Celebrating a Half-Century of Conspicuous Consumption
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Imagine, if you will, dining among honored guests at the Dresden Court with Johann Georg I, Elector of Saxony from 1611 to 1656. You are immersed in a candle-lit, Rococo splendor of gleaming, silver-gilt, and beautifully turned ivory parade vessels, gold-edged rock crystal, Giambologna bronzes, and ebony furniture with mother-of-pearl and silver inlay. On the dining table is a surreal menagerie of ornate silver-gilt vessels in the shapes of castles, heraldic lions, and exotic elephants – not to mention ostriches, whose gold and silver legs, necks, and wings sprout out of their bodies, which are made of actual ostrich eggs. Also surrounding you are tritons, nereids, unicorns, and all kinds of fowl made from precious metals and stones, coconuts, red coral, and iridescent shells. Al though you are already a little drunk – not only from the wine but also from the riches – your host announces yet another drinking game.
At Georg’s command, the 14-inch high “Automaton: St. George Slaying the Dragon” (c. 1620) starts moving independently around the table of dumbfounded diners. The mechanical windup sculpture, made by goldsmith Joachim Fries in Augsburg, is a gilded-silver statue of St. George astride his rearing horse and poised above the dragon. It rolls on an ornate, octagonal base with hidden wheels, until it stops, as in a game of spin-the-bottle, in front of you. At that moment you are obliged to remove the horse’s head and quickly down its body’s contents, a full flagon of wine or brandy.
The automaton, along with everything else I have described above, is among nearly 250 lavish or exotic objects in the Metropolitan Museums’s “Princely Splendor: The Dresden Court, 1580-1620.” The exhibition, curated by Wolfram Koeppe with Ian Wardropper, both from the Met, and Dirk Syndram, director of the Green Vault, Dresden, from which many of the objects come, is the first to be held on Dresden at the Metropolitan Museum in 25 years. The exhibition begins with pomp and circumstance and never lets up. The words “overthe-top” do not even begin to describe many of the works on view.
The exhibition, displayed before royally rich-colored walls of red, purple, blue, and green, focuses on the Dresden Court’s holdings during one of its periods of greatest prosperity. No expense was spared in the crafting of these peculiar objects, which include tools, clocks, clothing, jewelry, tableware, decorative animals, boxes, furniture, arms, and armor. No amount of bizarre juxtaposition or detailed, meandering ornamentation was too much for the works of art.
Almost every object is animated or stacked like a circus troupe or a wedding cake, and exotic materials are the norm. They include wood, shells, stones, eggs, and ivory brought from as far away as the South Seas, India, and Africa. In the court of 16th-century Dresden, you could never have too many animals, turnings, gold, engraving, or precious stones. The court motto was, seemingly: If you’ve got it, flaunt it; if you don’t have it, get it. There was no such thing as conspicuous consumption.
Moving through the show is a heady experience in which each room inexplicably tops the last. In the first gallery you are greeted immediately by an imposing full-length oil portrait of “Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony (1585-1656).” Painted by a Dresden court painter (c. 1620-25), the painting depicts the Elector (one hand on his hip, the other clasping a sword) standing next to his dog in his personal parade armor. His expression is stern and his shiny, black armor is alive with swirling, reddish-gold heraldic designs of flora and fauna. The portrait, shown here next to the actual suit of armor, is more arresting for its display of his wealth and power than it is as a painting, but it and other portraits of Electors – including 2 bronze busts and another full-length portrait – gets their message across.
Drinking and killing seem to be two of the main themes in the show, and no one can say that the Electors of Saxony looked bad doing either. The Electors’ tankards and flagons, some of which are beautifully top-heavy columns made of elaborately turned ivory by the Electors themselves, resemble giant chess pieces that have grown out of control. Others, including Georg Friedel’s “Sphere on a Tall Shaft” (between 1611-1619), strangely delicate yet oddly surreal, look like something that came out of the studio of Lee Bontecou or Brancusi. Other vessels were turned on the lathe out of a gorgeous, local, earthen-green material called serpentine.
The vitrines devoted to tools, arms, and armor astonish not only for their metalwork but for their sense of invention, a hallmark of nearly every work in the show, which often leans as much toward function as toward frivolity. Some of the objects – a “Folding Multipurpose Tool” (c. 1560-70), the original Swiss Army Knife; Matthias Schwerdtfeger’s “Frame Saw” (1564); the spectacular array of garden implements and axes – are as beautiful as they appear to be functional. Like so many of the tools and weapons in the show, some of which were strictly ornamental, it makes me wonder how anyone could bear to use them. I felt the same before the fragile works of crystal, shell, glass, and ivory.
“Hunting and Work Desk of Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony” (c. 1620-25), a portable, octagonal, ebony and oak chest of drawers, roughly 38 inches deep and 57 inches wide, with engraved silver inlays, was referred to as “a mute servant who never abandons his master … a servant with a philosophical mind.” It is a cabinet of curiosities replete with instruments, tools, and items for dining, hunting, writing, woodworking, falconry, battle, medicine, and grooming. A collection whose contents “mirror God’s creation in a microcosmic manner,” the elaborate chest is a museum in itself.
The challenge of this fine exhibition is freeing yourself from each and every over-the-top object long enough to move on to be wowed by the next.