming exhibition.
Where: Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck
When: Opens 18 June 2015
Schloss Ambras Innsbruck holds special annual exhibitions focusing on art and cultural historical themes related to the founder of the Ambras collections, the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol (1529-1595), to which 50,000 national and international guests attend.
The 2015 exhibition centres on the importance of animals and gardens at royal courts in the 16th and 17th century, especially the menageries in Portugal, Spain, Austria, Italy and Southern Germany.
At the Habsburg courts and those of other princes – like the Medici in Florence and the Wittelsbach in Munich -, birds, elegant dogs and horses cavorted, as did wild exotica that had traveled great distances. This exhibition highlights not only the acquisition and importance of these animals as objects of prestige and as specimens of natural history, but also their portrayal in art. The impact of naturalia, such as ivory, bezoar stones and rhinoceros horn which entered princely Kunstkammers as rarities, will also be thematised. On display are precious kunstkammer objects, paintings, drawings and engravings, among them extraordinary animals studies and portraits by Albrecht Dürer, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Georg Hoefnagel.
100+ objects will be on show, including loans from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Albertina of Vienna, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, and the Maximilianmuseum in Augsburg.
Also visit the Schloss Ambras’s magnificent Spanish Hall.Also visit the Schloss Ambras’s magnificent Spanish Hall.
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