Pathos formulas

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum displays a total of 2,500 square meters of Roman mosaic floors that were rescued by international archaeological teams from the city of Zeugma, which had been built on the banks of the Euphrates in 300 BC and destroyed in 256 AD, before the city was flooded in 2000. This is the largest mosaic museum in the world.

One of the most beautiful and best-preserved 3rd-4th-c. mosaics in the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep depicts the abduction of Europa according to the conventions of ancient images. Europa, the daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, is already sitting on the back of the bull that Zeus transformed into to seduce her. The bull swims with her towards Crete, and to make this more believable, its body ends in a fish tail. For the sake of symmetry, the left half of the picture is filled with a similar pair: a naiad – a sea nymph – sits on the back of a winged water leopard, which also has a fish tail.

It was absolutely not unusual in ancien art for any mammal to acquire a fish tail in a marine environment. The Romans knew from their literary studies that there was a hippo-potamus, a water horse in Egypt, which they imagined as a regular horse with a fish tail. And if there is a water horse, why should not there be a water deer, a water leopard, a water tiger or a sea bear? Vast is the sea, it hides many wonders. For example, the Arion mosaic floor of the Villa Romana di Casale in Sicily, which is roughly the same age as the Europa mosaic in Zeugma, presents us with a multitude of such aquatic mammals:

But there is a strange one among the pictorial conventions that is difficult to explain at first glance. What is the cloth that Europa holds outstreched, to be blown by the wind? And we see the same wind-blown cloth on the Sicilian mosaic above the heads of at least three naiads.

Roman art critics called this formula velificatio, which means velam+facere, that is, “to make a sail” (from one’s own clothes). ANd the one who makes the sail is a velificans. This is how Pliny uses this term in his Naturalis historia 36.29, describing the decoration of Octavia’s portico, on which Aurae velificantes sua veste, the Winds “make sails from their own clothes”. From this we also know what could have decorated Octavia’s portico, which, since the Middle Ages, was used as a fish market in the Jewish quarter, deprived of its original marble covering.

The formula of the velificatio had a double meaning. On the one hand, it suggested dynamics in the mostly static Roman images, which used few elements of movement. It suggested that the scene was actually in violent motion. On the other hand, by the fact that the wind that puffed out the cloth into a sail was actually miraculously blowing “from within”, it also suggested a kind of revelatio, that is, that the veil was lifted from the face of a person who should otherwise remain hidden: that an epiphany was taking place, the manifestation of the divine in this world, similarly to how the light that illuminated Renaissance and Baroque Nativity scenes emanated from the newborn Jesus.

On the eastern side of the Roman Ara Pacis (13-9 BC), the seated Mother Earth or the Peace of Rome is flanked by two nymphs with puffed cloaks, the allegories of  air and water, indicating that, with Augustus, peace had arrived on earth, water and sky.

Neptune’s chariot on a mosaic from Hadrumetum (Sosa Museum, Tunisia). This image also illustrates how the Romans imagined water horses.

Fresco from the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii

The formula was rediscovered from the Renaissance onwards (although it was not completely lost in the Middle Ages): here on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus

It is only natural that the Pre-Raphaelites, who imitated quattrocento compositions, also used the formula, as here in John Williams Waterhouse’s Boreas

Modern art history, starting with Aby Warburg (1866-1929), classifies this formula as one of the pathos formulas. According to Aby Warburg’s definition, the pathos formula or Pathosformel is a pictorial topos which, according to the common consesus of the time, should evoke a certain mood or emotional response from the viewer. We do not encounter most of these formulas in real life – such as puffed-up dresses above the head, or a number of Baroque gestures, because Baroque art in particular used such formulas – but viewers still knew exactly what they should feel when they saw these gestures, and which key the formula provided for the interpretation of the picture.

Pictures, even the most realistic pictures, do not depict reality, but use conventional formulas through which the viewer reconstructs a certain image of reality in himself. In this way, pathos formulas are still with us today, even if we do not pay attention to their unreality and do not reflect on the emotional effect they intend to evoke. To illustrate their persuasive power, let me present here that wide-eyed, wide-mouthed figure who, in advertisements, marvels at the wonderful quality or the wonderfully low price of a merchandise, in short on its epiphany.

In view of this figure, we know exactly how we should feel about the merchandise in question, and what we should do: go and buy it. Even if we never encounter such a facial expression in real life – the pictures have taught us how to interpret it. Although never say never: it is part of the effect of the pathos formulas that after a while the viewers also start to use them, since they know how the gesture will be interpreted by other contemporary viewers. Just as the passionate gestures of Baroque paintings became part of social behavior after a while (and not the other way around), or as nowadays we often react to unexpected news with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth. Not as if this were our instictive gesture, but because this is how we, taught by the ads, convey our astonishment to our contemporaries who also know the respective pathos formula.

Hotel Meissl & Schadn

During the season of the great exhibitions in Vienna from late autumn to early spring, one often walks along the Kärntnerstraße which leads from Stephansdom to the museums. On the corner where you have to turn to the Albertina, an unusual mosaic running across the entire second floor of a building attracts your attention among the hypermodern façades of the elegant shopping street. The figures in the mosaic symbolize different peoples. If one carefully decyphers their identities, they add up to the ethnography of the five continents.


The central axis of the building is, of course, filled with allegories of Europe, with the coat of arms of Austria in the center, surrounded by a woman symbolizing the city of Vienna and an armored German knight. Above them, a man and a woman symbolize trade and industry, the vocations of Europe. From the characteristic peoples of Europe, we can see on the left a Frenchman with a revolutionary Frygian cap, and an Italian with a Doge’s hat, and on the right two hard-to-identify peoples – perhaps an ancient German and one of the lucky Eastern Europeans. At the top of the group rises the genius of Light, which floods all the other continents with the light from here.


On the left axis, the peoples of the New World are lying in happy idleness, a mixture of Indians and Gauchos. Beneath the window, a golden Mayan motif evokes the highest level of civilization they have ever achieved. The pose of the Indian woman evokes the river statues of the Donner Fountain in the neighboring Neumarkt, as well as Michelangelo’s Medici epitaphs. In a strange way, an Austrian Old Shatterhand also appears among them in wild western dress, who brings them the light of Europe and the flag of Austria on a white horse.



In terms of composition and motifs, the third axis to the right is the most exciting one, with the allegories of the peoples of the East. In the middle, between the two windows, opens a horseshoe-shaped Andalusian Moorish gate, through which a young black camel driver steps out, leading his camel on a bridle. To the left is an Indian couple, to the right an Arab one: the stereotypical attribute of the former is the incense, and of the latter, the seductive odalisk. Between the two couples, a Japanese lady in a kimono holds a Chinese vase, alluding to the Japonisme of the turn of the century. The background of the Indian couple includes a stylized Javanese pattern, of the Arabians a Persian rug.



And the most peculiar motif: to the right of the horseshoe-arched gate, above the window, there is a faravahar, the identity symbol of the Iranian Zoroastrians, an allegory of God with the extended wings. True, a little arbitrarily transformed: the usual blessing male figure is missing from the middle of it, and the two bird feet are reinterpreted as cobras. It seems that the artist had already seen the motif, but did not understand it, or considered it a freely variable oriental decorative element.


Where did a Viennese artist see the Zoroastrian symbol of God at the turn of the century? It might be surprising, but he had quite a few occasions to. As Encyclopaedia Iranica describes in detail, commercial and later diplomatic, military and cultural relations between Austria and Persia developed greatly during the 19th century. The Shah, struggling with the pliers of Russia and Britain, found an external ally in Austria, still a great power at the time. From here he asked for support and specialists for the modernization of Persian education and military technology, and there was a considerable Austro-Persian trade between the ports of Trieste and Trabzon. Shah Naser-al-Din, who was of the same age as Francis Joseph and who took the throne in the same year of 1848, also took part in the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, and, after his Austrian visit in 1878, also in the 1891 Vienna Carpet Show, which had a special focus on the Persian carpet industry. A multitude of enthusiastic Austro-Hungarian Orientalists visited the monuments of Persia and published their experiences at home. And they did not overlook the exotic faravahar.

The faravahar in Persepolis, on the 5th-c BC palace of King Darius, on which many 19th-century Austro-Hungarian travelers left their carved signatures

What building could have been adorned with such magnificent mosaics? Nowadays, the ground floor houses a currency exchange, which would somehow justify the display of the peoples of the world, but upstairs there is a clothing store, which obviously would have been completely uninteresting to a significant part of the peoples depicted.

But nowadays, the rest of the building does not even look as it did in its heyday, at the turn of the century, when it was visited from its Kärtnerstraße side by all the peoples of the world, and from the Neuer Markt by the elite of Vienna. In fact, the block, built in 1894-1896 in the Romantic Neo-Gothic style, was the Hotel & Restaurant Meissl & Schadn. From Kärtnerstraße, one of Vienna’s most elegant hotels, whose guests are referenced in the mosaic of the façade made by Eduard Veith, the only element surviving from the building, which was bombed by the Americans and looted and set on fire by the Soviets. And from the Neuer Markt it was one of the best restaurants in the city, praised by contemporary authors as “Rindfleischparadies”.


In fact, the restaurant of Meissl & Schadn offered no less than twenty-four beef dishes with ten different garnishes, all following centuries-old Viennese recipes. It was a privilege to dine here that only Vienna’s elite could enjoy. It is no coincidence that on October 16, 1916 the socialist Friedrich Adler shot dead Prime Minister Count Karl Stürgkh at the dining table of the Groser Speisesaal here in protest against the war. (Count Stürgkh also signed Franz Joseph’s edict To my Peoples). The assassination made both Count Stürgkh and Adler a martyr – the former, in his death, and the latter, during his lifetime – and it further enhanced the reputation of the restaurant. So much that the really high-caliber authors – Karl Kraus, Egon Erwin Kisch, Maximilian Harden – only then devoted articles to the restaurants, in which, in addition to issues of political justice, they also wrote about the other virtues of the dining table. But they were all surpassed by Joseph Wechsberg, whose recollection of Meissl & Schadn’s Tafelspitz is both an anthem to Viennese cuisine and to the disappeared old Vienna.

Joseph Wechsberg, like so many who made the imperial city great, came from the provinces, of a Moravian Jewish family. After studying in Vienna and Paris, he became a journalist in Prague. The Czech government sent him to America in 1938 – just in time – to promote the Czech position on the Sudetenland. From there, he only returned in 1943 as a U.S. Army correspondent. From then on, he wrote only in English, promoting to the American public the disappeared Europe in which he grew up. In his book Blue Trout and Black Truffles: Peregrinations of an Epicure, an apotheosis of European cuisine, published in 1954, he devotes a separate chapter to the beef menu of the former Meissl & Schadn.

“The Hofrat’s Tafelspitz

Few Americans think of boiled beef as the gastronomic treat it is known for in central Europe. In Vienna there was a restaurant that was held in high esteem by local epicures for its boiled beef – twenty-four different varieties of it, to be exact.

The restaurant was Meissl & Schadn, an eating-place of international reputation, and the boiled beef specialties of the house were called Tafelspitz, Tafeldeckel, Rieddeckel, Beinfleisch, Rippenfleisch, Kavalierspitz, Kruspelspitz, Hieferschwanzl, Schulterschwanzl, Schulterscherzl, Mageres Meisel (or Mäuserl), Fettes Meisel, Zwerchried, Mittleres Kügerl, Dünnes Kügerl, Dickes Kügerl, Bröselfleisch, Ausgelöstes, Brustkern, Brustfleisch, Weisses Scherzl, Schwarzes Scherzl, Zapfen, and Ortschwanzl.

The terminology was bound to stump anybody who had not spent the first half of his adult life within the city limits of Vienna. It was concise and ambiguous at the same time; even Viennese patriarchs did not always agree exactly where the Weisses Scherzl ended and the Ortschwanzl began. Fellow Austrians from the dark, Alpine hinterlands of Salzburg and Tyrol rarely knew the fine points of distinction between, say, Tafelspitz, Schwarzes Scherzl and Hieferschwanzl – all referred to in America as brisket or plate of beef – or between the various Kügerls. Old-time Viennese butchers with the steady hand of distinguished brain surgeons were able to dissect the carcass of a steer into thirty-two different cuts, and four qualities, of meat. Among the first-quality cuts were not only tenderloin, porterhouse, sirloin, and prime rib of beef, as elsewhere, but also five cuts used exclusively for boiling: two Scherzls, two Schwanzls, and Tafelspitz. Unlike in present-day America, where a steer is cut up in a less complicated, altogether different manner, in Vienna only the very best beef was good enough to be boiled.

You had to be a butcher, a veterinarian, or a Meissl & Schadn habitué of long standing to know the exact characteristics of these Gustostückerln. Many Viennese had been born in the Austro-Hungarian monachy’s provinces of Upper Austria, Serbia, Slovakia, South Tyrol, Bohemia, or Moravia. (Even today certain pages of the Vienna telephone directory contain as many Czech-sounding names as the Prague directory.) These ex-provincials were eager to obliterate their un-Viennese past; they tried to veneer their arrivisme; they wanted to be more Viennese than the people born and brought up there. One way to show one’s Bodenständigkeit was to display a scholarly knowledge of the technical terms for boiled beef. It was almost like the coded parlance of an exclusive club. In Vienna a person who couldn’t talk learnedly about at least a dozen different cuts of boiled beef, didn’t belong, no matter how much money he’d made, or whether the Kaiser had awarded him the title of Hofrat (court councilor) or Kommerzialrat.

The guests of Meissl & Schadn were thoroughly familiar with the physical build of a steer and knew the exact anatomical location of Kügerls, Scherzls, and Schwanzls. At Meissl & Schadn, precision was the keynote. You didn’t merely order “boiled beef” – you wouldn’t step into Tiffany’s and ask for “a stone” – but made it quite clear exactly what you wanted. If you happened to be a habitué of the house, you didn’t have to order, for they would know what you wanted. A Meissl & Schadn habitué never changed his favorite cut of boiled beef.

The restaurant was part of the famous Hotel Meissl & Schadn on Hoher Markt, which was popular with incognito potentates for its discreet, highly personalized service. The chambermaids looked like abesses and knew the idisyncrasies of every guest. If a man came to Meissl & Schadn who hadn’t been there for ten years, he might find a small, hard pillow under his head because the abbess hadn’t forgotten that he liked to sleep hard.

There were two restaurants, the Schwemme on the ground floor – a plebeian place with lower prices and checkered tablecloths – and the de-luxe Restaurant on the second floor, with high prices and snow-white damask tablecloths. The upper regions were under the command of the great Heinrich, who was already a venerable octogenarian when I first saw him in the late twenties.

* * *

He was a massive, corpulent man with the pink cheeks of a healthy baby and the wisdom of a Biblical patriarch. His hands and jowls were sagging and he had serious trouble keeping his eyes open. He never budged from his command post near the door, from where he could overlook all tables, like an admiral on the bridge of his flagship surveying the units of his fleet. Few people in Vienna had ever seen an admiral in the flesh, but everybody agreed that Heinrich looked more an admiral than many a real one. Once in a while his pulse would stop beating and his eyelids would droop, and he would remain suspended between life and death, but the défilé of the waiters carrying silver plates with various cuts of boiled beef never failed to revive him.

Heinrich had spent his life in the faithful service of emperors, kings, archdukes, Hofräte, artists, and generals, bowing to them, kissing the hands of their ladies, or wives. His bent back had taken on the curvature of the rainbow, reflecting the fine nuances of his reverence, from the impersonal half-bow, with which he would dispose of the nouveaux riches, to the affectionate deep-bow, which was reserved for his old habitués, impoverished court councilors, and aristocrats living from the sale of one painting to the next.

Between Heinrich and his habitués there ruled a highly civilized, strictly regulated protocol. Upon entering the restaurant the guest would be greeted by Heinrich – or, rather, by Heinrich’s bent back expressing the exact degree of respect in which the guest was held. The depth of Heinrich’s bow depended upon the guest’s social standing, his taste for, and his knowledge of, boiled beef, and his seniority. It took a man from twenty-five to thirty years to earn the full deep-bow. Such people were greeted by “Meine Verehrung, küss die Hand”, which was breathed rather than whispered, and never spoken; Heinrich wasn’t able to speak any more.

The guest would be taken to his table by one of Heinrich’s captains. Each guest always had the same table and the same waiter. There was mutual respect between waiter and guest; when either one died, the other would go to his funeral. The waiter would hold the chair for the guest; he would wait until the guest was comfortably seated. One of Heinrich’s axioms was that “a man doesn’t enjoy his beef unless he sits well.”

When the guest was seted, the waiter would stand in front of him, waiting for the guest’s order. That was a mere formality, since the waiter knew what the guest wanted. The guest would nod to the waiter; the waiter, in turn, would nod to the commis; and the commis would depart for the kitchen.

The commis’s order to the cooks had the highly personal flavor that distinguished all transactions at Meissl & Schadn. It would be “The Schulterscherzl for General D.” or “Count H. is waiting for his Kavalierspitz.” This implied a high degree of finickiness on the part of the habitué, who wouldn’t be satisfied with so narrow a definition as the Kavalierspitz; his refined plate demanded that he gets his private, very special part of a Kavalierspitz.

After a suitable interval the commis would bring in the meat on a massive, covered silver plate. Some people would have a consommé before the meat; clear consommé was the only preceeding dish Heinrich approved of. The commis was followed by the piccolo, an eight-year-old gnome wearing a tiny tuxedo and a toy bow tie. The piccolo’s job was to serve the garniture: grated horseardish, prepared with vinegar (Essigkren), with apple sauce (Apfelkren), or with whipped cream (Oberskren); mustard, pickles, boiled potatoes, boiled cabbage, spinach, or anything else the guest wanted with the meat.

An elaborate ritual would ensue. The waiter had been standing motionless, watching his subordinates as they put the various plates on a small serving-table next to the guest’s table. Now the waiter would step forward, lift the cover off the silver plate, and perform the “presentation” of the meat. This was another mere motion, since the guest’s enthusiastic approval was a foregone conclusion. The waiter would serve the meat on a hot plate, place it on the table in front of the guest, make a step back, and glance at Heinrich. Then the guest, in turn, would glance at Heinrich.

There followed a minute heavy with suspense. From his command post Heinrich would review the table, with a short, sweeping glance taking in the meat, the garniture, the accessories, the setting, the position of chair and table. It was hard to understand how he managed to see anything through the narrow slit of his almost closed eyelids; but see he did. He would give a slight nod of approval to the waiter, and to the guest. Only then would a genuine habitué start to eat.

* * *

Words of ordinary prose have generally been held inadequate to express the delights of boiled beef at Meissl & Schadn. Many Austrian poets were moved to rhymed praise while they regaled themselves on a well-night perfect Hieferschwanzl. But poets, especially Austrian poets, are rarely given to tenacity of purpose, and somehow the poets didn’t bother to write down their poems after leaving the restaurant. Richard Strauss, an ardent devotee of the Beinfleisch, often considered writing a tone poem about his favorite dish, but after he finished his ballet Schlagobers (Whipped Cream), he thought that another major composition devoted to an Austrian food speccialty might be misinterpreted by posterity and resented by his admirers in Germany, who, like most Germans, disliked Vienna. Strauss, not unaware of his considerable German royalties, dropped the project.

“Too bad he did,” a Viennese music-critic and Strauss-admirer said not long ago. “A tone poem on Beinfleisch might have surpassed even the transcendental beauty of Death and Transfiguration.”

* * *

There was a reason for the excellence of the beef served at Meissl & Schadn. The restaurant owned herds of cattle that were kept inside a large sugar refinery in a village north of Vienna. There the steers were fed on molasses and sugar-beet mash, which gave their meat its extraordinary marble texture, taste, tenderness, and juice. The animals were slaughtered just at the right time, and the meat was kept in the refrigerators from one to two weeks.

In Vienna, in those days, boiled beef was not a dish; it was a way of life. Citizens of the Danube capital, venturing into hostile, foreign lands where boiled beef was simply boiled beef, would take Viennese cookbooks along that contained the anatomical diagram of a steer, with numbered partitions and subdivisions indicating the Gustostückerln. This was a wise precaution. Even in German-speaking lands the technical expressions denoting various cuts of beef differ from land to land. Vienna’s Tafelspitz (brisket), for instance, is called Tafelstück by the Germans and Huft by the German-speaking Swiss. A Viennese Beinfleisch is called Zwerchried in Germany and plat-de-côte among the Swiss.

* * *

Vienna’s boiled-beef-eaters are vehement chauvinists. They don’t recognize the American New England dinner, the French pot-au-feu, or the petite marmite.

“The meat of the petite marmite is cooked in an earthenware stock-pot,” a Tafelspitz scholar explained to me. “And the necks and wings of fowl are added. Incredible!” He shuddered slightly.

The Viennese experts take a dim view of boeuf saignant à la ficelle, rare beef with a string, a great French dish. A piece of fillet is tightly wrapped around with a string, roasted quickly in a very hot oven, and dipped for sixty seconds – not for fift-eight or sixty-two, but for sixty – in boiling consommé, just before it is served. The juice is kept inside the pinkish meat by the trick of quick roasting and boiling.

But the Viennese do recognize Tellerfleisch, another local speciality. Tellerfleisch (the name means “plate meat”) is eaten only between meals. It consists of a soup plate filled two thirds with clear beef soup, boiled carrots, split green onions, chopped parsley, with a piece of almost but not quite boiled beef and several slices of marrow sprinkled with chopped chive.

There were two schools of cooking beef in Vienna. People who cared more about a strong soup than about the meat put the raw meat into cold water and let it cook gently, for hours, on a slow fire. They would add parsley, carrots, green onions celery, salt, and pepper. After an hour the white foam that had formed on top was skimmed off. Sometimes half an onion, fried on the open range plate, was put in to give the soup a dark color. Others, who wanted their beef juicy and tender, put it straight into boiling water and let it simmer. This would close the pores of the meat and keep the juices inside.

* * *

The Meissl & Schadn was hit by American bombs in March 1945. A few weeks later, Red Army liberators tossed gasoline-sokaed rags and gas into the half-destroyed building and set fire to it. The hotel burned down. But the tradition that had made Meissl & Schadn a great restaurant had come to an end long before. The restaurant was a creation of the Habsburg monarchy; its prosperity and decay reflected the greatness and decline of the Danube empire. With the help of Heinrich, it survived the hectic twenties, but when he died, the restaurant was doomed.

“People would come in and ask for ʻboiled beef’,” an ex-habitué now remembers. “It was shocking.”

Vienna’s butchers have forgotten the fine points of cutting up a steer, and the chefs don’t know how to slice a Tafelspitz. The small pieces at the pointed end of the triangular Tafelspitz are cut lengthwise, but the large, long, fibrous, upper end must be cut along its breadth.

Today most Viennese restaurants serve Rindfleisch or Beinfleisch, without any specification. The cattle are raised, and the meat is cut and cooked without the loving care that made it such a treat. It is often tough and dry, and served by ignorant waiters who recommend to their customers expensive “outside” dishes, such as Styrian pullet or imported lobster. The waiters are more interested in the size of their tips than in the contentment of the guest’s palate. Restaurant-owners, operating on the get-rich-quick principle, no longer keep herds of cattle inside sugar refineries. It wouldn’t be profitable, they say; besides, many refineries are located in the Soviet Zone of Austria.

* * *

Where Meissl & Schadn once stood, there is now an office building. Most of Heinrich’s habitués are dead, and the few survivors have been scattered to the winds by the last war. Once in a while two of them may meet in an undistinguished Viennese restaurant whose menu offers a Tafelspitz, a first-quality cut of boiled beef which, the old habitués can see at a glance, is really Kruspelspitz, a fourth-quality cut, somewhat comparable to an American chuck or round of beef.

At such moments of gloom the old habitués are likely to remember, with a nostalgic sigh, the day in the late twenties when old, dignified Hofrat von B., one of Heinrich’s favorite guests, came into the dining-room of Meissl & Schadn, exactly at twelve fifteen, as he had done almost every day in the past twenty-seven years, and was ceremoniously guided to his table. Everybody knew, of course, that the Herr Hofrat came for “his” Tafelspitz, the narrow part of that special cut which almost, but not quite, touches another first-quality Viennese cut, called Hieferschwanzl. If the Kaiser himself had come in, he wouldn’t have got the Hofrat’s particular piece of Tafelspitz. Heinrich was loyal to his habitués.

On that day, as on any other day, there was the familiar ceremonial after the Hofrat had sat down. In due time the commis appeared with the covered silver plate, followed by the piccolo who carried the Apfelkren. But at this point the waiter did not lift the cover off the silver plate to “present” the meat, as he’d always done. Instead he discreetly glanced at Heinrich. Then the old man himself advanced toward the Hofrat’s table, slowly and cautiously, like a large ocean liner moving toward the pier. Everybody looked up at him. It had become very quiet in the dining-room.

Heinrich bent his back until his mouth almost touched the Hofrat’s ear.

“I’m disconsolate, Herr Hofrat,” he whispered. “A regrettable accident in the kitchen. The Hofrat’s Tafelspitz has been cooked too long. It has –” Heinrich didn’t have the strength to finish the sentence, but the tips of his fingers twitched, indicating that the meat had dissolved in the soup like snowflakes in the March sunshine. He was very pale and his jowls were sagging. He looked as though he had been dead for a while and had been resurrected by mistake.

His breath almost gave out, but with a supreme effort he continued: “I have taken the liberty to order for the Herr Hofrat the rear part of the Hieferschwanzl, close to, and very much like, the Tafelspitz.”

He made an effort to open his eyes and nearly succeeded. At his nod, the waiter lifted the cover off the plate with a flourish and presented the meat. There it was, a large, beautiful cut, tender and juicy, sprinkled with consommé, as delicate and enticing a piece of boiled beef as you could find anywhere in the world.

The Hofrat sat up stiffly. He cast one short, shocked glance at the meat. When he spoke, at last, his voice had the ring of arrogance – arrogance instilled in him by generations of boiled-beef-eating ancestors who had been around in Vienna in 1683 while the city fought off the assault of the Turks and saved – for a while, at least – Western civilization.

“My dear Heinrich,” the Hofrat said, with a magnificent sweep of his hand, and accentuating every single syllable, “you might just as well have offered me a veal cutlet.” A slight shiver seemed to run down his spine. He got up. “My hat and cane, please.”

He strode stiffly toward the door. Heinrich made his deepest full-bow, and he remained bent down until the Hofrat had left. But people sitting near Heinrich swear that there was a smile on his face. He looked almost happy.

Tigers in Berlin

Museums have reopened in Berlin, and one goes to museum again. The ancient collection of the Altes Museum on Museum Island is an intimate acquaintance, I missed it. Coming out, I sit down on the stairs to flip through, in the spring sunshine, the catalog of the new exhibition on Greek portrait sculptures, about which I will soon write. And as I raise my head, I suddenly take notice of something I have seen a thousand times: the two bronze statues flanking the steps of the museum. Two equestrian statues to the right and left, their riders stabbing two big cats: the woman to the right a tiger, and the man to the left a lion. They did not get there today: the amazon in 1843, and the man in 1861. Yet now I think about it for the first time: why are here, in front of the house of fine arts, the temple of the spirit, two such action statues, whose figures in obvious superior position – on horseback, hunting with weapon – are brutally massacring endangered protected animals?

I am not alone with this question. The Reclam Kunstführer Berlin, to which I first turn for an answer in the museum shop, is also perplexed, stating that “the sculptures have nothing to do with the museum’s program.”

How and why did they get here anyway?

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the designer of the museum originally wanted to place here the equestrian statues of the two Prussian kings donating the museum, Frederick William III and IV. In fact, the museum, built between 1823 and 1830 as Königliches Museum, housed the royal private collections, and aimed at sharing their antique heritage with the educated bourgeoisie. The museum thus logically fits into the building complex surrounding the Lustgarten, the royal ornamental garden: to the south the royal palace (whose reconstruction, after the devastation of the war and the hiatus of the GDR times, will be finished this year) as the symbol of power, to the east the Berliner Dom as that of the church, to the west the Zeughaus, the armory and then military museum as that of the army, and to the north the museum as that of the spirit.

However, Frederick William IV did not want royal statues here. Nevertheless, the idea was already on its way, and the stair railings cried out after equestrian statues.

Friedrich Thiele: The Altes Museum, 1830, with two equestrian statues that never existed.

The first equestrian statue, the Amazon killing a tiger or simply Amazon by the Silesia-born but Berlin-educated sculptor August Kiss was placed on the right rail in 1843. The September 30 issue of Illustrirte Zeitung reported in detail about its set-up and also provided art criticism. According to the author monogrammed L. R., the greatest merit of the work is that it was cast from public donation. The artist “was bold enough” to model the sculpture in life size in his studio, and only later a “large association of enthusiastic friends of art, led by the King” (of which Schinkel was also a member) collected the sum necessary to casting. This is, then, the first – albeit not visible – link between the museum and the sculpture: the active participation – “sacrifice” – of the educated burgeoisie in the enrichment of the new center of bourgeois culture – or, in the vocabulary and conception, its “temple”.

Illustrirte Zeitung, September 30, 1843. The muscle men setting up the statue in the engraving seem to be helping the amazon with their sticks against the tiger.

The spirit of the age also saw in the sculpture the embodiment of the victory of the spirit over animal savagery, that is, exactly the Bildungsziel the museum served for. It is no coincidence that August Kiss’ other masterpiece was the statue of St. George (1855) in front of the Nikolaikirche, whose dragon has been traditionally associated with evil, and its knockdown thus symbolizes the victory of good.


The prolific critic Karl August Varnhagen also praises the sculpture for this reason: “It is a great, bold, expressive and powerful work. … One can see that the horse is already lost, but the person is triumphing. The beautiful amazon radiating with spiritual superiority will survive, and will at least take revenge for the horse.” This concern for a secondary figure is unusual from a critic, but we know that Varnhagen fought the Napoleonic wars under Austrian, Prussian and Russian flags, and was able to exactly gauge what it means to lose a horse in an emergency.

However, no one is yet concerned for the tiger at this time. The only criticism of Illustrirte Zeitung was that while the amazon and the horse are beautifully crafted, the tiger hangs around the horse’s neck as a “shapeless, bag-like mass”, and one cannot find a vantage point from which its entire figure can be seen at once. I can confirm this myself as a photographer.

Photo by Adolphe Braun & Compagnie, ca. 1860-66

The statue was a great success. Prussia entered it for the 1851 London World’s Fair, where it stood in the Eastern Wing of the Crystal Palace, among the exhibits of the German Customs Union (there is no Germany yet at that time!). Michael Leapman writes about it in his The world for a shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 shaped a nation (2011):

„A little further on was the German sculptor August Kiss’s depiction of an Amazon on horseback attacked by a tiger, whose combination of energy and delicate modelling made it many people’s favourite work in all of the Crystal Palace. The tiger’s claws were embedded in the horse’s body while the Amazon held her spear aloft, ready to deliver the decisive blow.”

John Absolon: The Eastern Wing of the Crystal Palace, 1851

The statue’s popularity in Britain is evidenced by the fact that George Eliot used it as a metaphor in one of her critiques four years later. Speaking about a short story by Charles Kingsley, she praises its romantic impetus and faithfulness to nature, as opposed to the mass of writings that merely copy each other and use neo-classical commonplaces. And she suddenly uses this parallel: “After a surfeit of Hebes and Psyches, or Madonnas and Magdalens, it is a refreshment to turn to Kiss’ Amazon.” The memory of the statue was obviously still alive among the educated English audience if Eliot could refer to it like this, without any introduction. Interestingly, the thirteen year older critique of the Illustrirte Zeitung criticized the sculpture exactly for what Eliot praised it: that it does not follows the neo-classical ideal of beauty, and “instead of maximizing the unfolding of the nobility and force of the most beautiful organic forms” it aims at “terror and horror”, and instead of “spiritually recharging and moving the bosom and the emotions” at the “strong arousal of the nervous system”: “plastic art here has completely gone in the direction of modern romantic literature.”

And John Ruskin could refer to the memory of the exhibition even as late as 1859 in his Berlin report published in Scotsman: “Kiss’ Amazon makes a good grotesque for the side of the Museum steps; it was seen to disadvantage in London.”


In this 1854 photograph, the Amazon is still alone along the steps of the museum. But her mate, the lion killer, “der Löwenkämpfer” is already on the way. It was created between 1847 and 1856 by Albert Wolff, who was a student of the same Christian Daniel Rauch, founder of the Berlin School of Sculpture and leading sculptor of 19th-century Germany, as Kiss. As early as 1843, the Illustrirte Zeitung mentions a small statue seen by its author in Rauch’s workshop around 1831, depicting a naked Numidian rider stabbing an attacking lion with a spear. According to the author, this model inspired – with the mentioned changes – the statue of Kiss, and it was also followed, probably without significant changes, by Wolff’s lion killer.

The Löwenkämpfer. Above, in the 1860s photo by Senior Moser, and below, in the 1940s picture by Heinz Stockfleth

According to the literature, Rauch from the outset intended his lion killer for the stairs of the museum, and Schinkel, who died in 1841, knew and supported this. This may have helped the setting-up of the earlier completed Amazon, and this explains why August Kiss undertook so boldly, without an adequate financial background, to model his statue life-size: he probably recognized that Rauch’s model tuned the audience to such an equestrian statue. However, by 1861 this mood has largely passed. The critic Franz Kugler, who in 1843 still praised the setting-up of the Amazon, saying it fitted well to the (since then destroyed) frescoes of Schinkel in the museum lobby, in 1861 already wrote about the lion killer the same what is our first thought a hundred years later, in a completely changed atmosphere of reception: “In vain we look for a connection between the temple of peaceful arts and such a wild depiction of barbarian roughness.” Yet the sculpture is much more neo-classical, more balanced than its 1843 predecessor.

Albert Wolff managed to place one more equestrian statue in front of the Altes Museum: that of Frederick William III, in 1871. This statue was fused in 1944 for war purposes.

Such neo-classical genre statues are often inspired by ancient sculptures, or at least by ancient descriptions of works of art that did not survive. What could have been the ancient inspiration of the two big cat killers?

We know no statue of a tiger or lion killer from antiquity. But we do know reliefs or two-dimensional representations of this topic. One of them is right here, in the museum: a mosaic from around 130 AD from the Tivoli Villa Hadriana, on which centaurs, i.e. horse-men fight with three big cats: a tiger, a lion and a panther. The tiger bites with its claws into the body of the centaur laying on the ground just as the tiger of the Amazon does with the horse. The museum purchased this mosaic around 1840, so both sculptors could see it.




For today’s recipient, this image feels like an overwritten fantasy. It is too much by half. Three big prey cats attacking at once? and centaurs? But most probably this was the originally intended effect. The mosaic had to convey concentrated exoticism, and the key elements of this were the transitorial human-animals living somewhere far away, on the edge of the oikumene, as well as the tiger. For the Romans, tiger was a trademark of exoticism. In the 4th-century Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily, one of the largest surviving Roman mosaic ensembles, the floor of the great central cross corridor is adorned with the scene of the “great game hunting”, where we see hunting and animal capture in Africa to the left, and in Asia to the right. The scenes on the left are quite authentic, as the Romans knew Africa well, and probably the owner of the villa played an important role in capturing large African animals and transporting them to the Roman circus. On the right, however, which they only knew from hearsay, hell breaks lose. Alles geht, from rhinoceros to griffin. And among the exotic animals, the tiger plays an emblematic role, sort of a hallmark of being in a world of fairy tales.



The Romans first saw a tiger in 20 BC, which was brought by an Indian embassy to the island of Samos as a gift to the emperor. And Augustus, as Pliny reports in his Naturalis historia 8.25, managed to stage a tiger in public only in 13 AD, at the inauguration of Marcellus’s theater. True, in the Gladiator, the late 2nd-century emperor Commodus was able to muster up as much as twelve tigers into the Colosseum just to end up unfairly with Centurion Maximus, but that’s not the only excess in that film.

The Asian scenes of the Villa Romana also include a Pliny story from Naturalis historia 8.25, the one which Centurion Fungus Maximus Tertius wanted to see on his mosaic floor in Zeugma. That is, if the hunter abducts the tiger’s kids, it will follow him, but then the hunter throws a round mirror (a polished metal sphere or convex metal plate) in front of it, in which it sees itself small and lingers with it for a while, believing seeing its kid. Here we see the hunter with the caterpillar-like little tigers on his chest galloping up the boat ready to depart, and the busy tiger behind him. The mere fact that this form of hunting was portrayed as a promising opportunity on the floor of the villa of an otherwise serious large-scale African animal capture specialist shows how exotic an animal the tiger was.





The exotic character of the tiger is also evident in the villa’s sea scene. Here the artists, inspired by the horse / water horse (hyppo-potamos) dichotomy, created some similar aquatic animals for the depths of the inexhaustible sea, next to the sea gods and nayads. Among them is the water tiger.



Probably the exoticism of the tiger attracted the amazon as an additional character, as it did the griffin on the mosaic of the villa. An exotic animal needs an exotic hunter, like on the floor of Villa Hadriana. And besides, the verses of Virgil (Aeneis 11.576-577), well known to every Bildungsbürger say that the amazon wears tiger skin:

Pro crinali auro, pro longae tegmine pallae
Tigridis exuviae per dorsum a vertice pendent.

(Instead of gold jewelry on her hair and a long robe, tiger skin hangs down on her back.)

And someone had to kill that tiger. The statue at the entrance of the Altes Museum was seen as an illustration of this verse by the little Bildungsbürgers coming here on a class trip, as long as this category existed.

The world has changed a lot since then. It became clear exactly here in Berlin, that human spirit did not prevail over animal savagery. And we have learned to see in the tiger and other animals the spirit of nature endangered by human savagery. Like here next to me, on the firewall of the Birkholz senior center in Charlottenburg.

“[Can you] see me? My life matters.” “Let’s imagine a world, in which every being is protected.”

We see this humanization of the tiger on the front page of today’s Die Zeit, where it figures as an illustration of the article “Can we still trust?” both as a scary animal (whom we may not be able to trust) and as a being endangered and longing for trust just like us. Following the pattern of the biblical topos where the lion lies with the sheep and the tiger with the amazon.