August 13th 2012
I was exhausted after completing the 25 mile bike ride I described in Saturday's post, to spend Sunday resting and recovering in my apartment while catching up on some much needed schoolwork. After taking Sunday off I was feeling better, so I decided to meet up with some of my fellow bikers and explore some of the cities museums that we would not have time as a group to explore as a class. I chose to accompany some of my classmates on a trip to the Kunsthistoriches museum's collection of historical arms, armor, and musical instruments at the museum's Neue Burg extension simply out of a fascination with medieval knights and combat. Sure enough, the exhibit lived up to my greatest expectations. The arms and amour display held pieces of amour and weaponry from the medieval, renaissance, and early modern periods, including both displays of both functional and parade military gear.
The first thing I noticed upon examining the armor was it was made to fit very small warriors. The average piece of amour looked like it would fit a modern day 10 year old, provided that 10 year old had a slim build and was in very good athletic shape. All the pieces of amour had a very clear inward curve, meaning that they could only be worn by men with a V shaped waist. The amour was crafted this way because people were simply smaller at the time, due to poorer nutritional standards. The amour appeared to be made for smaller people, but the weapons on display were surprisingly bigger than expected. The handles seemed a little bit on the small side, but the sizes of the blades on some of the weapons approached 5 or more feet in some circumstances. The contrast between the small armor and larger weapons makes the high physical requirements of contemporary military service glearingly apparent. It would take quite a bit of strength, stamina, and training to control and fight with a five foot long blade over the course of a prolonged battle, but the fact that someone the size of an older child would need to muster that kind of strength is truly mind blogging for me.
I was much less interested in the music exhibit than the arms and armor exhibit, but it was entertaining to explore nonetheless. A few of the oldest pieces of musical equipment dated back to ancient Rome, but most were from either the renaissance, or the Baroque period with its accompany explosion of musical talent in Vienna. The information provided by the museum indicated that what kinds of musical equipment were used and in what circumstances, for example explaining if something was used primarily for church or common street music, or if a particular instrument was popular with nobility, or was played in the kinds of music played at the royal court. As I explored the music exhibit, it appeared that almost all of the musical instruments were featured in courtly music at one time or another, and furthermore suggesting that becoming popular with nobility help to preserve instruments, as more musical pieces were written for courtly instruments, ensuring them a sort of longevity.
I found the lack of focus on popular music to be interesting, because it seemed to indicate that culture and fashion were organized from the top down, with high society dictating what is popular and what is used or kept up. This is in contrast to our modern day consumer culture, were mass consumerism gives common tastes a fair bit of cultural power, so I became interested in investigating this more. I found additional evidence for a top town cultural organization by looking at the trends in fashion in armor, particularly in parade dress. The styles used in arms and amour were made to resemble contemporary fashions worn at court. For example, in the era of the Spanish Hapsburgs, a type of armor smiting that exposed the iron to extremely high temperatures called bluing came into practice because it gave the amour's metal a blue or black appearance. At the same time, the Hapsburgs popularized Spanish fashion at court, which consisted of plain suits consisting of high quality black fabrics.
Trends in music and amour suggest that noble culture was the primary area of cultural development, and that popular culture did not have much effect on fashions or music. I suspect that the historical reason for this trend has to do with money. As I described earlier, money plays a strong role in determining what is culturally significant today, and I suspect the same was true in past. I know that, in general, wealth was much more concentrated in the hands of the elite than it is in the modern era, so in terms of money and buying power, the common citizen may every well have had no voice to speak with. Regardless of what the facts may be, examining the exhibits on armor and music has given me a lot to think about regarding the way culture was shaped in the early modern and medieval periods.
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