With this volume in Reaktion Books’ “Renaissance Lives” series, Princeton University art historian Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann returns to the discussion of the activities of the well-known Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (who reigned 1576–1612). This is a topic on which DeCosta Kaufmann has developed substantial expertise. (The bibliography lists fifteen related works by the author.) This accessible and relatively short book (216 pages of text, with numerous illustrations) “offers an account of a crucial question: how Rudolf II’s interests and actions intersect with the histories of art, architecture, collecting and with the history of science” (26).
For many readers, Rudolf II is a rather mysterious, perhaps “mad” leader who sat in his castle in Prague together with alchemists and astrologers, often hiding from the public and lost in a world of marvels, many of them assembled around him in his famous art collections and “Wunderkammer.” Back in 1994, the US historian H. C. Erik Midelfort dedicated an entire chapter, titled “A Melancholy Emperor and His Mad Son” to Rudolf and his son in his book Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville, 1994). DaCosta Kaufmann dispels this image stating that “convincing evidence does not exist for Rudolf II’s madness” (22). He builds a much more positive image of the emperor (who was also King of Hungary and King of Bohemia, by the way) through a persuasive discussion of various aspects of Rudolf’s cultural activities, activities seen as essential for a ruler of his time.
DaCosta Kaufmann’s book is divided into five chapters. They show Rudolf in relationship to contemporary politics and religion, Rudolf as a collector, as an art and architecture patron, as a patron of science, and as someone actively tied to the wider world through networks of gift exchange and collecting. The man DaCosta Kaufmann paints is hardly a recluse, at least most of the time. DaCosta Kaufmann tells us that “Rudolf’s intense and continuing diplomatic efforts should lead to a revised interpretation of his politics” (86). According to DaCosta Kaufmann, “Rudolf II was an extraordinary ruler” (221). He was a mediator who “continued the temporizing politics of his predecessors” (223). Rudolf’s decision not to marry, far from being a sign of melancholy, despair, or even mental illness, is seen here instead as part of a decades-long political strategy followed by the leaders of the junior branch of the Habsburg dynasty. “These policies accompanied and may well have enabled there to be the longest period of comparative peace in Western and Central Europe in modern times” (223).
This is not the first time an attempt has been made to rehabilitate Rudolf. Both R. J. W. Evans in his classic Rudolf II and His World (Oxford, 1973) and Karl Vocelka in his Rudolf II. und seine Zeit (Vienna, 1985) questioned the exaggerated image of the monarch. Prague tour guides may not have gotten the message, but many scholars recognize that Rudolf II’s failures were often outside of his control, and his image often in the hands of his adversaries, such as his ambitious and scheming little brother Matthias, who eventually succeeded in elbowing Rudolf out of the way on Matthias’s drive to the throne(s). More popular literature, such as Peter Marshall’s The Mercurial Emperor: The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague (London, 2007) continue to focus on Rudolf’s supposed fixation with alchemy and astrology.
DaCosta Kaufmann places even this aspect of the ruler’s cultural interests in the broader context of his time, pointing out that such interests were hardly as uncommon as they may seem. He calls this distorted image of Rudolf “another consequence of the criticism and calumniation of Rudolf’s intellectual interests” (171). One aspect of the argument presented by DaCosta Kaufmann in his defense of Rudolf is that the lines between astronomy and astrology, alchemy and chemistry, the occult and science, were nowhere near as clearly drawn as they are today. Could not Rudolf be seen as a member of a larger “community of rulers comprising patrons and practitioners of many of the sciences, including those now called occult [?]”
Many of DaCosta Kaufmann’s insights and examples could probably not have developed without the tremendous amount of research that has been and is being conducted on the cultural activities of this Central European ruler. For decades now, for example, the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Institute of the History of Art has published an important periodical specifically dedicated to Rudolf II and his time: Studia Rudolphina: Bulletin of the Centre for Research on Art and Culture in the Age of Rudolf II. DaCosta Kaufmann cites the ongoing “Art for Display” project sponsored by this Institute, thanking them for holding a seminar for him in 2022 where some of the preliminary research results were presented (168: n. 78). Multiple important exhibitions starting in the late 80s with the blockbuster Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Kaiser Rudolfs II. (Vienna, 1988–89) have put Rudolfine Prague “on the map.”
It remains to be seen if Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new attempt to rehabilitate this fascinating Habsburg ruler will succeed. The Romantic image of a mad ruler might just be too fixed in the popular historical imagination. For those interested in interrogating the clichés and for thinking about how men ruled in early modern Central Europe, those interested in the politics of painting and culture, this work is worth reading and its images worth contemplating.
