Cosmopolitan aristocracy and the diffusion of baroque culture : Cultural transfer from Spain to Austria in the Seventeenth century

Abstract

This study aims to reveal traces of Spanish cultural influences on the seventeenth-century Austrian Habsburg monarchy, or to be more precise, on courtly and aristocratic culture. The focus is however less on the ruling houses, but rather more on the aristocratic society and its contribution to cultural transfer processes from Spain to Austria. Tracing themes of alteration in aristocratic selfrepresentation, evoked by political, social and cultural changes in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this study examines the role of culture in general, and cultural borrowings in particular, in the process of aristocratic re-invention. "A nobleman has to be curious", Prince Karl Eusebius Liechtenstein once argued. "Thereby he distinguishes himself from the ordinary man." This curiosity in every respect was beyond any doubt a decisive factor for cultural transfer processes.