DRACULA - Voivode and Vampire

The exhibition was presented by the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna in 2008 at Schloss Ambras from Innsbruck, celebrating 111 years from the publishing of the „Dracula” novel by Bram Stoker, aiming at reopening the discussion about the historical character Vlad Tepes/Dracula and about vampirism in a historical and realistic context.

 

The present exhibition in Bucharest includes, besides objects from museums in Austria, Hungary, Germany and Slovenia, pieces from the national patrimony of the National Museum of Art of Romania, the National Museum of History of Romania, the National Peles Museum, the Romanian Peasant Museum and the Carpathian Hunting Museum.

 

The central piece and the „star” of the exhibition is the well known portrait of voivode Vlad Tepes, called Dracula, preserved for more than 400 years at Ambras Castle, presented now for the first time in Romania.

 

The first section of the exhibition explores the legends created around the Wallahian voivode from the 15th century. The personality and image of Vlad III Dracula and his epoch are illustrated through a series of portraits and documents. One of the most interesting pieces from this section is a crypto-portrait („a disguised portrait”) of the voivode: the Jesus in front of Pilat panel - a scene from the Passion cycle from the Franciscan monastery in Vienna, preserved now at the National Gallery of Ljubljana, in which we recognize in the physiognomy of Pilat, Vlad’s traits as they appeared in his portraits at that time.

 

The second section illustrates the conflicts between the Turkish and the Christians from the South-East in the 15-18th centuries, that, with all their shortcomings, contributed to the cultural exchanges. The guns and portraits presented in the exhibition prove the existence of a neutral interest: the objects produced in Western Europe have been influenced by the Oriental decoration, while the Ottoman sultans, despite the Koran’s interdictions, have commissioned portraits.

 

The third section approaches the vampirism myth, as outlined from testimonies about „vampirism phenomenon” recorded in the 18th century in areas near the military border of the Austrian possession until the Ottoman Empire, in the context of the conflicts between Christians and Muslims. Epoch engravings, letters, treaties for healing the „vampirism disease” document this part of the exhibition. It is completed by the literary approaches of the subject: notes, drafts of the „Dracula” novel by Bram Stoker (1897) and by other fragments from literary texts which refer to vampires and supernatural creatures, signed by: Homer, Goethe, Byron, Beaudelaire, John Sheridan Le Fanu, John William Polidori etc.

 

Nothing has contributed more at shaping the current vision about Dracula and vampires than the huge production of film adaptations. The last part of the exhibition follows the evolution of Dracula’s figure in worldwide filmmaking, through posters, trailers and film captions such as Dracula (USA, 1931) directed by Ted Browning, starring Béla Lugosi, Dracula, Prince of Darkness (Great Britain, 1965, directed by Terence Fisher, starring Christopher Lee), Blood for Dracula (France-Italy, 1974, directed by Paul Morrissay, produced by Andy Warhol), Nosferatu the Vampire (RFG-France 1979, directed by Werner Herzog, starring Klaus Kinski) etc