"HABSBURG SPLENDOR" is now departed from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. One thing you missed, if you missed the fine show, was a display of a Habsburg carriage and a Habsburg sleigh, each attached to one or more life-sized model . . .
. . . horses. It showed how the inbred Habsburg nobles lived large, riding here and there in gilded style.
It also showed how woefully out-of-touch their technology was. The fine white plastic horses pulled their royal cargo with breast straps. Looked good. Worked poorly, at least compared to modern technology -- at least since the 1100s in Europe -- of the horse collar, a device that distributed the load across the horse's shoulders and improved pulling power by 50 percent.
My guess is that the royal sense of style trumped the royal sense of utility. After all, farmers used horse collars. Who wanted to drag the streets of Vienna in a vehicle that shared too much in look-and-feel with a peasant's wagon?
I've seen horses plowing with breast straps, in Romania and Moldova. The blades were cutting a few inches of topsoil, not digging deep into the earth the way my grandfather and uncle did with collared mules on their East Texas farms in the forties and fifties.
For the Habsburgs, I blame anti-horse-collar bias on excessive pride. In Romania and Moldova, I blame it on excessive communism.
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