here we wait

happy unnecessary horse day

say what you will about the Habsburgs but I really appreciate how many of them created massive baroque synecdoches of their own neuroses. Charles V drove himself crazy trying to manage an intercontinental empire in the 1500s and then spent his final years in a monastery surrounded by clocks, obsessed with trying to get all of the clocks ticking in unison. Philip II was a meticulous and obsessively pious introvert and he turned his palace into a bureaucratic warehouse with him sitting at the top floor, correcting the grammar of his advisors’s letters like he was grading essays. Rudolf II was completely checked out of his role as emperor, obsessively collecting foreign curiosities while wars and religious revolts slowly devoured the Holy Roman Empire, just like the live lions and tigers wandering the halls of Prague Castle and attacking servants at random. All of them (the Habsburgs not the lions and tigers) had debilitating prognathism from centuries of inbreeding to keep their ‘noble blood’ (and to keep their territories consolidated), their bodies falling apart from the sheer weight of their dynastic history and endless pursuit of purity and centralization. It’s bizarrely and tragically beautiful.