Image Details

Photo from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Agog with archaeology, Viennese citizens flocked to exhibitions of ancient art in the city’s new museums—as depicted in this 1886 painting Der Marmorsaal (The Marble Hall of the Lower Belvedere Museum), by the Viennese artist Carl Goebel. The Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted to share in the archaeological glory cast on Germany by Heinrich Schliemann and England by Flinders Petrie. So they created the Austrian Archaeological Institute, which undertook the excavations at Ephesus (and continues to do so; see “Ephesus Uncovered”), and several new museums, such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Lower Belvedere, a former imperial palace. Freud avidly visited the Viennese museums, as well as museums in London and Rome.