The Monument to Archduke John of Austria

Town Park (until 1918)

Franz Weissenberger

1856/1883

The monument to Archduke John of Austria was ceremonially unveiled in Maribor's Town Park on 10 June 1883. The full-length statue was cast after the model made by sculptor Franz Weissenberger in Salm's ironworks in Blansko in Moravia. After World War I, it was removed from public space and transferred to the city museum.

Othmar Reiser, a lawyer living in Vienna, donated the monument of Archduke John to his birth town of Maribor. Presumably, he bought the older statue in Vienna. The sculptor Franz Weissenberger (1819-1875) made the model for the full-length portrait of Archduke John of Austria and presented it at the exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1856. The sculptor portrayed the archduke as a hunter dressed in Styrian attire. He is leaning on a travelling stick, while a hunted wild rooster lies by his right leg. At the time, a portrait of a member of an imperial court in hunting attire and in a relaxed pose was exceptional and unacceptable for public space. Nevertheless, in 1859 they cast two archduke's portraits after Weissenberger's model in Salm's ironworks in Blansko. One stood in a garden in Salzburg and was later relocated to Bad Aussee, the birth town of the archduke's wife Anna Plochl. The grateful citizens of Zidani Most wanted to erect the other statue in their hometown; however, the authorities thought that the genre depiction of a member of the imperial family in hunting attire was not suitable. Therefore, the statue was to stay in Vienna, where Othmar Reiser bought it in 1882. By request of the donor, the citizens of Maribor placed it in a new area of the park, emphasising the final merits of Maribor mayor Matthäus Reiser. The latter was also Othmar's cousin. They placed the statue on a two-metre high artificial rock made out of grey-green rock from the Pohorje Mountains. The pedestal was soon overgrown with ivy, which harmoniously connected the monument with its natural environment. The unveiling of the monument on 10 June 1883 did not cause as many national disputes as did the unveiling of the monument to Emperor Joseph II in 1882; however, it was still a manifestation of the city's leading German-national and liberal political party. At the end of the First World War, the statue was moved to (today's) Maribor Regional Museum, where it is still preserved.

Polona Vidmar

(20 May 2014)