Collectors, Collections and Collecting Cultures in Vienna and Central Europe – Vienna Center for the History of Collecting

Vienna is one of Europe’s most important cities of art and culture.  Along with its imperial collections, from the seventeenth century to modern times the large aristocratic families but also the rising bourgeoisie built up extensive art collections, almost all of which are scattered today. Examples would be important aristocratic collections such as those of the Colloredo-Mansfelds, the Dauns, the Esterházys, the Harrachs, the Kinskys, the Liechtensteins or the Schönborns, but also large bourgeois collections such as those of the Birkenstocks, the Figdors, the Geigers, the Gsells or the Rothschilds. The research centre’s work seeks to systematically document collectors, collections and collecting cultures in Vienna and Central Europe and locate them in the broader art- and cultural-historical context.

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 of the Austrian Academy of Sciences: the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) and the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (IHB). The IHB participates in the cooperation project via its research focus on “Habsburg Representation in Visual Art, Architecture and Music”. The systematic study of the Habsburgs’ strategies of representation considers the actors, artworks and collections directly forming the corpus for the project “Collectors, Collections and Collecting Cultures in Vienna and Central Europe”.