Object and provenance

The Imperial Crown of Austria, in German Kaiserkrone des sterreichischen Kaiserreichs, is a Renaissance-period crown made in 1602 in Prague for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II by the court goldsmith Jan Vermeyen. It was conceived as a personal crown for Rudolf, since the elective Crown of the Holy Roman Empire could not be modified or carried at will. When Francis II declared the hereditary Austrian Empire in 1804, in response to Napoleon's elevation as Emperor of the French, this Rudolfine crown was reassigned as the state crown of the new empire and remained so until the abolition of the monarchy in 1918.

The crown is held today in the Imperial Treasury, the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. It is on continuous public display.

Construction and gemstones

The crown comprises three principal elements stacked vertically. The lower circlet, a closed gold band, carries eight large fleurs-de-lys-form points alternating with eight gemstone-set raised areas. Above the circlet rises a high mitre, the form derived from ecclesiastical practice, divided into four enamelled pictorial panels showing scenes from Rudolf's reign. Surmounting the mitre is a single arch from front to back terminating in a cross, on top of which is mounted a large unfoiled blue sapphire cabochon described in the inventory as approximately one hundred and forty carats.

The principal gemstones include large polished spinel cabochons, traditionally identified at the time as rubies though the trade now recognises that most red stones in royal European inventories before the nineteenth century are spinels rather than corundum. Diamonds are point-cut and table-cut, consistent with the cutting practice of the early seventeenth century. Pearls form the borders of the enamelled panels and the crests of the circlet points. The total is in the high hundreds for diamonds and dozens for the larger coloured stones.

The four enamelled mitre panels, executed in painted enamel on gold, depict Rudolf's coronations as King of Hungary, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, plus a triumphal allegory. They are signed and dated and are themselves regarded as masterpieces of Habsburg court enamelling.

Symbolic programme

The composite form, circlet plus mitre plus arch, is deliberate. The circlet derives from ancient royal crowns. The mitre derives from the bishop's mitre and signals the religious authority claimed by the Holy Roman Emperor. The arch, joining the two, signals sovereignty in the imperial sense. Each element of the form was a calculated assertion in a period when the Holy Roman Imperial title was contested between secular and ecclesiastical claims.

Role under the Austrian Empire

From 1804 the crown served as the state symbol of the Austrian Empire and, after 1867, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Austrian half, although it was never used in a coronation in the strict liturgical sense. The Emperor of Austria was not crowned with it; coronations in the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy used the separate Holy Crown of Hungary, the Crown of Saint Stephen. The Austrian Imperial Crown was instead displayed at imperial events and reproduced on coats of arms, coinage and official documents.

Survival through the twentieth century

The crown survived the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 because the new Austrian Republic took possession of the Imperial Treasury and the regalia were preserved as national patrimony. The crown was sequestered briefly during the German annexation of Austria in 1938, with the Nazi authorities considering its transfer to Nuremberg as part of a planned reunification of the historic Imperial regalia. It was not transferred. After 1945 the crown returned to permanent display in Vienna.

Conservation and recent history

The crown has undergone several documented conservation campaigns, most recently in the late twentieth century, focused on stabilising the enamel panels and reattaching loose pearls. The original gemstones remain in their original cells. No replacements have been documented in the modern conservation record. The piece is regarded by curatorial authorities as the most complete and unaltered of the major surviving European imperial crowns from before the nineteenth century.

Place in the trade canon

For the working jeweller and the gemstone trade, the Austrian Imperial Crown is significant for two reasons. It is one of the best-documented cases of large historical spinels misidentified for centuries as rubies, a story that recurred with the Black Prince's Ruby in the British Imperial State Crown and the Timur Ruby. And the table-cut diamonds in the crown represent a rare unaltered survival of pre-brilliant-cut diamond setting at the highest level of European patronage. Pieces of comparable cutting style virtually never come to auction, since survivors are almost all in institutional collections.