Artist unknown
Völkertafel (18th century)
Photo: ÖMV / Birgit and Peter Kainz
The so-called Völkertafel (Table of Peoples), painted in several copies by an anonymous subject of the Habsburg Empire, most probably from the Styrian Ausseerland, is still popular today. The reasons are the same as in the 18th century: entertainment masked as Enlightenment, and a slightly perverse pleasure of total classification, derived from the comparison of everything with anything. The table shows ten Europeans in allegedly (often wrong) traditional costumes, from left to right: a Spaniard, a Frenchman, an Italian, a German, an Englishman, a Swede, a Pole, a Hungarian, a Russian, and a Turk or Greek, between whom no distinction is made (Greece was under Ottoman rule at the time). Many, but not all, could have been subjects of the Habsburgs.
Their characteristics, obviously fictional, are placed in a grid. The figures are positioned from West to East, and as one moves toward the latter, both their moral qualities and the sky in the background darken. The table quotes an early-18th-century German print (the so-called Leopold-Stich) based on untrustworthy travel reports and theories of climate influence on mores. The text, although in South German, does not spare Germans either and seems to adopt an “übernational” Pan-European bureaucratic attitude. Still, it was first made widely known in 1899 through the Deutsche Zeitung, a Pan-German newspaper from Vienna, which took it quite uncritically.
Oil on wood, 104 × 126 cm
Ausseer Kammerhofmuseum, Bad Aussee