The Wilsons in Europe: The Kunsthistorisches Museum

On Thursday we visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna's mini-Louvre (which is to say a big, general art museum from antiquity to about 1800, but still manageable). We started with the Egyptian materials, which Sophie liked a lot. I don't think she really understood the mummies, but her confusion of animals and human sarcophagi seemed pretty much on the money. We'll see if she remembers the word "hieroglyphics" when we go to the Louvre with the students in September.

This little item, a small ceramic hippo from the 11th or 12th dynasty, sort of caught Sophie's eye, though she likes it more now that we bought her a little model of it as a souvenir of her visit.

In the Portrait Gallery, she found most of the portraits uninteresting at this point. She did like some of the more magnificent things, like a Dürer altar where she thought Christ was swimming, and a gigantic still life with huge fish. But when it came to Raphael's Madonna in the Meadow, which I think may just be the most beautiful painting ever, she kind of just noted in passing that Jesus was naked. Rembrandt? Vermeer? Shrug. Oh, well. There's still time.

She did take to the Arcimboldo allegorical seasons, especially the most approachable, Summer:

I was truly pleased that she liked the Bruegels, since I use them in my Humanities 120 class. I think these amazing early scenes of the everyday life of common people are just amazing, and there's so much activity from real life that Sophie found them pretty interesting. Here are her two favorites, The Peasant Wedding and The Peasant Dance:

She even agreed with me that the children Bruegel painted in the lower left of the painting below looked like little adults. (Of course, at this point, if I told her that we lived on a planet called Mars, she might agree with me about that, too.)