Art collecting and patronage
Rudolf moved the Habsburg capital from Vienna to Prague in 1583. Rudolf loved collecting paintings and was often reported to sit and stare in rapture at a new work for hours on end. He spared no expense in acquiring great masterworks, such as those of Albrecht Dürer and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Rudolf's collections were the most impressive in the Europe of his day. He was patron to some of the finest contemporary artists, who mainly produced new works in the Northern Mannerist style, such as Bartholomeus Spranger, Hans von Aachen, Giambologna, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Aegidius Sadeler, Roelant Savery, Joris Hoefnagel, and Adrian de Vries, and commissioned works from Italian artists like Paolo Veronese.
Rudolf's love of collecting for the kunstkammer extended to decorative objects of all kinds, natural artefacts, and mechanical moving devices. In addition, his court included artists who contributed ceremonial swords, musical instruments, clocks, waterworks, astrolabes, compasses, telescopes and other scientific instruments. Rudolf also attracted some of the best scientific instrument makers of the time, such as Jost Bürgi, Erasmus Habermel and Hans Christoph Schissler, who had direct contact with the court astronomers and through the financial support of the court were economically independent to develop scientific instruments and manufacturing techniques.
Rudolf patronised astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, who both attended his court. Brahe, who had spent much of his life making observations of stars and planets that were more accurate than any previous observations, directed Kepler to work on the planet Mars. In doing so, Kepler found that in order to fit the observations to the required accuracy, it was necessary to assume that each planet orbits the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus, sweeping out equal areas in equal times, resulting in Kepler's laws of planetary motion. It was Rudolf's patronage of the two astronomers that made this possible, as Kepler recognised when he eventually published the Rudolphine Tables.
The poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, a writer of Renaissance Latin poetry, published numerous odes to him while appealing for him to release her stepfather's assets.
Rudolf kept a menagerie of exotic animals, botanical gardens, and Europe's most extensive "cabinet of curiosities" incorporating "the three kingdoms of nature and the works of man". It was housed at Prague Castle, where between 1587 and 1605 he built the northern wing to house his growing collections. A lion and a tiger were allowed to roam the castle, as is documented by the account books, which record compensation paid to survivors of attacks or to family members of victims.
The Codex Gigas was one of Rudolf's possessions. He was also alleged, by a single piece of hearsay, to have owned the Voynich manuscript, a codex whose author, purpose, language and script, and posited cypher remain unidentified to this day. In a letter written in 1665, Johannes Marcus Marci claims to have heard that Rudolf acquired the manuscript for 600 gold ducats at some unspecified time. No evidence in support of this assertion has ever been discovered.
As was typical of the time, Rudolf II had a portrait painted in the studio of the renowned Alonso Sánchez Coello. Completed in 1567, the portrait depicted Rudolf II at the age of 15. This painting can be seen at the Lobkowicz Palace in the Rozmberk room.
By 1597, Rudolf's collections occupied three rooms of the incomplete northern wing. When the building was completed in 1605, the collection was moved to the dedicated Kunstkammer. Naturalia (minerals and gemstones) were arranged in a 37-cabinet display that had three vaulted chambers in front, each about 5.5 m wide by 3 m high and 60 m long, connected to a main chamber 33 m long. Large uncut gemstones were held in strong boxes.
Apart from the fantastic nature of the objects, the aesthetics of their arrangement and presentation played an important role in highlighting the harmonious expression of divine order and the analogy of a micro-macrocosm in art, nature, and the world.
Rudolf's kunstkammer was not a typical "cabinet of curiosities", a haphazard collection of unrelated specimens. Rather, the Rudolfine kunstkammer was systematically arranged in an encyclopaedic fashion. In addition, Rudolf employed his court gemologist and physician Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632), to curate the collection. Anselmus was an avid mineral collector and travelled widely on collecting trips to the mining regions of Germany, Bohemia and Silesia, often accompanied by his Bohemian naturalist friend, Thaddaeus Hagecius. Between 1607 and 1611, Anselmus catalogued the kunstkammer and in 1609 published Gemmarum et Lapidum, the finest gemological treatise and encyclopedia ever written for this time.
Rudolf's successors did not appreciate the collection, and the kunstkammer gradually fell into disarray. Some 50 years after its establishment, most of the collection was packed into wooden crates and moved to Vienna. Most of the paintings that reached Vienna remain there, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with other pieces in the Secular Treasury and other museums. The collection remaining at Prague was looted during the last year of the Thirty Years' War by Swedish troops who sacked Prague Castle on 26 July 1648 and took the best of the paintings, many of which later passed to the Orléans Collection after the death of Christina of Sweden. In 1782, the remainder of the collection was sold piecemeal to private parties by Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor. One of the surviving items from the kunstkammer is a "fine chair" that was looted by the Swedes in 1648 and now owned by the Earl of Radnor at Longford Castle in Britain, and others survive in museums.
