“Wien Museum,” or, “this statue is the Patron Saint of Bruh”

Our tour this week took us to the Wien Museum, current host of the “Sex in Wien” exhibit.
Okay, no, that wasn’t the exhibit we went to see, but I’m having fun imagining the looks on the faces of the program coordinators back home going “we’re paying for them to see what?”

We met up outside of Karlskirche, the namesake of Karlsplatz.¹ The church was built to honor Saint Charles, for his work in fighting the Black Plague.² Most of the church is built in the Baroque style, but the two big pillars are in faux-antiquity style, based on a pair of pillars somewhere in Rome.

That is an angel that’s ready to fight. You better not sin, you’ll get a brass cross upside the head.

I think my favorite thing that the museum had, once we got into it, was the ground floor exhibit – a bunch of things that were removed from St. Stephen’s cathedral in order to preserve them.

Not only were a bunch of statues moved here, but also some of the original stained glass windows. They are much nicer than the ones currently in the cathedral.

There’s also some bits of funeral armor, originally placed around Frederick III’s resting place. Why one of them consists of a woman with fish for arms, I don’t know.

The second and third floor of the museum both have models of the city as it appeared at different points in history.

I liked this one – the opera house was only built a couple hundred years ago,³ but you can already see the building where I have classes every day.⁴

And I’ll end with this bust, because look at that face.⁵