Panel E, ‘Orient’, in the Portrait Collection of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM)

Abstract Panel E, ‘Orient’, at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) is the focus of my work in progress. I look into its presentation in the museum, and the collection of small portraits of which it is part. Panel E is composed of 34 portraits of rulers from the ‘Balkans and the Orient’. The portraits belonged to Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II's (1529–1595) broad collection of wonders and objects, suits of armour, and biographies, which he put together in his homestead, Ambras Castle in Austria's Tyrol. My research looks at these little portraits in the changing context of their roughly 440 years of existence. What did they, their production, collection, inclusion and combination signify in the sixteenth century, and what in the twenty-first? The completed work is scheduled for publication in the Ottomania series by Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, Vienna, in 2025.