Press Kit | IMPERIAL IMPRESSIONS at Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna as of 13 February 2024

The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna is dedicating the exhibition Imperial Impressions. The Emperors and their Court Artists to the medal as an artform. The artists represented in the show, such as Leone Leoni and Antonio Abondio, were active at the Habsburg courts and residences and at ease in many disciplines of the arts. They would, for example, have worked as architects, but also created paintings, sculptures, goldsmithery and more. It is the fact that they also made medals that warranted their inclusion in this exhibition, however. Medals offered emperors the opportunity to communicate political messages and special events or ceremonies, such as accession to the throne or weddings, relatively cost-effectively and instantaneously. This characteristic made the medium highly significant until World War I. 

The aim of the exhibition is to emphasize the role of the medal as an object of art. The idea is to focus on medals for their artistic quality rather than their historical message. Imperial Impressions aims to show that medals do not have to shy away from comparison with other genres of art. Moreover, it will illuminate how the role of artists developed from the universal genius of the Renaissance and early Baroque to specialists for separate genres of the arts during the later years of the monarchy. 

The exhibition comprises about eighty works: medals, coins, paintings, gemstones, ivory and goldsmithery. Most object stem from the museum’s Habsburg collections, with no other museum being able to illuminate this topic in such a high-quality selection. They are complemented by loans from the Coin Collection at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and from the Tiroler Landesmuseen-Betriebsgesellschaft.