Word: wittelsbach
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...point is spectacularly documented in a dramatic display of 907 paintings, drawings, costumes, stage models, furniture and other rarely seen bric-a-brac commissioned and closely supervised in their execution by Ludwig for his many projects. The lot is installed for the summer in a wing of the Wittelsbach family palace, formally known as the Munich Residence. Selected from Ludwig's three castles, from vaults and state theatrical museums, and sumptuously installed in velvet-hung, stagily lit galleries, their magpie splendors represent the culmination of Ludwig's eclectic vision...
...Gaggle of Princelings. A ring of royalty surrounds Munich, making it the society center of Germany. The gaggle of local princelings includes Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, lesser-known Hatzfeldts and Croys, but the dominant family is the Wittelsbachs, who ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918, when Kurt Eisner's revolution threw them out. The Wittelsbachs still live in the splendid Nymphenburg Castle- Munich's Versailles-and their shadow court dominates the city's social life. At the Aristocrats' Ball, held earlier this month in the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, only those patricians with at least 32 titled ancestors...
Painting in Gems. The Wittelsbach treasure represents some of the finest works of a moribund art in which precious stones, rather than paint, provided color, and malleable gold and silver, rather than marble, was shaped to the sculptor's concept of form. The Schatzkammer's most ostentatious piece, an equestrian statue of the knight St. George, has 2,291 diamonds, 406 rubies and 209 pearls-and an artistic value transcending them all. Almost unnoticed beneath its bright blanket of jewels, the horse's opal eye flashes balefully from a smooth, stylized head of chalcedony. The swoop...
...roly-poly ruler of Renaissance Bavaria, diamonds were a duke's best friend. Albrecht V nearly emptied the privy purse in 1565 to buy the 27 jewel-studded pieces-primarily cups and goblets-that formed the original Schatzkammer (treasure chamber) of the Wittelsbach family, which ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918. But to Albrecht, competing for glory with monarchs from Madrid to Moscow, it was worth every pfennig. Over the centuries, the treasure grew in splendor and size; its 1,224 pieces rank it with the four largest royal treasure chambers that survived the decline of Europe...
Before 1958, only a fraction of the Wittelsbach Schatzkammer's contents had been shown to the public, and then only in a cramped, subterranean vault. The Bavarian government decided to bring the treasure out of the dark, spent $250,000 in preparing new quarters in a wing of the family's sprawling Munich residence, which is a replica of Florence's Pitti Palace and a next-door neighbor to the rebuilt Nationaltheater (TIME, Dec. 6). Now-slowly, because it is not much publicized-the Schatzkammer is becoming one of the show attractions of Europe (see opposite page...