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Consuming Utopia

Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism

developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read
utopian fiction (including dystopian and anti-utopian) from the critical perspective
of cultural studies.
With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself,
John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on
utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of
utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of produ-
cing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a ‘politics’, it
is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read,
rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in
cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the
meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics.
An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of
great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary stu-
dies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory.

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in
Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK, and Chair Professor of
the Chang Jiang Scholar Programme, Shaanxi Normal University, China.
Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Adapting Endings from Book to Screen

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Edited by Armelle Parey and Shannon Wells-Lassagne

Migration, Identity, and Belonging

Defining Borders and Boundaries of the Homeland
Edited by Margaret Franz and Kumarini Silva

Exploring Seriality on Screen

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Edited by Ariane Hudelet and Anne Crémieux

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture

Place, Tourism and Belonging
Edited by Nicky van Es, Stijn Reijnders, Leonieke Bolderman, and Abby Waysdorf

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Situated, Embodied and Performed Ways of Being, Engaging and Belonging
Edited by Fiona Blaikie

Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology

Seeing through the Mirrorshades
Anna McFarlane

Consuming Utopia
Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading
John Storey

Language, Image, and Power in Luso-Hispanic Cultural Studies

Theory and Practice
Edited by Susan Larson
Consuming Utopia
Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading

John Storey
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 John Storey
The right of John Storey to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
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the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Storey, John, 1950- author.
Title: Consuming utopia : cultural studies and the politics of
reading / John Storey.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Series: Routledge research in cultural and media studies |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Contents: Culture and power -- The utopian contrast -- Dystopian and
anti-utopian fiction -- Textual politics -- Habitualization, defamiliarization
and utopian reading -- Reading and the education of discontent.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021019558 (print) | LCCN 2021019559 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367818777 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032067285 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003010586 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Utopias in literature. | Dystopias in literature |
Fiction--History and criticism. | Books and reading--Political aspects. |
Popular culture--Philosophy. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PN3448.U7 S76 2022 (print) | LCC PN3448.U7 (ebook) |
DDC 809.3/9372--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021019558
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021019559

ISBN: 978-0-367-81877-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-06728-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01058-6 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003010586

Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
For Yen
Contents

List of figures viii

Preface ix

1 Culture and power 1

2 The utopian contrast 13
3 Dystopian and anti-utopian fiction 30
4 Textual politics 48
5 Habitualization, defamiliarization, and utopian reading 63
6 Reading and the education of discontent 85
7 Postscript 105

References 109
Index 115
Figures

6.1 At the seaside: mass culture and working-class culture 88

Preface

In Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies: On Refusing to be Realistic (Storey

2019), I discussed utopianism across a range of different examples, both theoretical
and historical. In Consuming Utopia: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading,
my focus narrows to one example, utopian fiction (both dystopian and anti-uto-
pian). In critical discussions it is quite common to encounter the argument that
such work is political. While I agree, and share Fredric Jameson’s insistence that
‘the political perspective [is] the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpreta-
tion’ (1981: 17), too often this means little more than a critical commentary on the
politics contained within textuality; what Bertolt Brecht calls ‘solutions on paper’
(1980: 72; italics in original). For these politics to have an impact they have to
move from the discursive to the material, from writing to social practice. We can
argue endlessly that this or that text is political, but unless someone reads it and
acts upon what they read, this is a politics that will hardly trouble the prevailing
structures of power.
Consumption is absolutely crucial to the production of politics beyond the text.
Therefore, the primary argument of Consuming Utopia is that if utopian fiction
has a politics, its fundamental location is in social practices of reading. Contrary to
a particular common sense, books do not change the world. We might point to the
Bible, the Quran or the Communist Manifesto and say these books changed the
world, when what we really mean is that the readers of these books made the
change. In other words, the real politics of utopian fiction must be found outside
the text. Books inspire change by enabling readers to see the world differently and
then, on the basis of this different way of seeing, to act to change it. Therefore, a
discussion of the politics of utopian fiction has to be a discussion of reading and
readers. Not readers as proposed by textuality, but actual, material readers who
pick up books and act on what they read. As Raymond Williams pointed out in
Marxism and Literature, the production of meaning is ‘a practical material activ-
ity’ (1977: 34) and in the course of Consuming Utopia, and in the best traditions of
cultural studies, I will attempt to show how reading utopian fiction may work to
make meaning material and social and therefore available for politics.
In the ‘Introduction’ to the 2016 edition of Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge
Piercy makes the excellent observation, ‘The point of writing about the future is
not to predict it . . . The point of such writing is to influence the present’ (vii). It is
x Preface
always difficult to do what we cannot imagine, therefore, to make change we have
to first be able to imagine change. As Karl Marx argued in volume one of Capital,

A . . . bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells.

But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that
the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
(1976: 284)

The ability to imagine the world in a different way, disturbing the ‘naturalness’
and ‘inevitability’ of the historical here and now, is the first moment in changing
the world. Imagination can challenge the world to be otherwise as we learn to be
realistic beyond what currently counts as reality. Utopia is not a destination, it is
a desire; a refusal to be defined or confined by what is currently considered pos-
sible. Of course, reading utopian fiction is not the same as going on strike,
marching in a demonstration or winning an election. But what it can do is help
develop critical imagination. When read as interrogative, not imperative, we may
begin to see political possibilities, as we encounter questions, not answers, and
questioning is what utopian fiction should encourage us to do. It is from asking
questions that we realize and articulate the limits and possibilities of ruling rea-
lity. In other words, utopian fiction is radical not because of the solutions it
explicitly points to in the elsewhere but because of the problems it implicitly
identifies in the here and now. If this encourages new questions, and enables new
ways of seeing, we might have something we can call the politics of utopian
fiction.

About this book

The book will begin with an outline of ‘culture and power’ in cultural studies.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a general theoretical frame through
which to understand the arguments of the next five chapters. Chapter 2 discusses
the utopian contrast that invites readers to take sides in an argument about social
change. In Chapter 3 we will consider the spaces of hope that exist in dystopian
fiction and the hopeless reliance on a fixed and unchanging ‘human nature’ that
structures the anti-utopian novel. Chapter 4 examines textual fetishism, while
chapter 5 explores the relationship between habitualization and defamiliarization.
In chapter 6 we will arrive at the very heart of my argument, the role played by
readers in the politics of utopian fiction. The book concludes with a brief
Postscript.
Like radical utopianism itself, what I propose in Consuming Utopia are not
answers but questions, and as William Blake observes in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d’ (2004: 184).
When darkness falls, in Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’, as one
century gives way to another, the speaker sees only cause for despondency. But
when a thrush begins to sing with ‘joy illimited’ (unlimited), he wonders if the
bird knows that better times will come: ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew/
 Preface xi
And I was unaware’ (1980: 14). The reading of utopian fiction can be experi-
enced like the song of the thrush, enabling a reader to actively find hope where
before there had not existed grounds for such a possibility. And if hope leads to
action, then we have found the politics of utopian fiction.

John Storey, January 2021

1 Culture and power

In this opening chapter I will outline the dominant concept of culture operating in
cultural studies. My purpose here is to establish a theoretical framework which I
can then use in later chapters to discuss the possibility of a politics of utopian
fiction.

Culture as shared meanings

Cultural studies works with a very particular concept of culture. It defines it as a
network of meanings that are made concrete in particular social practices with
particular material objects. This definition derives from the work of Raymond
Williams.1 In ‘The analysis of culture’, a founding text in cultural studies, Williams
introduced three new ways of thinking about culture: first, the ‘anthropological’
position, which sees culture as ‘a description of a particular way of life’ (2019: 29);
second, the proposition that culture ‘expresses certain meanings and values’ (ibid.);
third, the claim that the work of cultural analysis should be the ‘clarification of the
meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular
culture’ (ibid.).
Williams’ new definition broadens what counts as culture: instead of it being
defined as only the ‘elite’ texts and practices (ballet, opera, classical music, litera-
ture), it is redefined to include as culture, for example, pop music, television,
cinema, advertising, going on holiday, utopian fiction, etc. However, another
aspect of his definition has proved even more important for cultural studies: the
connection he makes between culture and signification. The importance of a par-
ticular way of life is that it ‘expresses certain meanings and values’. Cultural ana-
lysis from the perspective of this definition ‘is the clarification of the meanings and
values implicit in a particular way of life’ (Williams 2019: 29). Moreover, culture
as a ‘realized signifying system’, as Williams (1981a) would later call it, is not
reducible to ‘a particular way of life’; rather, it is fundamental to the shaping and
holding together of all ways of life. This is not to reduce everything ‘upwards’ to
culture as a realized signifying system, but it is to insist that culture, defined in this
way, should be understood ‘as essentially involved in all forms of social activity’
(13). While there is more to life than signifying systems, it is nevertheless the case
that ‘it would … be wrong to suppose that we can ever usefully discuss a social
DOI: 10.4324/9781003010586-1
2 Culture and power
system without including, as a central part of its practice, its signifying systems, on
which, as a system, it fundamentally depends’ (207). In other words, signification is
fundamental to all human activities; it saturates the social. Nevertheless, while
culture as a signifying system is ‘deeply present’ (209) in all human activities, it
remains the case that ‘other quite different human needs and actions are sub-
stantially and irreducibly present’ (ibid.). Moreover, in certain social activities
signification becomes ‘dissolved’ into what he calls ‘other needs and actions (ibid.).
To dissolve can mean two quite different things: to disappear or to become liquid
and form part of a solution. For example, if a parliament is dissolved it ceases to
exist. However, when we dissolve sugar in tea, the sugar does not disappear;
rather, it becomes an invisible but fundamental part of the drink. It is this second
sense of dissolve which best captures Williams’s usage. Nevertheless, the ambiguity
of the term has allowed some critics to suggest that signification is therefore absent
in certain human activities. This is a claim made by Terry Eagleton, for example:
‘But if car-making falls outside this definition, so does sport, which like any human
practice involves signification, but hardly in the same cultural category as Homeric
epic and graffiti’ (2000: 34). Social activities do not have to signify in the same way
to fall within Williams’ definition of culture. Industrial manufacture and the works
of Homer are not the same, do not signify in the same way, but they do both
depend on signification. It may be true that car-making and sport do not signify in
ways equivalent to, say, a sonnet by William Shakespeare or a song by Shake-
speare’s Sister, but signification is still a fundamental part of both sport and the
making of cars. We acknowledge as much when we use phrases like the culture of
sport or the culture of the work place. In other words, signification exists in all
aspects of human existence. Sometimes it is the most important aspect of the
activity, at other times it is overshadowed by more functional aspects. But it is
never totally dissolved (that is, it never disappears); culture always marks a human
presence in the world. In my view, the logic of Williams’ position is this: sig-
nification saturates the social, but at times it simply becomes less visible in certain
human activities. Poetry is more obviously about signification in a way that, say,
plumbing appears not to be. But we know that without signification plumbing
would not be possible (there is a culture of plumbing). Moreover, we also know
that plumbing, as a human activity, has a variable history of signifying different
things: civilisation, modernity, westernisation, class difference, for example. Cul-
ture, therefore, as defined by Williams, is not something restricted to the arts or to
different forms of intellectual production, it is an aspect of all human activities.
Following this definition, cultural studies has come to define culture as the pro-
duction, circulation and consumption of meanings. As Stuart Hall further elabo-
rates, ‘Culture … is not so much a set of things – novels and paintings or TV
programmes and comics – as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is
concerned with the production and exchange of meanings – the giving and taking
of meaning’ (1997: 2). According to this definition, cultures do not so much consist
of, say, books; cultures are the shifting networks of signification in which, say,
books are made to signify as meaningful objects. For example, if I pass a name
card to someone in China, the polite way to do it is with two hands. If I pass it
 Culture and power 3
with one hand I may cause offence. This is clearly a matter of culture. However,
the culture is not simply in the social act, nor is it just in the materiality of the card;
it is in the realized meaning of both act and card. In other words, there is nothing
essentially polite about using two hands; using two hands has been made to signify
politeness. Nevertheless, signification has become realized in a material practice,
which may, in turn, produce material effects. Similarly, as Marx observed, ‘one
man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They,
on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king’ (1976: 149). This
relationship works because they share a culture in which such relations are mean-
ingful. Outside such a culture this relationship would seem meaningless. Being a
king, therefore, is not a gift of nature but something constructed in culture. It is
culture and not nature that gives the relationship meaning. According to Williams,
‘Signification, the social creation of meanings … is … a practical material activity’
(1977: 34). It is a social practice that requires human agency and human interac-
tion. It is not something abstract; it is always something realized in human action
and interaction. Culture, understood in this way, consists of the shared meanings
that give our social worlds stability and coherence. To share a culture, therefore, is
to interpret the world – make it meaningful and experience it as meaningful – in
recognizably similar ways. So-called ‘culture shock’ happens when we encounter
radically different networks of meaning: when our ‘natural’ or our ‘common sense’
is confronted by someone else’s ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’.

Culture as shared and contested meanings

So far I have focused on culture as a system of shared meanings. This is more or
less how culture tends to be presented in Williams’ early work. Although I star-
ted with a quotation from The Long Revolution (1965; originally 1961), the idea
of culture as a realized signifying system is in fact first suggested in his 1958 essay
‘Culture is Ordinary’. The formulation is quite similar to that found in The Long
Revolution, ‘A culture is common meanings, the product of a whole people’
(1989: 8). Ten years after ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in ‘The Idea of a Common Cul-
ture’ (1968), he is even more explicit about the ordinariness of the making of
meanings: ‘culture is ordinary … there is not a special class, or group of men,
who are involved in the creation of meanings and values, either in a general sense
or in specific art and belief’ (1989: 34). When Williams said that ‘culture is
ordinary’, he was drawing attention to the fact that meaning-making is not the
privileged activity of the few, but something in which we are all involved. How-
ever, this does not of course mean that we are all involved in it in quite the same
way; meaning-making, like all other social activities, is always entangled in
relations of power. While we may all be involved in the making of meanings, it is
also the case that some meanings and the people who make them have more
power than other people and other meanings. Having said this, Williams’ early
work is not totally unaware that power features in the articulating and social
embedding of meanings. For example, in ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’ he
observes,
4 Culture and power
If it is at all true that the creation of meanings is an activity which engages
all men, then one is bound to be shocked by any society which, in its most
explicit culture, either suppresses the meanings and values of whole groups,
or which fails to extend to these groups the possibility of articulating and
communicating those meanings.
(1989: 35)

In fact it would be very unfair to Williams to suggest that even in this early
work he is simply unaware of power. His ‘Communications and Community’
essay, written in 1961, makes this absolutely clear:

For in fact all of us, as individuals, grow up within a society, within the rules
of a society, and these rules cut very deep, and include certain ways of seeing
the world, certain ways of talking about the world. All the time people are
being born into a society, shown what to see, shown how to talk about it.
(1989: 21–2)

What is the case, however, is that he had not yet found a fully adequate way of
articulating the relations between signification and power. In The Long Revolu-
tion, for example, he is still able to claim that culture is ‘the sharing of common
meanings … [in] which meanings that are valued by the community are shared and
made active’ (1965: 55). To put it very simply, most meanings are not of our own
making, they are generated by dominant groups and dominant institutions.
Moreover, these meanings tend to operate in the interests of dominant groups and
dominant institutions. It is not until ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural
Theory’ (1980; originally 1973), Marxism and Literature (1977) and Culture (1981)
that Williams really insists that signifying systems consist of both shared and con-
tested meanings. Culture is where we share and contest meanings of ourselves, of
each other and of the social worlds in which we live. It is when he embraces
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that he changes how he understands
culture as a realized signifying system. After the introduction of hegemony into his
work in the 1970s, culture as a realized signifying system is always understood as
consisting of both shared and contested meanings. Moreover, it is when he
embraces Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that he locates culture and power as the
object of study in cultural studies (see Storey 2010a).

Hegemony
Gramsci uses hegemony to describe processes of power in which a dominant
class does not merely rule by force but leads by consent: it exerts ‘intellectual
and moral leadership’ (Gramsci 2019: 75). According to Gramsci,

Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essen-
tial function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself,
organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and
 Culture and power 5
an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the
social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself
the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organisers of
a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. … . [Their role is] to create the
conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class.2
(71)

Hegemony is a historically constituted array of discourses that enable and con-

strain what is deemed possible and impossible, what can be changed and what is
unalterable, what can be perceived and what is unintelligible. It involves a specific
kind of consensus, one in which a dominant class presents its own particular
interests as the general interests of the society as a whole; it turns the particular
into the general.3 Hegemony transforms potential antagonism into simple differ-
ence. This works in part through the circulation of meanings that reinforce dom-
inance and subordination by seeking to fix the meaning and limits of social
relations. As Williams (1977) explains,

It [hegemony] is a lived system of meanings and values – constitutive and

constituting – which as they are experienced as practices appear as reci-
procally confirming. It thus constitutes a sense of reality for most people …
. It is … in the strongest sense a ‘culture’ [understood as a realized sig-
nifying system], but a culture which has also to be seen as the lived dom-
inance and subordination of particular classes.
(110)

It is a process of social reproduction in which the prevailing structures of power are

continually protected and renewed. In a hegemonic situation, subordinate groups
appear complicit with meanings and values which incorporate them into the prevail-
ing structures of power; that is, relations of dominance and subordination, which, as
Williams points out, appear as reality itself. The production of a particular con-
struction of reality is fundamental to the working of hegemony: what Williams calls
‘the reproduction of a restricted everyday reality’ (2010: 75). To remain within this
reality, we are required to be realistic; realistic about this and realistic about that, but
above all, realistic about what is possible and what is not possible. Part of the play of
hegemony is a constant lowering of expectations about what can change. This is
probably why so much ideological effort has been put into making utopia and uto-
pian seem unrealistic and therefore dangerous. Defense of the ‘normal’ is usually
always normative, seeking to insist on what it claims should require no insistence.
For Gramsci, ‘the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activ-
ities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but
manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules’ (2019: 74). In other
words, consent is ‘organized’ (73).4 The State, therefore, should be seen as ‘an
“educator”’, it ‘educates’ consent (73). As Gramsci points out, ‘Every relationship
of “hegemony” is necessarily an educational relationship’ (70). ‘The school as a
positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative
6 Culture and power
function, are the most important State activities in this sense: but, in reality, a
multitude of other so-called private initiatives and activities tend to the same end –
initiatives and activities which form the apparatus of the political and cultural
hegemony of the ruling classes’ (73). He writes of the

Educative and formative role of the State. Its aim is always that of creating
new and higher types of civilisation; of adapting the ‘civilisation’ and the
morality of the broadest popular masses to the necessities of the continuous
development of the economic apparatus of production; hence of evolving
even physically new types of humanity.5
(242)

Part of the educating of consent, involves the organising of ignorance. Or, to put it
differently, consent is rarely informed consent. I do not mean this is some patronizing
way to suggest that other people are cultural dupes, unable to see and comprehend
what is obvious to those with academic positions in universities. My point is that so
much of our history and culture is hidden from view. The debate about statues that
followed the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 is a perfect illustration of my point.
Buildings, statues and streets are named after men who made fortunes from the
human misery of the slave trade and the genocidal activities of empire. These men
hide in plain sight. When this glorification of great white men is challenged, we are
told we cannot rewrite history. But this is not history, it is veneration, and to chal-
lenge it we need history. But the history that would allow us to understand what these
great white men did and why other men and women venerated them is not made
available to the vast majority of the population. This does not mean they are stupid,
but it does mean that their ignorance is organised; deliberately kept out of the school
curriculum and from culture more generally. We know Henry VIII had six wives and
that Sir Francis Drake defeated the Spanish Armada and that Winston Churchill won
the Second World War almost single-handedly because we are taught these things in
school.6 In the same way, we do not know anything very much about empire, other
than that the British Empire was a modern wonder, or the slave trade, other than that
Britain abolished it, because we are not taught about these things in school. This is
what I mean by organised ignorance. It is not about people failing at education but
how education often fails people.7
But we should not see hegemony as something like a dominant ideology,
sweeping all resistance into the dustbin of history. Hegemony is an active pro-
cess, hegemonization, the making and remaking of ‘common sense’ in defence
of the prevailing structures of power. And because it is an active process, it
always implies its other, anti-hegemonization. In other words, hegemony con-
sists not just of consensus and coercion, but of ‘a certain compromise equili-
brium’ (2019: 69) between incorporation and resistance. As Gramsci points out,

The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parlia-
mentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent,
which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating
 Culture and power 7
excessively over consent. Indeed, the attempt is always made to ensure that
force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the
so-called organs of public opinion – newspapers and associations – which,
therefore, in certain situations, are artificially multiplied.
(69)

Hegemony, as Williams observes, ‘does not just passively exist as a form of dom-
inance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is
also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged’ (1977: 112). Therefore,
although hegemony is characterised by high levels of consensus, it is never without
conflict; that is, there is always resistance. However, for hegemony to remain suc-
cessful conflict and resistance must always be channelled and contained – dis-
articulated and rearticulated in the interests of the dominant. As Gramsci explains,

Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the

interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exer-
cised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed – in other
words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic corporate
kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise
cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical–political, it must also
be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive nucleus of economic
activity.
(69–70)

In other words, in the shifting balance of forces that make up a ‘compromise

equilibrium’, the fundamentals of economic power must remain beyond dispute.

Two conclusions
Cultural studies draws two conclusions from this way of thinking about culture.
First, although the world exists in all its enabling and constraining materiality
outside culture, it is only in culture that the world can be made to signify. In other
words, culture constructs the realities it appears only to describe. Judith Butler, for
example, argues that both sex and gender are culturally constructed, a process she
calls materialization. But she does not argue that the material body is a cultural
construct. What is a construct is what it means and the social and political con-
sequences of what it means. That is, its social and culturally intelligibility as a
sexed and gendered body. Materialization always produces realized signification,
but (and this is a very important and clarifying but), as Butler points out,

To claim that discourse [culture] is formative is not to claim that it origi-

nates, causes, or exhaustively composes … rather, it is to claim that there is
no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further for-
mation of that body.
(1993: 10)
8 Culture and power
In other words, to identify a ‘natural’ meaning of the human body is to have
already situated it in a regime of signification. We will discuss something simi-
lar in chapter 4, when I argue for a clear distinction between the materiality and
the meaning of utopian fiction.
It is sometimes claimed that cultural studies reduces material objects to a simple
matter of meanings. The opposite is in fact true: the material object is not reduced;
it is expanded to include what it means in human culture. Cultural studies has
always been interested in the use of things, and this interest has always involved a
consideration of their materiality. As we saw in the example of passing a name
card in China, the culture of the event is not simply in the social act, nor in the
materiality of the card, nor in the meaning of the card and act – it is in the entan-
glement of meaning, materiality and social practice. Moreover, the passing of a
name card in China is not simply a symbolic performance in which meaning is
represented and consumed, it is a performative event in which meaning is enacted
and realized. Therefore, to argue that culture is best understood as a realized sig-
nifying system is not a denial that the material world exists in all its constraining
and enabling materiality outside signification. As Williams makes very clear, ‘the
natural world exists whether anyone signifies it or not’ (1981b: 67). But what is
also absolutely the case is that the natural (or the material) world exists for us
entangled in signification and that how it is made to signify helps organise our
relations with it. Material objects are always inscribed with signification by human
practice. They always exist for us within a particular regime of realized significa-
tion. The reading of books always plays out this duality. Culture is never just the
materiality of things; it is always a simultaneous entanglement of meaning, mate-
riality and social practice. This admixture can take various forms: a text message
written on an iPhone, musical sounds produced by the human body, graffiti pain-
ted on a wall, a toy loved by a child, a utopian novel read by a reader. When
Roland Barthes writes about other similar examples, he says that what they have
in common is that they are signs (1995: 157). ‘When I walk through the streets – or
through life – and encounter these objects, I apply to all of them, if need without
realizing it, one and the same activity, which is that of a certain reading’ (157). In
other words, the material objects Barthes encounters are also signs to be read.
They have materiality, but they also have been inscribed with meaning. Cultural
studies shares with Barthes the insistence that ‘All objects which belong to a
society have a meaning’ (182); that is, they have been transformed by the fact that
‘humanity gives meaning to things’ (179). In this way, then, the material objects
that surround us do not issue their own meanings; they have to be made to mean
and how they are made to signify informs how we think about them, value them,
use them and act as a consequence of them. This is also absolutely the case with
utopian fiction.
Although material objects are always more than signs, more than symbolic
representations of social relations, what they are for us is inconceivable outside a
particular culture that entangles meaning, materiality and social practice. They are
never things in themselves, but always objects that are articulated in relation to a
particular regime of realized signification, enabling and constraining particular
 Culture and power 9
types of social practice. A mobile phone, a dress, a football, a wooden table, a CD,
an advert in a magazine, a utopian novel – what they all have in common is
materiality and meaning produced by human social practice. It is this combination
that makes them examples of culture. Culture is not therefore something we
‘have’, it is something we ‘do’ – the social production and reproduction of mean-
ings realized in materiality and social practice. To repeat, this is not a denial of the
reality of material things but it is an insistence that such things are mute until made
to signify. This claim is sometimes misunderstood (often deliberately and mis-
chievously) as a denial of the materiality of things. But to be absolutely clear, the
material properties of an object are not culturally constructed; what is constructed
is its inscription and location in culture. Materiality is mute and outside culture
until it is made to signify by human action. However, saying materiality is mute is
not the same as saying it does not exist, nor is it the same as saying that it does not
enable and constrain how it might be made to signify. In other words, culture is a
social practice that entangles meaning with materiality. Consuming News From
Nowhere, for example, involves materiality of the words on the page, the social
practice of reading and the production of meaning by a reader. However, material
reality is not an effect of signification, it can exist perfectly well without being
made to mean and being understood as meaningful, but for us it always exists
realized in signification, and it is this entanglement of signification and materiality
enabled by a social practice that cultural studies calls culture.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe use the term discourse in much the same
way as I am using the word culture. As Laclau explains, ‘The basic hypothesis
of a discursive approach is that the very possibility of perception, thought and
action depends on the structuration of a certain meaningful field which pre-
exists any factual immediacy’ (1993: 431). Discourse, according to Laclau and
Mouffe, consists in the totality of meaning and materiality. In other words, they
use the term discourse

to emphasize the fact that every social configuration is meaningful. If I kick

a spherical object in the street or if I kick a ball in a football match, the
physical fact is the same, but its meaning is different. The object is a foot-
ball only to the extent that it establishes a system of relations with other
objects, and these relations are not given by the mere referential materiality
of the objects, but are, rather, socially constructed. This systematic set of
relations is what we call discourse.
(2019: 126)

Moreover, the discursive character of an object does not, by any means,

imply putting its existence into question. The fact that a football is only a
football as long as it is integrated within a system of socially constructed
rules does not mean that it ceases to be a physical object … . For the same
reason it is the discourse which constitutes the subject position of the social
agent, and not, therefore, the social agent which is the origin of discourse –
10 Culture and power
the same system of rules that makes that spherical object into a football,
makes me a player.
(126–7)

Material objects exist independently of their discursive articulation, but it is

only within discourse that they can exist as meaningful objects. For example,
earthquakes exist in the real world, but whether they are

constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath

of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied
is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different
assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any dis-
cursive condition of emergence.
(Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108)

As Gramsci points out, ‘East and West … never cease to be “objectively real”
even though when analysed they turn out to be nothing more than a “histor-
ical” or “conventional construct”’ (2007: 175).

It is obvious that East and West are arbitrary and conventional (historical)
constructions, since every spot on the earth is simultaneously East and
West. Japan is probably the Far East not only for the European but also for
the American from California and even for the Japanese himself, who,
through English political culture might call Egypt the Near East … . Yet
these references are real, they correspond to real facts, they allow one to
travel by land and by sea and to arrive at the predetermined destination.
(176)

In other words, East and West are cultural constructions, directly connected to
the imperial power of the West. However, they are forms of signification that have
been realized and embedded in social practice: cultural constructs they may be, but
they do designate real geographic locations and guide real human movement.
The second conclusion cultural studies draws from this way of defining culture
concerns the struggle over meaning. The making of meaning is always entangled in
what Valentin Volosinov identified as the ‘multi-accentuality’ of the sign. Rather
than being inscribed with a single meaning, a sign (anything that can be made to
signify) can be articulated with different ‘accents’. That is, it can be made to mean
different things in different contexts, with different effects of power. Therefore, the
sign is always a potential site of ‘differently oriented social interests’ and is often in
practice ‘an arena of … struggle’ (1973: 23). Part of the ‘normal’ processes of
hegemony is ‘to make the sign uni-accentual’, to make what is potentially multi-
accentual appear as if it could only ever be uni-accentual. In other words, things –
including utopian fiction – do not issue their own meanings, they provide the
material for the articulation of meaning – variable meaning(s) – as things are
articulated, disarticulated and rearticulated in different contexts.
 Culture and power 11
Multi-accentuality should not be misunderstood as a form of polysemy.
Whereas polysemy refers to the idea that texts contain a variety of meanings,
multi-accentuality points to how people make meaning with texts. In other
words, it is a difference between meaning as a property of a text and meaning
as produced in social practices of consumption. Academics and students con-
tinually acknowledge the multi-accentuality of the sign. This is done every time
an interpretation of Woman on the Edge of Time, for example, is described as a
feminist reading, a queer reading, a post-colonial reading, a Marxist reading,
etc. Each time we implicitly acknowledge that the novel has been made to sig-
nify from the critical perspective of a particular reading practice. While these
meanings are realised in different social practices of reading, nothing about the
materiality of the text changes. What does change is how this materiality is
made meaningful. Therefore, although Marge Piercy’s novel has a quite clear
material existence, what it means and the struggle over what it means always
takes place in culture. The different ways of making it signify are part of a
struggle to fix the meaning of the novel; an attempt to make what is multi-
accentual appear as if it is uni-accentual – the correct meaning of Woman on
the Edge of Time. This is not a question of semantic difference – a simple
question of interpreting the text differently – it is about relations of culture and
power; about who can claim the power and authority to define what we call
social reality; to make the world (and the things in it, including utopian fiction)
signify in particular ways. As Hall explains,

Meanings [i.e. cultures] … regulate and organize our conduct and prac-
tices – they help to set the rules, norms and conventions by which social
life is ordered and governed. They are … , therefore, what those who wish
to govern and regulate the conduct and ideas of others seek to structure
and shape.
(1997: 4)

Meanings have a material existence in that they help organize practice; they
establish norms of behaviour, as we recognized in the example of the passing of
a name card in China.
‘Articulation’ is a key term in cultural studies. ‘The practice of articulation’,
as Laclau and Mouffe explain, ‘consists in the … partial fix[ing] of meaning’
(2001: 113). Hall has developed the concept to explain how culture is a terrain
of ideological struggle. Like Laclau and Mouffe, he argues that texts and prac-
tices are not inscribed with meaning; meaning is always the result of an act of
articulation. As he points out, ‘Meaning is a social production, a practice. The
world has to be made to mean’ (2019: 104). Making the world mean is an
attempt to (partially) fix the meaning of social reality. Dominant ways of
making the world meaningful, produced by those with the power to make their
meanings circulate in the world, can generate the ‘hegemonic discourses’, which
may come to assume an authority over the ways in which we see, think, com-
municate and act in the world and become the ‘common sense’ which directs
12 Culture and power
our actions or become that against which our actions are directed and against
which we struggle. As we shall see, especially in chapter 6, the act of reading
utopian fiction is not like listening to a meaning already constituted, the mere
expression of what already exists, it is rather the articulation of something new.
Reading is not a passive discovery, it is active making: it brings into the world
what had previously not existed, and it is only in such moments of articulation
that we will find the possibility of the politics of utopian fiction.

Notes
1 Williams spent a lot of time thinking about culture. In Keywords he famously claims that
‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’
(1983: 87). When interviewed by New Left Review, he said of culture, ‘But you know the
number of times I’ve wished that I had never heard of the damned word. I have become
more aware of its difficulties, not less, as I have gone on’ (Williams 1981b: 154).
2 I have argued elsewhere (Storey 2010a) that Matthew Arnold is best understood as
what Gramsci called an ‘organic intellectual’.
3 Marx and Engels present a very similar idea in The German Ideology where they claim
that a ruling class is ‘compelled … to represent its interest as the common interest of all
the members of society … to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as
the only rational, universally valid ones’ (2019: 59). This is intended to qualify the earlier,
more famous statement (fame often derived from deliberate simplifications of Marxism)
that ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which
is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (58).
What they mean by this is that the dominant class, on the basis of its ownership of, and
control over, the means of material production (the mode of production), is virtually
guaranteed to have control over the means of intellectual production. However, this does
not mean that the ideas of the ruling class are simply imposed on subordinate classes.
Unless we include both formulations (ruling ideas and compulsion, and especially the
way the second qualifies the first), we arrive at a very simplified notion of power: one in
which class struggle is replaced by social control; where power is simply something
imposed rather than something for which men and women have to struggle.
4 For hegemony to continue to work, the production of meaning really matters. While
not wishing to present power as some top-down monolith, most of the mass media,
one of the principal sources of meaning in most western societies, and certainly in the
UK, tend to support the prevailing structures of power. Even mass media that posi-
tions itself as in some way oppositional, tend to be oppositional from a perspective
which assumes that all that is really required for a better society is a little reform here
or a little reform there, leaving in place the fundamentals of power.
5 As Gramsci explains, ‘If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer
“leading” but only “dominant”, exercising force alone, this means precisely that the
great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer
believe what they used to believe previously, etc.’ (1971: 275–6). In such a situation
hegemony is beginning to crumble.
6 We should read such history alongside Bertolt Brecht’s wonderful poem, Questions of
a Worker Who Reads (2019: 675), the content of which could be summed up by
William Morris’s observation, ‘You look in your history-books to see who built
Westminster Abbey, who built St Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry
III, Justinian the Emperor. Did they? Or, rather, men like you and me … who have
left no names behind them, nothing but their work?’ (1979: 35).
7 This is not a criticism of primary and secondary school teachers but of those with the
power to fix the content of the National Curriculum, which teachers then have to teach.
2 The utopian contrast

All utopian fiction is structured by a critical contrast between a model society and
the society of the narrator or visitor to utopia. It is this utopian contrast which
invites a reader to compare the ‘nowhere’ with the ‘somewhere’ of the narrative.1 In
a discussion of Thomas More’s Utopia, Louis Marin claims, ‘Utopia is not a topo-
graphy but a topic’ (1984: 115). While I agree, I do not think that Marin goes far
enough. Rather, and staying with his alliteration, I would argue that Utopia is not a
country, it is a utopian contrast with a country. In other words, the society of the
island is not there to show us what a perfect society looks like but to tell us things
about sixteenth-century England (and Europe more generally). Knowing that Book
Two was written before Book One and that Book One could not have been pub-
lished on its own during More’s lifetime only makes this point more evident.
Although the utopian contrast is most explicit in More’s Utopia, as we shall see in
the course of this chapter, it is an important political feature of all utopian fiction.
There is also a second critical contrast between a utopian blueprint and the context
of the reader. While the first contrast is important, it is the second that is absolutely
crucial if we are to speak of a politics of utopian fiction. In chapter 6, I will discuss in
detail this second utopian contrast; here my focus will be on the first.

Thomas More’s Utopia

Although it is certainly true that dreaming discursively of a better world exists
before the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, the book is nevertheless the
founding text of radical utopianism. I think it begins with More, not because he
presents a much improved way of living as this is not something new – it already
existed in the traditions of the Golden Age, the Land of Cockaigne and the Mil-
lennium. What is new, and what I mean by radical utopianism, is his construction
of a utopian contrast between Utopia and sixteenth-century England (and Europe
more generally). In this short book, written in Latin and published in 1516, More
invented the word utopia. Although the book is now known simply as Utopia, its
original title was the far less catchy: Libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam
festivus de optimo reip[uplicae] statu, deq[ue] nouva Insula Vtopia, which in the
first English translation became On the Best State of a Commonwealth and the
New Island of Utopia. A Truly Golden Handbook No Less Beneficial Than
DOI: 10.4324/9781003010586-2
14 The utopian contrast
Entertaining. More constructed the word utopia from the Greek word ‘topos’
(meaning place); the u that begins the neologism alludes to both ‘eu’ and ‘ou’,
signifying respectively ‘happy’ and ‘not’. If we include More’s play with language,
we could change the book’s English title to The Happy Place That Exists
Nowhere.
Utopia consists of two parts: the first focuses on sixteenth-century England (and
to a lesser extent Europe) and condemns private property and class inequality. In
the second, when we are taken to the imaginary island, we see a society without
private property and with a moneyless economy and levels of social equality
undreamt of in More’s England. But contrary to claims about More’s intentions,
the island is not a perfect society (the idea of perfection in utopian fiction will be
discussed in chapter 4). It is patriarchal and has its origins in colonialism, wages
war through the use of mercenaries and engages in slavery. Although I take ser-
iously Hythloday’s claim that the Utopians ‘have laid the foundations of a com-
monwealth that is … very happy’ (2011: 106), I am not really interested in the
content of Utopia; my main argument is that the political power of the book
derives not from attempting to outline perfection but in marking a radical differ-
ence between the society of the island and that of sixteenth-century England. It is
the utopian contrast that is made between the two which undermines England’s
claim to historical inevitability. Encountering this difference opens up the possibi-
lity of thinking outside the fold of our usual complicity with power.2 Surprisingly
(or not), Utopia is often discussed as if it consisted of just Book Two, the story of
an imaginary island, omitting that it is a work that also contains a damning social
and political critique of sixteenth-century England, in which, as Book One puts it,
‘miserable poverty and scarcity … exist side by side with wanton luxury’ (20).
Most of the story is told by Raphael Hythloday, but what he tells us is
framed and often challenged by another character called More. Put simply, one
promotes Utopia, while the other defends the prevailing structures of power in
sixteenth-century England. It might seem unnecessary to say it, but it is
important to distinguish between More the author of Utopia and More the
framing narrator of the story.3 Moreover, I think we have to be careful about
how much weight we give to More the narrator’s arguments. They are short
interruptions in what is mostly a narrative by Hythloday. If they are intended
to undermine Hythloday’s narrative, it would seem a rather odd way to con-
struct an argument and victorious counter-argument. However, what I think is
of crucial importance here is not the two positions in the argument but the
argument itself; that is, the continual confrontation the book establishes
between these two worlds, inviting the reader not to simply admire the society
of the island of Utopia, but to think about how it is different from sixteenth-
century England. In doing this, the book introduces a certain defamiliarization
(see discussion in chapter 5) in which what had seemed natural and inevitable in
sixteenth-century England now seems historical and mostly the result of the
actions of those with power.
Throughout the narrative Hythloday condemns all societies run in the inter-
est of powerful minorities. As he explains,
 The utopian contrast 15
When I consider and turn over in my mind the various commonwealths
flourishing today, so help me God, I can see in them nothing but a con-
spiracy of the rich, who are advancing their own interests under the name
and title of the commonwealth.
(105)

In Book One, Hythloday argues that private property is the cause of the social
crisis that is rampant in rural England. As he observes, an observation that still
resonates more than five hundred years later,

I am wholly convinced that unless private property is entirely abolished,

there can be no fair or just distribution of goods, nor can the business of
mortals be conducted happily. As long as private property remains, by far
the largest and best part of the human race will be oppressed by a distres-
sing and inescapable burden of poverty and anxieties.
(38)

As Hythloday also points out, ‘There are a great many noblemen who live idly
like drones off the labour of others’ (16). But, as he explains, being social
parasites is not enough for them: ‘Living in idleness and luxury without doing
society any good no longer satisfies them; they have to do positive harm’ (18).
The ‘positive harm’ to which he refers is enclosure, the taking into private
ownership of common land. It was done in search of profit, a process Marx
called ‘primitive accumulation’ (1976: 873–940). Towards the end of volume
one of Capital, Marx in fact quotes approvingly Utopia’s analysis of the pro-
cess. This in itself tells us a great deal about the nature of More’s book.
Hythloday attacks the enclosure of common land that was previously used by
villagers to grow crops. The land was enclosed by force and dubious legality by
rich landowners to be used to pasture sheep, as this was a time when the pro-
duction of wool was a source of great wealth. As Hythloday puts it, in a meta-
phor that points to the human cost of the search for profit, ‘sheep … that
commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, I hear, they have become so greedy
and fierce that they devour human beings themselves’ (2011: 18) According to
Hythloday,

Thus, so that one greedy, insatiably glutton, a frightful plague to his native
country, may enclose thousands of acres with a single fence, the tenants are
ejected; and some are stripped of their belongings by trickery or brute
force, or, wearied by constant harassment, are driven to sell them. One
way or another, these wretched people – men, women, husbands, wives,
orphans, widows, parents with little children and entire families (poor but
numerous, since farming requires many hands) – are forced to move out.
They leave the only homes familiar to them, and can find no place to go.
(19)
16 The utopian contrast
Driving people from a life supported by subsistence farming into a world where
existence must now depend on working for someone else (that is to say, work-
ing for wages) is the origins of what became known in the nineteenth century as
the working class. In the early sixteenth century they were being condemned to
a life of uncertainty, insecurity and despair. Hythloday’s account sets up a clear
relationship between the search for profit of the few producing social distress
for the many, resulting in starvation, homelessness and social unrest. But
enclosing land by force or dubious legality is not the whole story. Hythloday
makes a more general point:

What kind of justice is it when a nobleman … or someone else who makes

his living by doing either nothing at all or something not especially neces-
sary … gets to live a life of luxury and grandeur, while in the meantime a
labourer, a carter or a carpenter … works so hard and so constantly that
even beasts of burden would scarcely endure it.
(104)

While there can be little doubt which side Book One takes in what would later be
called class struggle, there has been a great deal of discussion about whether More
really approved of the society depicted in Book Two. The fact that in Latin the
surname of Raphael Hythloday means pedlar of nonsense would seem to suggest
he did not. But does pedlar of nonsense fix the meaning of the book to a satire on
impossible dreams? Before accepting that it does, we should first note that his
given name is Raphael, the name of the archangel and cosmic physician especially
famed for the correcting of blindness (Apocryphal Book of Tobit). In other words,
the connotations of his name pull in two directions, pedlar of nonsense and cor-
rector of blindness. I think Hythloday’s name (and the other Latin ‘jokes’ in the
book) are not intended to imply a satire on impossible dreams; rather, they are
part of a defensive strategy of disavowal. Moreover, whether More intended it or
not, Hythloday’s angry voice of protest has resounded down the years, finding an
echo every time it is recognised that the luxury of the few is built on and sustained
by the exploitation and oppression of the many.
Utopia was not translated into English until 16 years after More’s execution
for high treason in 1535. The fact that he did not allow the book to be trans-
lated into English during his lifetime may have been out of concern that what
he was depicting, if widely read, could threaten his own security or undermine
the hegemony of Catholicism. A point agreed upon by both radical and con-
servative readers of Utopia. To quote Marxist A.L. Morton,

the book sailed far too close to the wind for its immediate publication in
English to be altogether safe. Not only did it advocate communism: that
might have been passed over as the pleasant conceit of a platonic philoso-
pher, but it contained the most savage criticism, explicit as well as implied,
of the actual government of England.
(1952: 78)
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verwandt ist das „Venezianer Email“, wie die auf Kupfer emaillierten
Schalen, Kannen, Leuchter und dergleichen Geräte mit ihren
dunkelblauen, dunkelgrünen und weißen Farben bezeichnet werden;
es ist um 1500 gepflegt worden. Zwei Schalen, ein Krug und ein
kleines Räuchergefäß vertreten hier diese Art, desgleichen ein
Ostensorium in Vitrine IX.
Tischvitrine XI. Malerschmelzarbeiten. Täfelchen mit den Taten
des Herakles; ovale Platte mit Madonnenbild; Limousiner Plättchen
mit Heiligenbildern.
Vitrine XII und Tischvitrine XIII. Das in der Bijouterie verwendete
„Goldschmiedeemail“ ist in den herrlichen Stücken deutschen
Renaissanceschmuckes vertreten, die samt dem mit
Schmuckstücken reichbesetzten Kelch aus der Kirche des
ehemaligen Damenstiftes zu Hall in Tirol stammen. Es sind
süddeutsche Arbeiten aus dem XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert. Die
Schmuckstücke waren auf zwei barocke Perlenkronen montiert, die
im Wandschrank XVII aufbewahrt sind.

Kruzifix, Silber mit transluzidem Email.

Italienisch, XV. Jahrhundert
Vitrine XIV. Drei emaillierte Anhänger, süddeutsche
Renaissancearbeiten. Gotische Silberplättchen mit Heiligenbildern in
Niello. (Bei dieser Technik wird in die vertieften Stellen des
Metallgrundes eine schwarze Metallmischung mit Schwefel
eingeschmolzen.) Ein Achatkreuz mit Nielloplättchen und
Kristallkugeln, XV. Jahrhundert. Zwei Nielloplättchen für
Dolchscheiden, süddeutsche Renaissancearbeit. Zwei gravierte
Silberscheiben, die eine mit der Schilderung der Versuchungen
Christi durch den Teufel, von einem niederländischen Stecher des
XVI. Jahrhunderts; die andere ein signiertes Werk des Michael le
Blon (um 1600) schildert Abigail vor David.
 Wandschrank XV. Prunkschüssel aus vergoldetem Messing,
eingraviert in ein reiches Ornament das Gleichnis vom verlorenen
Sohn, deutsch, XVI. Jahrhundert. Prunkschüssel, Messing, mit
silbertauschierten Ornamenten und Wappen, signiert auf der
Rückseite: Greco da Nicol. Rugina Corfu fecce 1550. Standuhren,
bezw. Tischuhren aus dem XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert. Die große
Uhr in der Mitte oben eine Leihgabe des Stiftes Göttweih.
Wandschrank XVI. Oben: Die Perlenkronen aus der Kirche des
ehemaligen Damenstiftes zu Hall, charakteristisch für den mit
Material prunkenden Barockschmuck; auf dem Eisengerüst der
Kronen die Inschriften: „Donum Regij Parthenonis Antistita Maria à
Spaur Comitissa Aᵒ 1657. — Munificentissime Renovatum Antistita
Eleonora Felicitate Comitissa de Arco Aᵒ 1767“. Auf diesen
Eisenbügeln waren die Schmuckstücke in Vitrine XII und XIII
angebracht. Hausaltärchen aus Ebenholz mit reichem
Silberbeschlag und einem Bild aus dem Rudolfinischen Kunstkreis,
Augsburger Arbeit, XVII. Jahrhundert.
Unten: Bucheinbände mit Metallverzierung und Buchdeckel aus
Metall: Horae Deipari Virg. Mariae, Paris, T. Kerver 1519, gebunden
in Samt mit Beschlägen aus durchbrochenem Silber, auf jeder Seite
ein Wappen in Niello. Breviarium Romanum, Antwerpen, Plantin
1592, Samteinband mit Silberbeschlägen. Missale Romanum,
gedruckt in derselben Offizin, 1587, Samteinband mit Silberbeschlag
und Eckstücken nach Peter Flötner. Buchdeckel aus schwerem
Silber mit getriebenen Ornamenten, XVII. Jahrhundert. Notizbuch in
silbernem Einband mit Soldatenemblemen, XVII. Jahrhundert.
Notizbuch, Einband aus durchbrochenem Silber. Notizbuch mit
emailliertem Einband und vergoldetem Beschlag, Empire.
Galvanoplastische Nachbildung zweier Arbeiten des deutschen
Goldschmiedes Anton Eisenhoit (ca. 1600), die silbernen
getriebenen Einbanddecken zu einem Missale und einem Pontifcale
Romanum.
Vitrine XVII. Mailänder Prunkschild und -helm, am Schild der
Raub der Helena, am Helm die Eroberung Trojas dargestellt; Eisen
getrieben und goldtauschiert, XVI. Jahrhundert. Kassette, Eisen
goldtauschiert. Goldtauschierter eiserner Ständer für
spitzenklöppelähnliche Objekte, ca. 1700. Rahmen aus Eisen
geschnitten, ca. 1600. Hirschjagd, Eisen geschnitten und tauschiert,
XVII. Jahrhundert. Schmuckkassette, Eisen geätzt und vergoldet,
Anfang des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Feinwage aus Messing, reiche
Arbeit aus der ersten Hälfte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Schloßplatte,
Messing, aus der Mitte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Gewehrschloß aus
der zweiten Hälfte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Degengriff mit Initial
Kaiser Franz I., Silber vergoldet, Anfang des XIX. Jahrhunderts. Griff
eines Prunkdegens, Eisen geschnitten und tauschiert.
Wandpulte XVIII. und XIX. Bestecksammlung. Zwei kleine antike
Bronzelöffel. Silberlöffel, Wien, XVII. Jahrhundert. Silberlöffel aus
dem XVII. und XVIII. Jahrhundert. Holländische Löffel aus dem XVII.
Jahrhundert. Sogenannte Apostellöffel, XVII. Jahrhundert. Besteck
mit Elfenbeingriffen, XVII. Jahrhundert. Schwarzemailliertes
Eßbesteck, um 1700.
Tischvitrine XX. Süddeutsche Emailarbeiten. Goldmedaillon mit
Blumen auf weißem Grund, Augsburger Arbeit, XVII. Jahrhundert.
Zwei Täfelchen mit Heiligenbildern und Blumen, Augsburg, XVII.
Jahrhundert. Augsburger Emailplättchen mit Tobias und dem Engel,
XVII. Jahrhundert. Sechs Plättchen mit Passionsszenen, Augsburg,
XVII. Jahrhundert. Kleine runde Platten mit Kinderszenen. Diadem,
Armband und Ohrgehänge, Siebenbürgen, XVII. Jahrhundert.
Wandvitrinen XXI und XXII. Siebenbürgischer Volksschmuck.
Vitrinen XXIII und XXIV. Dosen. Zumeist Arbeiten aus dem XVIII.
und Anfang des XIX. Jahrhunderts. Zwei Dosen mit Miniaturen von
Blarenberghe, Geschenke des regierenden Fürsten Johann von und
zu Liechtenstein, Dose in Gold und Email von Ouville, Miniatur von
Degault (1793). Dosen in Goldemail, Kupferemail, Schildkrot; Dosen
mit Piquéarbeit; holländische Silberdosen; Porzellandosen.
Vitrine XXV. Emailarbeiten aus dem XVIII. und Anfang des XIX.
Jahrhunderts. Silberne Spülkumme mit Emailmalerei auf weißem
Grund, Anfang des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Leuchter mit Emailmalerei
auf weißem Grund, Mitte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Wiener Uhr,
emailliert, Anfang des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Wiener Emailarbeiten:
Zwei kobaltblaue Blumentöpfe, signiert J. Jünger 1776. Lichtblaue
Deckelschale mit Blumendekor, Ende des XVIII. Jahrhunderts.
Kobaltblaue Deckelschale mit Tasse, signiert: Christoph Jünger.
Tischvitrine XXVI. Schmuck aus dem Ende des XVIII.
Jahrhunderts. Im Barock stand der Durchschnitt der
Schmuckarbeiten nicht auf der Höhe wie in den vorangegangenen
Perioden; man verstand es, mehr mit dem Material als mit edler
Arbeit zu prunken. Im Zeitalter des Klassizismus wurde beim
Schmuck auf zarte Formen und Technik wieder großer Wert gelegt;
in seinen reizvollen Schöpfungen waren als Motive die Symbole
sentimentaler Freundschaft und Liebe ebenso Mode wie antike
Stilelemente: Goldkette mit vier zierlichen Wachsmedaillons.
Scheibenförmiger goldener Anhänger mit einem Filigranrahmen und
einer von Glas umschlossenen perlenbesetzten Blumenvase. Hals-
und Haarschmuck mit Gemmen von Bernstein. Uhren mit
Maleremail, die man als Schmuck am Kleid oder Gürtel trug.
Tischvitrine XXVII. Schmuck aus der ersten Hälfte des XIX.
Jahrhunderts. Die große Not, die die Napoleonischen Kriege über
Deutschland und Österreich gebracht haben, hatte den Schmuck
aus edlen Metallen als meist unerreichbare Kostbarkeit verdrängt;
ersetzt wurde er durch den Eisenschmuck, der in dem staatlichen
Gußwerk von Mariazell, dem Gußwerk des Grafen Wrbna, dem
Glanz’schen Gußwerk und andern in Massen hergestellt worden ist:
Schmuckkassette. Kette, Anhänger und Ohrgehänge mit Medaillons.
Anhänger in Kreuzform. Erst in den ruhigen Biedermeierzeiten
nimmt Gold- und Silberschmuck wieder den alten Platz ein:
Halskette und Ohrgehänge, Gold mit Chrysoprasen, ca. 1830;
Brosche, ca. 1850.
 Pokal, Viertraubenbecher, Silber,
vergoldet, XVI. Jahrhundert, Anfang,
Lüneburger Marke

Die Vitrinen XXVIII bis XXXVI vereinigen Ziergerät des

ostasiatischen Kunstkreises, hauptsächlich Emailarbeiten. Die ältere
chinesische Emaillierkunst ist der Zellenschmelz mit
undurchsichtigen Glasflüssen; im XVIII. Jahrhundert ist die
Emailmalerei auf weißem Grund, die der Porzellanmalerei sehr
ähnelt, eingeführt worden. Die Japaner haben mit größter Virtuosität
den Zellschmelz gepflegt und sind darin noch heute die besten
Meister; überraschende Neuerungen wie Zellenschmelz auf
Porzellan zeigen ihr bravouröses technisches Können.
Alle Arten der Metallschmuckkunst zeigen die Vasen und
Schwertzieraten, die in Vitrine XXVIII bis XXXIV ausgestellt sind.
 SAAL II.
ARBEITEN DER EDELSCHMIEDE.
Schrank I und II. Die Antike ist durch galvanoplastische Kopien
ihrer hervorragendsten Goldschmiedearbeiten vertreten: die in ihrer
künstlerischen Form wie in der Treibtechnik gleich wunderbaren
Becher aus Mykenä und Váfio; die spätantiken, zum Teil
hellenistischen Silberarbeiten des Hildesheimer Silberfundes, der
Funde von Boscoreale und Bernay.
Schrank III. Nachbildungen berühmter Goldschmiedearbeiten des
Mittelalters: die vergoldete Silberschüssel im Domschatz zu
Halberstadt, eines der schönsten Werke byzantinischer
Goldschmiedearbeit; von romanischen Arbeiten das Ziborium des
Louvre mit reichem Grubenschmelz; das Welfenkreuz; das
Evangeliar von Wiener-Neustadt; der gehenkelte Kelch des Stiftes
Wilten mit gravierten und niellierten Bildern. Von gotischen Werken:
Kelch mit Volane aus Klosterneuburg; der silberne Monstranzenfuß
aus Klosterneuburg; Gefäße aus dem deutschen Ordensschatz;
Reliquienkästchen, Arm- und Kopfreliquarien aus Zara.
Eines der umfangreichsten Werke mittelalterlicher
Goldschmiedekunst die Arca Simeonis im Dom zu Zara, in
galvanoplastischer Nachbildung (frei aufgestellt).
Schrank IV und IV a. Von dem Aufschwung des deutschen
Goldschmiedehandwerkes im XVI. Jahrhundert geben die
Nachbildungen von Renaissancearbeiten eine Vorstellung. Im
Anfang der Renaissance wirken noch gotische Formen der
Treibarbeit nach, die in dem Korvinus-Pokal von Wiener-Neustadt
vielleicht ihren schönsten Ausdruck gefunden hat. Als die italienische
Renaissance in Deutschland durchdrang, da nahmen sich die
Goldschmiede die Maler zu Hilfe, die die italienischen Formen, die
Mode gewordenen mythologischen Darstellungen beherrschten. Da
waren die Vorlagen der Maler und Kupferstecher von höchster
Bedeutung für den ausführenden Handwerker. Von hervorragenden
Stücken jener Zeit sind in Nachbildungen der Landschadenbund-
Becher (Graz), der Jamnitzer-Pokal (Nürnberg), Pokale nach Paul
Flynt, Hans Holbein d. J. u. a., ferner Stücke aus dem Lüneburger
Ratssilber ausgestellt.
In der Sammlung des Museums überwiegen an Originalen
Stücke aus der Spätzeit des XVIII. Jahrhunderts.
Vitrine V. An Renaissanceoriginalen sind hervorzuheben ein
Viertraubenbecher aus Lüneburg; ein Wiener Pokal mit
ausgebildetem, fein getriebenem Renaissanceornament; eine
ähnliche Arbeit aus Augsburg; ein mit Medaillons gezierter
Nürnberger Pokal mit altem ergänzten Fuß von Augsburger Arbeit.
Vitrine VI. Ein Nürnberger Kokosnußpokal in vergoldeter
Kupferfassung mit feinem Rankenornament; ein Breslauer Humpen;
eine Augsburger Kanne mit dem getriebenen Bild einer
mythologischen Geschichte; ein Augsburger Pokal mit dem
Bandornament der Kleinmeister; zwei Nürnberger Satzbecher.
Vitrine VII. Ein vergoldeter Tafelaufsatz mit getriebenen figuralen
Bildern; eine schwere Kanne mit graviertem Bandwerk; ein
Augsburger Doppelbecher, in der Gestalt einer bechertragenden
Dame (sogenannter Jungfernbecher); eine Brünner und eine
Augsburger Kanne des XVII. Jahrhunderts. Eine mehr barocke Form
zeigt der Wiener Humpen vom Ende des XVII. Jahrhunderts mit
getriebenem Blattwerk.
Vitrine VIII. Barocke Formen des XVII. Jahrhunderts. Zwei
ornamentlose Siebenbürger Becher. Arbeiten mit hochgetriebenen
figuralen und ornamentalen Reliefs. Ein kleiner Becher aus
Augsburg.
Vitrine IX. Barockarbeiten Augsburger, beziehungsweise
süddeutscher Provenienz. Ein Regensburger und ein verwandter
Augsburger Leuchter mit schwerem Blattornament; eine prächtige
Taufkanne und Schüssel aus dem Anfang des XVIII. Jahrhunderts;
drei kleinere Kannen derselben Provenienz.
Vitrine X. Augsburger Wöchnerinnenschüsseln und kleines
Tischgerät; ein jüdischer Weinbecher, Nürnberger Arbeit, ein
getriebener Becher desgleichen.
 Kultgefäße und -geräte vereinigen die Vitrinen XI bis XIV.
Vitrine XI. Gotische Kelche und ein gotisches Reliquiar.
Vitrine XII. Vortragkreuz, Kupfer vergoldet, mit getriebener Arbeit,
nach der Inschrift von Johannes da Civitella aus Spoleto 1485;
gotischer dalmatinischer Kelch mit Email; ein Breslauer Kelch; ein
deutscher Kelch von 1497. Gotischer Kelch mit Filigranverzierung in
Email.
Vitrine XIII. Italienischer Renaissancekelch; Wiener Monstranz
vom Ende des XVII. Jahrhunderts mit stark getriebenen
Barockornamenten und gegossenem Silberzierat an den Strahlen;
ein in Silber getriebener Cruzifixus aus dem XVII. Jahrhundert.
Vitrine XIV. Ein venezianisches Reliquiar in den verderbten
Formen eines mißverstandenen fremden Stils (Rokoko), XVIII.
Jahrhundert; ein serbisches Reliquiar (volkstümliche Arbeit), dann
Arbeiten des XIX. Jahrhunderts: ein schöner Prager Kelch von 1810;
eine Wiener Monstranz von 1840.
Die nächsten Vitrinen umfassen die weltlichen Silberarbeiten des
klassizistischen Stils.
Vitrine XV. Das Reiseservice des Königs von Rom, eine Arbeit in
Vermeil von dem Pariser Goldschmied Biennais, Anfang des XIX.
Jahrhunderts.[1]
Vitrine XVI. Englische Arbeiten aus den Werkstätten von
Sheffield; eine hohe Kanne; eine Reihe von Saucieren und Leuchter.
Vitrine XVII. Verschiedene Silberarbeiten derselben Zeit.
 Kelch, XVII. Jahrhundert, mit Schmuckstücken aus
dem XVI. Jahrhundert besetzt
Vitrine XVIII. Norddeutsche Kannen vom Ende des XVIII.
Jahrhunderts.
Vitrine XIX. Ein Tafelaufsatz, Empire; Leuchter derselben Zeit.
Vitrine XX und XXI. Österreichische Silberarbeiten um 1800: eine
große Grazer Kanne und mehrere kleinere derselben Provenienz;
Prager und Brünner Arbeiten.[2]
 Vitrine XXII. Teeservice, Wiener Arbeit von 1842, Geschenk der
Frau Baronin Dingelstedt, gewidmet zum Andenken an ihre Mutter
Jenny Dingelstedt-Lutzer.
Vitrine XXIII enthält Arbeiten der Wiener Silberschmiede vom
Ende des XVIII. und vom Anfang des XIX. Jahrhunderts. Die Wiener
Arbeiten dieser Zeit sind durch die Ausstellung alter Gold- und
Silberschmiedearbeiten 1907 im Österreichischen Museum erst
näher bekannt geworden; den Mittelpunkt nimmt eine große
Suppenterrine ein mit der Wiener Marke von 1788 und dem
Meisterzeichen des Georg Hann. Die andern Objekte der Vitrine
verteilen sich auf eine große Reihe von Meistern, die erst durch
neuere Forschungen bekannt geworden sind. Einen beträchtlichen
Teil der Objekte bilden Geschenke des Herrn Dr. A. Figdor.

[1] Leisching, Eduard, Ein Reiseservice des Königs von Rom.

(„Kunst und Kunsthandwerk“, VII, 253.)
[2] Leisching, Eduard, Zur Geschichte der Wiener Gold- und
Silberschmiedekunst. („Kunst und Kunsthandwerk“, VII, 345.) —
Leisching, Eduard, Die Ausstellung von alten Gold- und
Silberschmiedearbeiten im k. k. Österreichischen Museum.
(„Kunst und Kunsthandwerk“, X, 317.)
 ARBEITEN AUS UNEDLEN METALLEN.

ARBEITEN AUS ZINN.

Seit dem ausgehenden Mittelalter war das Zinn das meist

verwendete Material für die Kannen und Humpen der Zunftstuben
vom XVI. bis Anfang des XIX. Jahrhunderts für das bürgerliche
Tischgeschirr. Arbeiten mit kunstvollem Schmuck und von feinem,
mit Blei nicht oder wenig vermischtem Zinn werden Edelzinn
genannt.
Vitrine XXIV. Gotischer Humpen mit gravierten Heiligenbildern
und Ornamenten, Breslau, Ende des XV. Jahrhunderts. Im XVI.
Jahrhundert kamen die Verzierungen aus gegossenen Ornamenten,
aufgelegten Abgüssen von Plaketten auf; ein schönes Beispiel
hierfür die kleine Kanne mit den Bildern der Parabel vom verlorenen
Sohn nach B. Beham. Eine prächtige Kanne von dem Straßburger
Zinngießer Isaak Faust. Teller mit den Bildern von Kaiser Ferdinand
und den Kurfürsten.
Vitrine XXV. Adam- und Evaschüssel; Schüssel mit einer Arion-
Plakette als Nabel; Schüssel in der sogenannten Holzstockmanier
des Nicolaus Horchhaimer (Nürnberg, 1550-1600). Kleine Kassette
mit zarten, feingegossenen und ziselierten Ornamenten, französisch,
XVI. Jahrhundert. Becher mit vergoldetem Rand, XVI. Jahrhundert,
Geschenk des Herrn Dr. Albert Figdor.
Vitrine XXVI. Ein Humpen des XVII. Jahrhunderts und Teller aus
dem XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert; gravierter Teller, signiert: Florintino
Puterin Abtisin zu Gos 1588. Ein Schweizer Teller mit den Wappen
der alten Kantone.
Vitrine XXVII. Ein großer Humpen mit prächtigem Henkel aus
Ödenburg und Kannen des XVII. Jahrhunderts; eine mit der Plakette
Gustav Adolfs am Deckel und schön gelungenem Guß von Blumen
und Ornamenten am Gefäßkörper; ein gravierter polnischer Humpen
mit Namen von Zunftmitgliedern.
Vitrine XXVIII. Eine Sammlung von Humpen und Kannen des
XVI. bis XVIII. Jahrhunderts.
Vitrine XXIX. Zunftpokal mit Platte und Bechern der Innsbrucker
Zinngießer von 1711.
Vitrine XXX. Suppenterrine, Tischaufsatz, Napf und Teller,
bürgerliches Hausgerät aus dem XVIII. Jahrhundert.
Vitrine XXXI. Zinnteller des XVII. und XVIII. Jahrhunderts;
Zinnkannen des Empirestils und Kannen der Biedermeierzeit; zwei
albanische Pulverbüchsen aus Blei. Oben Nachbildungen und ein
Zinnteller aus der Zeit der Romantik.
 SAAL IV.
Schrank I. Antike Bronzen römischer, griechischer, etruskischer
und ägyptischer Herkunft. Hausgeräte, die noch heute in ihrer
Zweckmäßigkeit und Schönheit mustergültig sind, Kannen, Schalen,
Amphoren und andere Weinsiebe, Schöpfer u. dgl. m. Gefäßdeckel
und -henkel. Zwei etruskische Dreifüße, einer davon ein Geschenk
weiland Erzherzogs Rainer. Altjonische Bronzemaske mit
eingesetzten Augen. Flügel von der Statue einer Siegesgöttin.
Deckenrosetten aus den Grabkammern von Cotona, griechischer
Gesichtshelm.
Schrank II. Figurale Bronzen. Relief mit der Beweinung Christi,
ein oberitalienisches Werk des XV. Jahrhunderts (Geschenk des
Fürsten Johann von und zu Liechtenstein). Bronzebüste der Niobe
von dem Mantuaner Antico. Statuette eines kleinen
vorwärtsschreitenden Pferdes, das auf einen Vorwurf des Leonardo
da Vinci zurückzuführen ist. Pferdestatuette, niederländisch um
1600. Zwei Bronzekandelaber, italienisch, XV. Jahrhundert,
Statuetten von Aphrodite und Ares, italienische Arbeiten des XVI.
Jahrhunderts. Gruppe der Ringer, ein Geschenk des Fürsten Johann
von und zu Liechtenstein. Putto, Nürnberger Arbeit, XVI.
Jahrhundert.
Wandschrank III. Heiliger Sebastian, vergoldete Bronzestatuette,
italienisch, XVI. Jahrhundert. Tabernakeltüre, deutsch, XVII.
Jahrhundert. Bronzerahmen vergoldet, XVII. Jahrhundert. Zwei
schwebende Engel, XVIII. Jahrhundert. Engelstatuette, XVIII.
Jahrhundert.
Tischvitrine IV. Renaissanceplaketten oberitalienischer,
toskanischer und römischer Meister, wie Riccio, Moderno, Ulocrino,
Vicentino, Francesco da Brescia und anderer.
Tischvitrine V. Deutsche und niederländische Plaketten.
Bleiabstöße von Peter Flötner. Niederländischer Meister der
Triumphzüge.
 Wandpult VI. Niederländische und deutsche Plaketten, XVII. bis
XIX. Jahrhundert.

Relief, Grablegung, Bronze, Türchen eines Tabernakels.

Oberitalienisch, XVI. Jahrhundert
Schrank VII. Deutsche Bronzemörser und Kannen aus dem XV.
und XVI. Jahrhundert. Italienischer Mörser mit Faunen, XVI.
Jahrhundert. Zwei Bronzebügeleisen, XVI. und XVII. Jahrhundert.
Bronzenes Tintenfaß, italienisch, XVI. Jahrhundert. Nach Giov. da
Bologna, Raub der Dejanira. Kupferkannen und Kupferbecken, XVI.
bis XVIII. Jahrhundert. Tiroler Messingschüsseln. Ein Bindenwickler,
Messing durchbrochen und vergoldet, XVI. Jahrhundert. Uhr, Wien,
um 1800, Bronze vergoldet. Lichtschirm, ca. 1800. Lichtputzschere,
Bronze vergoldet, ca. 1860.
Wandschrank VIII. Kamingarnitur, Uhr und Leuchterpaar, von
Thomire. Spiegel mit Bronzefassung, ca. 1800. Uhr in Lyraform. Uhr
(als Trommel von Amor getragen), Schale und Räuchergefäß,
Ebenholz mit Bronzeverzierung. Zwei Bronzebüsten.
IX. Alt-Wiener Möbelbeschläge.
Wandpult X. Möbelbeschläge.
Diesen Schränken steht gegenüber die kleine Sammlung von
Arbeiten des Ostens.
Schrank XI. Persische Geräte von Kupfer, Zinn u. dgl. Verzinnte
Kupferschüssel mit Jagdszenen. Tauschierte und gravierte Arbeiten
mit Metalleinlagen.
Wandschrank XII. Gleichartige Stücke derselben Provenienz.
Schrank XIII. und Wandschrank XIV. Japanische und chinesische
Bronzen, zumeist Stücke aus neuerer Zeit.
Schrank XV. Japanische und chinesische Bronzen. Metallgefäße
aus Zentralasien und Indien.
Der Eingangstür zum Saal I gegenüber hängen an der Wand
Bleireliefs des XVIII. Jahrhunderts, ein Pygmalion-Relief von G. R.
Donner, zwei Reliefs mit der Sage von Orestes und Pylades aus der
Zeit des Klassizismus, Geschenk des regierenden Fürsten Johann
von und zu Liechtenstein.
Vitrine XVI. Bleimodell zu einem Denkmal für Katharina von
Rußland, XVIII. Jahrhundert.
Vitrine XVII. Bleiarbeiten. Zwei Arbeiten G. R. Donners, die eine
offenbar eine Modellfigur für den Brunnen am Neuen Markt, die
andere ein Relief mit Faun und Knaben. Zwei Statuetten von
Hagenauer, ein Vermächtnis der Frau Rosalia Goldschmied an das
Museum. Bleiplaketten vom Ende des XVII. Jahrhunderts.
 Die zweite Hälfte des Saales ist den Kunstschmiedearbeiten
reserviert. Nur eine kleine Sammlung von Bronzetürklopfern des
XVI. Jahrhunderts ist hier noch untergebracht.
An der Wandverschalung hängt chronologisch geordnet eine
Sammlung von Schlössern und Schloßbeschlägen vom XIV. bis XIX.
Jahrhundert. Gotische Schloßplatten. Spätgotischer Türklopfer.
Reichverziertes Kastenschloß, Ende des XVI. Jahrhunderts, mit
einer Inschrift. Kastenschloß aus dem XVII. Jahrhundert. Reihe von
großen Prunkschlössern des XVII. und XVIII. Jahrhunderts, die sich
an der Schmalwand des Saales hinzieht.
Vitrine XVIII. Zwei Hauptwerke süddeutscher Schlosserkunst des
XVI. Jahrhunderts, die Vorhängschlösser aus Stift Heiligenkreuz mit
eingeätzten Ornamenten.

Gruftgitter, Schmiedeeisen, deutsch, XVII. Jahrhundert

Größere Kunstschmiedearbeiten: Renaissancegitter mit
durchgezogenen Stäben, aus Steiermark; Grabkreuz, Tiroler Arbeit
des XVII. Jahrhunderts; Balkon- und Stiegengitter mit Figuren,
prächtigem Durchzugswerk und tief eingeschlagenen Ornamenten,
eine Wiener Schmiedearbeit des XVII. Jahrhunderts; zwei
venezianische Feuerböcke des XVI. Jahrhunderts, einer davon ein
Geschenk des regierenden Fürsten Johann von und zu
Liechtenstein. Auf der gegenüberliegenden Seite des Saales
Kunstschmiedearbeiten des XVIII. Jahrhunderts. Ein Balkongitter
aus Bandeisen, um 1700; an der Wand ein geschmiedeter Wandarm
mit Laubwerk an den Enden seiner schön gezogenen Spiralen, um
1700; vom Anfang des XVIII. Jahrhunderts das Balkongitter aus dem
abgebrochenen Hause Gumpendorferstraße 94; Gruftgitter mit dem
ausgebildeten Laub- und Bandelwerk der deutschen Schmiede aus
der ersten Hälfte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts; ein kolossaler
geschmiedeter Toraufsatz vom Anfang des XVIII. Jahrhunderts in
der Mitte des Saales. An der Wand (wie vorhin) ein kleiner Wandarm
mit schönem Laubwerk, erste Hälfte des XVIII. Jahrhunderts; das
mächtige Wirtshausschild („zum goldenen Stern“), eine Augsburger
Schmiedearbeit, in der sich Rokoko mit Zopfstil mischt. Mit dem
Rokoko ging das Kunstschmiedehandwerk seinem Ende entgegen;
das Empire mit seinen strengen, einfachen Formen konnte das
Handwerk, das im Louis XIV-Stil und im Rokoko seine höchste Blüte
gefunden hat, nicht mehr in gleichem Maße beschäftigen und der
Eisenguß hat das Handwerk vollends verdrängt. Die Arbeiten vom
Ende des XVIII. Jahrhunderts sehen neben den reichen, kunstvollen
Barockarbeiten recht dürftig und sogar in ihrer Technik
herabgekommen aus.
Vitrine XIX. Eine Sammlung von Schlüsseln kunstvoller Arbeit,
XVI. bis XVIII. Jahrhundert.
Vitrine XXII. Schlüssel. Ein Kassaschloß vom Ende des XVIII.
Jahrhunderts. Schlüssel aus dem XVII. und XVIII. Jahrhundert. In
der Mitte der Vitrine ein in Eisen geschnittener Doppeladler.
 SÄLE V UND III.

MÖBELSAMMLUNG.
Saal V. Aus dem Altertum und fast dem ganzen Mittelalter sind
nur ganz wenige Holzmöbel erhalten, ein Umstand, der sich aus der
Vergänglichkeit und dem geringen Werte des Materials erklären läßt.
In Ägypten haben sich in den erst in neuerer Zeit erschlossenen
Gräbern hauptsächlich Sitzmöbel vorgefunden, die uns schon eine
bedeutende Fertigkeit in der Art der Holzbearbeitung erkennen
lassen. Schnitzereien und Bemalung dienen zum Schmucke dieser
seltenen Stücke. Infolge der Ausgrabungen in Pompeji wurde es
möglich, Rekonstruktionen von antiken Möbeln vorzunehmen, die
nicht nur über die Form, sondern auch über die Technik wichtige
Aufschlüsse geben.
Die hauptsächlichste Quelle für die Geschichte des antiken
Möbels sind aber die Darstellungen auf den Werken der bildenden
Kunst, besonders auf den Vasen und den zahlreichen uns
erhaltenen Reliefs an den Tempeln und Grabdenkmälern.
Auch aus dem Mittelalter haben sich bis in das XIV. Jahrhundert
fast keine Holzmöbel erhalten, und wir müssen aus den Abbildungen
auf Kunstwerken dieser Zeit unsere Kenntnis schöpfen. Vor allem
sind die zahlreichen Miniaturenhandschriften weltlichen Inhaltes —
Romane, Historie usw. eine ergiebige Fundgrube. Erst vom XIV.
Jahrhundert an ist eine größere Zahl von Holzmöbeln auf uns
gekommen.[3] Das verbreitetste Möbel zur Zeit der Gotik war die
Truhe, ein langer rechteckiger Kasten mit einem nach oben zu
öffnenden Klappdeckel. Die Verbindung der Bretter geschah durch
Verzinken, das heißt durch das Aussägen und Verbinden von
fingerartig ineinandergreifenden Zacken.
Bei den ältesten Holzmöbeln entstehen die großen Flächen
durch das Aneinanderfügen einzelner Bretter, später bildet sich das
sogenannte Rahmensystem in der Weise aus, daß in einen Rahmen