On the morning of July 1, 1916, prominent members of Viennese high society gathered in a large imperial park not far from the center of Vienna. This park, the Prater, had been the site of many fairs, exhibits, and festivals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It accommodated the World's Fair in 1873 and since then had housed circuses, variety shows, children's exhibits, and the Luna Park amusement complex. The Prater was a favorite destination of Viennese of all classes in search of recreation and entertainment. On this particular morning, those in attendance were more notable than usual; they included Archduke Franz Salvator, War Minister Alexander Krobatin, Education Minister Max von Hussarek, the Austrian defense minister, ambassadors of several allied countries, and local and regional government officials. They were on hand to celebrate the grand opening of what sponsors promised would be an exhibition unlike any Vienna had ever seen. At eleven o'clock, the prestigious entourage entered the first hall of the grandest entertainment spectacle of the wartime home front: the Vienna War Exhibition.

In the nineteenth century, the imperial palace in Vienna had become the epicenter of political decision making in the Danube monarchy. The fact that the Hofburg served as the emperor's family home and at the same time as the unchallenged centerpiece of politics and administration lent its function a duality that was mirrored in the title of the town where the palace was located. Officially, Vienna was the Haupt- und Residenzstadt, that is, the empire's capital and the monarch's official residence. In this former role, Vienna was second to none. Vienna was the seat of offices and ministries, the meeting place of parliamentary deputies in the Reichsrat, and the place where the governors who represented the sovereign in the respective Crownlands had their headquarters in the Statthalterei. It was not until Budapest became the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 that Vienna had to share its rank with another city. In their role as the monarch's official residence, both Vienna's and the Hofburg's traditions went back to the Middle Ages. There had been no interruptions even when in the Baroque period the monarchs had built other residences elsewhere in what today is Vienna, among them the Favorita palace on the Wieden (today's Theresianum), the Favorita palace in the Augarten park, and Schönbrunn palace. At all times the Hofburg had been the place where the Habsburg family and the sovereign lived during the winter half-year, and furthermore, it remained the setting of the most eminent ceremonies that formed the rituals of the Habsburg sovereign (Corpus Christi procession, Anniversarium militare ceremonies in commemoration of the dead, and others). No other Habsburg palace would ever challenge the Hofburg's priority in terms of rank.

The complex of events linked to the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 often has been characterized as a turning point in East Central, indeed even European history, an argument which probably can be disputed only on semantic or philosophical grounds. For example, the late Hugo Hantsch once stated in private conversation that he firmly believed that the abortive Ottoman assault upon Austria's capital fundamentally determined the future of the Habsburg empire. Assuming that this judgment is valid, the purpose here is to refine, extend—and correct a bit—certain conclusions drawn in two earlier books, one in English and the other in German, concerning the subject in question. These observations are occasioned by the avalanche of writings evoked by the tercentennial celebration of the sieges in Vienna and elsewhere and by personal discussions of the author with the Hungarian historians, László Benczédi and Géza Perjes. It is convenient to treat the topic under three headings: the antecedents of the Ottoman offensive, the significance of the events per se, including the delicate question of Polish participation, and the consequences of the allied victory and the subsequent campaigns in Hungary.

Some aspects of the relationship between the Polish aristocracy and the Ukrainian peasantry in Eastern Galicia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have been treated by many scholars over the years. This relationship has been seen primarily as one of class and then national conflict, played out in the economic and political spheres of Galician life. The traditional picture has been one of discrimination against and exploitation of the peasants by the numerically small class of Polish magnates and gentry. The emphasis has been on forced peasant labor, on inequities in the size of landholdings, on the brutality of the landlords and oppression by their stewards, on beatings, on the illegal annexation of peasant lands, and on the expected and automatic obedience and subservience of the peasant to the manorial lord. All of these elements were certainly part of the relationship in pre-1848 Galicia, though even in this respect one may ask questions about the growing number of Ukrainian village schools, and so on.

This article considers the function of twenty-two hand-colored prints of mathematical instruments in Tycho Brahe's Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (Instruments of the renewed astronomy; 1598), a hand-painted presentation treatise dedicated to Emperor Rudolf II and conferred on a network of individuals connected to the imperial court in Prague. Although the accompanying text communicates the instruments’ use and composition, the images demand close inspection because they articulate Brahe's observationally driven astronomy. They do so through structured, repeated, and consecutive representations; through expanded viewer access, achieved by adhering to multiple perspectives; through the juxtaposition of colors, which focuses attention on the heads of the instruments (the part that does the measuring); and through the use of gold paint, which emphasizes the head and brings to mind the very metallic nature of the instruments. Much like an astronomer taking multiple measurements of cosmological phenomena, these images allow viewers and readers, as they leaf through the pages of the treatise, to become virtual participants in Brahe's instauration of astronomy.

Throughout the world, historians expand the history of their nations and states into periods when these polities did not yet exist. The French speak of their first dynasty and mean the Frankish Merovingians. Until recently French history textbooks even for students in the French overseas territories started with “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois.” In the German Kaiserreich between 1871 and 1918, let us say, little Jan Kowalski in Poznan had to accept the Germanic peoples as his forefathers, as every textbook on German history dealt with them at length. Needless to say, not only German medievalists speak of Germans long before theodiscus or teutonicus came to mean deutsch. All over the world people search for the roots of their identity. Take, for instance, the present preoccupation with Celtic ancestors. Not only the Irish, Welsh, Scots, and Bretons, but a great many other Europeans also want to be Celts by origin. “Their successors in Brittany, Wales, or Ireland do not threaten anybody with Anschluss or war. The Celtic origins, therefore, fit the Austrian neutrality perfectly well,” as Erich Zöllner ironically put it in 1976 after Chancellor Bruno Kreisky had openly declared that the Celts and not the Germans were our forefathers.

All rulers' portraits are, in several senses, forms of representation. In the first and most obvious instance, all portraits epitomize one of the basic functions of visual art as imitation (mimesis). Portraits represent a person by providing his or her likeness. The Renaissance sculptor Vincenzo Danti (1530–1576), a contemporary of the artists discussed here, pointed to this basic mimetic function when he defined one of the fundamental forms of artistic imitation as ritrarre, using a verb related to the Italian word for portrait, ritratto. Because they are works in three dimensions, sculpted portraits may approach this end even more directly, as seen in the sculpted heritage of Charles V that is the subject of this paper. In any case, hyperrealist works of the 1970s and wax sculpture of the past, including a small wax sculpture of Emperor Rudolf II with a favorite hound (London, Victoria and Albert Museum) (see Figure 1), demonstrate that sculpture may make the effort to portray individuals as close to life as possible.