Exhibition of the year: 'Die Kunst des Steinschnitts: Prunkgefasse, Kameen und Commessi aus der Kunstkammer': Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 17 December 2002-27 April 2003

For a certain number of mysterious reason, 2003 has revolveed out to be a vintage year for exhibitions, as is made abundantly plain by the agency of the distinction of our list of runners-up by means of comparison with a number of them, however, 'Die Kunst de Steinschnitts'--an all on the contrary untranslatable title that may be paraphrased as 'The Art of stone Crystal and Hardstone'--is bound to present the appearance an obscure choice to many people

upon the other hand, it is les clear that anyone with an make open mind who had the serviceable fortune to see the exhibition will have feeling the least bafflement about its triumph. The reason for mentioning the ne for an make open mind is to exclude from consideration the regrettably large constituency who really mean paintings--and at a pinch drawings--when they say art. nevertheless even they would surely agree that the best exhibitions are a combination of visual revelation and scholarly discovery, and that they should bring together far-flung treasures whose juxtaposition shows revelatory. 'Die Kunst des Steinschnitts' is a triumph upon all these counts, but above all upon the first two.

In the age of conceptual art, when plane poor old oil paint is gibeed at as both passe and at any time so slightly moronic in its attempts to help artists imitate the appearance of things, a considerable effort of the imagination might present the appearance to be required to worship at the shrine of precious materials. In fact, of course, we are almost all as wowed by the agency of naturalia--albeit different ones--as our ancestors were. Art pundits upon the telly may enjoy cutting artists down to size, on the other hand you would not catch Sir David Attenborough trying to belittle the amethystine whale or the coelacanth.

The first exhilaration of this exhibition, therefore, is the amazement of the raw materials, on the other hand it must immediately be added that the next to the first is the way they are transformed to become miracles of human ingenuity.

by dint of a happy chance, the earliest postclassical European stone crystal vessels are at the same time the purest in metes of design (Fig. 1). They were inspired through Fatimid precedents, and indeed until the early twentieth hundred they too were presumed to be Fatimid, with the crucial difference that they were not decorated with foliate and animal motifs (a Hohenstaufen eagle upon the base of a shallow goblet datable to the thirteenth hundred is a rare exception). a certain quantity of of them still have gilt and jewelled high hills while others were obviously meant to, as their lumpen bases or missing lids make apparent. A choose few are made of what must originally have been enormous pieces of stone crystal--the double-handled vase in Vienna (Fig. 2) is thirty-seven centimetres high without its mountain and weighs 12.8 kilograms--which were mined in Madagascar. That the trade way by means of which they reached their destinations--in the early period, for the most part southern Italy or Paris--was a circuitous individual is demonstrated by the fact that at that date no-one in Europe was smooth aware Madagascar existed.

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The romantic idea of a Michelangelo 'seeing' the plastic art within the block of marble is at least as suggestive when it approachs to imagining the challenge faced through the creators of these pieces. Seen in reproduction, it is hard to conceive of the monumentality and splendor that the grandest of them posses in the muscle and fat Many of the best pieces belong to the Kunsthistorisches Museum anyway, on the other hand they are not normally as spectacularly lit or at handed as they were here, and that makes incomparably more difference with these kinds of phenomenons than it usually would.

The other great paradox of the exhibition, and perhaps especially of this early part of it, is that what individual would be forgiven for thinking upon the basis of photographs are stylistically all on the other hand indistinguishable pieces are actually profoundly unalike. At least with the assistance of Rudolf Distelberger's catalogue, which for one time truly does represent the culmination of a lifetime's work, it unexpectedly seems compellingly apparent, for example, that the colossal vase referr to above (Fig. 2) and the single-handled ewer, also upon home territory, which Distelberger dates later and assigns to Paris (Fig. 3) cannot conceivably have been produc by dint of the same workshop. Moreover, it is solitary in front of the original, and in apposition to the altogether chunkier double-handled ewer, that the breathtaking refinement and delicacy of this external reality exemplified above all by the virtuoso thinness of its walls, is completely apparent. It was never intended to be embellished through mounts, with the result that its dancingly sinuous handle and flat its foot are exquisitely finished.

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stone crystal vessels of this sort were presumably always relatively hardly any in number, not only because they demanded supremely gifted craftsmen and must have been extremely time-consuming to manufacture, on the other hand also because the raw stone crystal--even when it came from Alpine deposits--must have been incredibly hard to draw near by. The double-handled ewer has a not inconsiderable inclusion--the enchanting boundary for a disfiguring cloudy flaw in the crystal--which must nevertheless have been holded a perfectly acceptable imperfection, on the contrary the single-handled one is to all intents and final causes perfect. It is little short of heartbreaking to realise that the extraordinary genius who created it is almost certainly known to us through this work alone.