Quote:For over 300 years, the GARDEN PALACE and the CITY PALACE of the princely family of Liechtenstein are deeply rooted in Vienna’s history. Both palaces are still privately owned by the princely family.

The GARDEN PALACE is available for hire for exclusive events (no parallel events at the same time) - with the Sala Terrena on the ground floor, the three former Ladies' Apartments as well as the Hercules Hall on the first floor. If the weather is fine the magnificent garden is available for events too. The Princely Library is another highlight of the palace.

Quote:The icon of Our Lady of Philermos is, more than any other, the most sacred representation to which, for centuries, the Knights of the Order of Malta have been devoted. It is the symbol par excellence of the Marian spirituality of the ancient Order of the Hospitallers of St. John. However, Our Lady of Philermos could also be worthy of the name of patron saint of travellers, without wishing in any way to detract from the official holder of this title, St. Christopher. Few religious pictures have travelled as much and as adventurously as this small but precious portrait.

EVERYTHING ABOUT HER SPEAKS OF PILGRIMAGE

Even just to admire this face, which releases a deeply holy sense, one has to travel, taking a long journey to the National Museum of Art of Montenegro in Cetinje, where it has been kept since the Second World War. And when the icon reappeared, at the end of the 20th century, having been thought to be lost, it was welcomed like a long lost friend or, better yet, a much-loved mother from whom you’ve heard nothing for years and who suddenly shows hope when all hope had been lost.

ITS HISTORY ACCORDING TO TRADITION

The first account, reported in the Complete calendar of Russian saints and brief miraculous news on the Mother of God, leaves no room for doubt: “According to tradition, the Hodigitria (she who leads) Filermskaia was painted by St Luke and consecrated with the blessing of the Mother of God. In around the year 46, it was taken to Antioch, the birthplace of St. Luke, and then to Jerusalem. Towards the year 430, it was taken to the church of Blacherne in Constantinople. In 626, it saved Constantinople from the Persians (…) In 1204 it was taken by the Latin army, transferred to Palestine and from there to the island of Malta”.

Another description, reported in a text dating back to the 17th century, also makes reference to the same presumed artist: “Said to have been painted by the Evangelist, Luke”. Then it makes less precise historical references. The icon, according to what is written, is supposed to have been taken to Rhodes from Jerusalem “when the island was still under the rule of the Eastern Emperors”. The timing is less certain because, apart from the invasions by the Persians in 620 and the Arabs (633-665), Rhodes was ruled, at least in name, by the Eastern Emperors until the island was occupied by the Hospitallers in 1306.

A third version appears in a Magistral Bull of the Hospitallers Order dated 1497. It states that, according to local tradition, the icon is said to have arrived in Rhodes by way of a miracle: floating on the sea, at the time of Emperor Leon the Heretic (717-741).

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ITS REDISCOVERY

But what had happened to the original? It was found thanks to the insistence of an Italian scholar Giovannella Berté Ferraris di Celle. She had written a book on the icon in 1988, but her interest didn’t stop there: she continued with her search. She had heard rumours in the religious and monastic environments, particularly those of the Orthodox Church, according to which the great reliquaries of Malta and the icon had not been destroyed, but were located in a monastery in the south of what was then Yugoslavia. After writing numerous letters and continuing to insist, she finally received a reply from the Metropolitan of Belgrade: yes, the icon was in Cetinje in Montenegro! And so it was that, in May 1997, the tenacious researcher completed her work: “I was moved by being able to worship this holy icon”. Several years later, between the 12th and 15th of March 2004, the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, Fra’ Andrew Bertie led the pilgrimage to the icon. Followed by a delegation of the Order, he paid devout homage also to the other two holy reliquaries of the Order: the authentic Cross and the hand of St. John the Baptist, kept in the Orthodox monastery of the Nativity.

An icon with an extraordinary history, still today a symbol of the Order of Malta’s Marian spirituality and emblem of its history. The members of the Order of Malta – as their predecessors have done over the centuries – continue to pray and to invoke her as their protector and to refer to her in the most difficult moments. On 8 September they celebrate her feast all over the world.

Order of Malta

Quote:The painting is believed by F. J. Sánchez Cantón to depict a room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured in a particular moment as if in a snapshot.[b][2] Some of the figures look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand.[3] In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. They appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.

Las Meninas has long been recognised as one of the most important paintings in the history of Western art. The Baroque painter Luca Giordano said that it represents the "theology of painting", and in 1827 the president of the Royal Academy of Arts Sir Thomas Lawrence described the work in a letter to his successor David Wilkie as "the true philosophy of the art".[4] More recently, it has been described as "Velázquez's supreme achievement, a highly self-conscious, calculated demonstration of what painting could achieve, and perhaps the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of the easel painting".
Wiki

Quote:Shocked, titillated, and frightened

Working during the height of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of Reason,” the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli (born Johann Heinrich Füssli) instead chose to depict darker, irrational forces in his famous painting The Nightmare. In Fuseli’s startling composition, a woman bathed in white light stretches across a bed, her arms, neck, and head hanging off the end of the mattress. An apelike figure crouches on her chest while a horse with glowing eyes and flared nostrils emerges from the shadowy background.

The painting was first displayed at the annual Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1782, where it shocked, titillated, and frightened exhibition visitors and critics. Unlike many of the paintings that were then popular and successful at the Royal Academy exhibitions, Fuseli’s The Nightmare has no moralizing subject. The scene is an invented one, a product of Fuseli’s imagination. It certainly has a literary character and the various figures demonstrate Fuseli’s broad knowledge of art history, but The Nightmare’s subject is not drawn from history, the Bible, or literature. The painting has yielded many interpretations and is seen as prefiguring late nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theories regarding dreams and the unconscious (Sigmund Freud allegedly kept a reproduction of the painting on the wall of his apartment in Vienna).

Although it is tempting to understand the painting’s title as a punning reference to the horse, the word “nightmare” does not refer to horses. Rather, in the now obsolete definition of the term, a mare is an evil spirit that tortures humans while they sleep. As Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) defined it, a mare or “mara, [is] a spirit that, in heathen mythology, was related to torment or to suffocate sleepers. A morbid oppression in the night resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast.” Thus, Fuseli’s painting may in fact be understood as embodying the physical experience of chest pressure felt during a dream-state.