By Reinhold Baumstark

For successive generations the Princes of Liechtenstein were committed creditors of paintings. the results of this custom is a suite of masterpieces that during its intensity and breadth mirrors greater than 400 years of eu heritage and ranks one of the world's maximum deepest collections. The work, sculpture, firearms, porcelain, and different artistic endeavors exhibited on the Metropolitan Museum of artwork and richly illustrated and mentioned during this ebook have been got or commissioned by means of the Princes of the home of Liechtenstein to accessorize their really good palaces, to reveal their prestige and wealth, to make understand their contrast as nice creditors, and to meet their princely experience of noblesse oblige.

Of the various memorable masterpieces that make up the Princely Collections possibly the main extraordinary is the good cycle of 8 canvases by means of Peter Paul Rubens—the background of Decius Mus, the Roman consul—the in simple terms entire ensemble of this kind now in inner most fingers. different works via Rubens within the assortment comprise the beguiling portrait of the artist's daughter Clara Serena and the belief of the Virgin, a enormous paintings of Rubens's maturity.

The catalogue conveys the continuum of the Princes' amassing via a chain of excessive issues revolving round particular moments within the heritage of the home of Liechtenstein. The work by means of Marcantonio Franceschini that after adorned the Liechtenstein backyard Palace in Vienna, for instance, evoke the attractiveness of the Princes' a variety of flats all through Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, and Silesia; the awesome pietre dure tables think of the shut ties that the Princes of Liechtenstein had with the courtroom of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague; and a wealth of elaborately embellished firearms courting from the overdue 16th in the course of the eighteenth century remembers the function of the Princes not just as aristocratic huntsmen but additionally as nice army leaders within the provider of the Holy Roman Empire. The Liechtensteins' unflagging feel of provider to the Emperors and their courtly style are good symbolized via the astonishing Golden Carriage, a Rococo masterpiece of French carriage construction that served Prince Joseph Wenzel von Liechtenstein in his ceremonial access into Paris as imperial ambassador in 1738.

The remarkable and various panoply of works accumulated by way of the Princes of the home of Liechtenstein not just represents the paradigm of a superb ecu princely assortment but in addition bears the excellence of being the personal number of the one surviving monarchy of the Holy Roman Empire, a princely condominium that lines its amazing lineage again to the 12th century. The exhibition of those esteemed works on the Metropolitan Museum of artwork marks sleek highlights within the heritage of the Princely Collections, for by no means sooner than have those works been on view within the New international, nor have the complete intensity and diversity of the Princely Collections been proven publicly to such virtue wherever on the planet for over thirty years.