Apr VSS - "Princely Taste"

Helen Buddensieg

Lichtenstein Collection

Princely Taste: Four Centuries of Collecting

The Princely Collections of Liechtenstein, among the significant Old Master collections in private hands, were formed not by a single vision but through four centuries of princely ambition. Beginning with Karl I (1569–1627), the first Prince of Liechtenstein and a patron of the arts at the court of Rudolf II (1552–1612) in Prague, successive princes acquired, commissioned, displayed, relocated – and sometimes sold – works in response to taste, circumstances, pressures, and dynastic strategy. Focusing on works that define the Collections today, including masterpieces by Peter Paul Rubens and Van Dyck, bronzes by Giambologna and Susini, and Neoclassical and Biedermeier objects, this lecture asks how individual preferences became a collective identity. It approaches this history through three connected themes: princely taste; the character of a living collection, shaped by acquisitions, sales, and scholarship; and curating as an act of representation, preservation, and renewal. Together, these perspectives reveal collecting as a negotiation between inheritance, change, and continuity.

BIO

Helen Buddensieg (née Kohn) is a Curatorial Assistant and Advisor to the Director of the Princely Collections Liechtenstein in Vienna. She recently submitted in her doctoral thesis on Correggio’s Madonna of Saint Sebastian and the art of the ‘visionary’ altarpiece in sixteenth-century northern Italy to the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her thesis was supervised by Professors Hans Aurenhammer and David Ekserdjian. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from the University of Vienna and master’s degree with a specialisation in the Italian Renaissance from the Courtauld Institute, London. From 2019 to 2024, she worked as a curatorial fellow, and subsequently as a research assistant, at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden. During this time, she was involved in various exhibition projects, as well as the conservation and restoration project of Correggio’s Madonna of Saint Sebastian. From 2024 to 2025, she was a predoctoral fellow in the Lise Meitner Group ‘Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History’ at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Her research interests include the materiality of objects, their restoration and collection history, and interdisciplinary research questions involving and crossing art history and restoration. Her research has been published in journals such as Studiolo, conference proceedings such as Bridging the Gap: Synergies between Art History and Conservation (Oslo) and Hand in Hand: Collaboration in Art and Conservation (London) and exhibition catalogues.