A few months ago, I went to Wien to visit some art museums (mostly to see Wes Anderson’s exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum) and practice my German! This was my second trip to Austria but my first-time visiting Vienna. While I saw many amazing works of art and fragments of history, I want to focus on two sets of works that really blew me away—the Blaschka glass flowers and sea creatures. The Blaschkas were a father-son glass artist duo native to Czech-German borderland. They sold thousands of these glass invertebrates as models for scientific and academic study.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself a glass artist but my foray into glassblowing has deepened my appreciation of glass art and the skill required to produce such realistic and proportionally accurate replicas. Harvard also has a collection of their sea creatures and commissioned the infamous glass flowers, but I hadn’t seen the glass flowers before visiting Vienna. Both of these collections are breathtaking and so realistic, I am absolutely awestruck. These models are both art and scientific models, and quite honestly, these photos don’t do them justice.
