Mary’s Tears
Garrett Bliss
A boulevard runs where the city’s protective walls once stood, an exuberant, bombastic display of private wealth and state power. Wide enough to discourage the rebellious construction of street barricades. Near-twin palaces face each other in regal silence across a plaza named for a former Empress, built to showcase the accumulated riches – gifted, purchased, commissioned, appropriated, stolen – of the Hapsburgs. In the Naturhistorisches Museum, the Venus of Willendorf – a hand-sized, robustly proportioned figure representing life-giving female fertility – considered the oldest work of art in the world. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the most famous salt dish ever created – a gold and enamel sculpture of two reclining nudes, a man (The Sea) and a woman (The Earth), an indulgent folly crafted by a murderer for the same King of France to whom Leonardo da Vinci delivered the Mona Lisa. A stairwell decorated with gold-flecked paintings by Gustav Klimt. The second floor: a relentless succession of galleries filled with dark landscapes, theatrical mythological scenes, portraits of somber royals in black and brown.
In the northwest corner of the museum – in a small, light-filled room – a mother collapses at the feet of her son – ridiculed, scorned, betrayed, tortured, and slowly executed in front of her.
Her tears shake the air around me. I am unable to speak or move.