Ludwig II & Richard Hornig — A Forbidden Love In Aeternum (Virtual Exhibition)

View the complete virtual exhibition here:

https://oncyber.io/spaces/dQJ5HJT2jDAit48jd0aX

or through the link on my LinkedIn profile: Mădălina Biță.

Everyone remembers the king.
Almost no one remembers the man he loved.
SCHÜTZEN: LIEBER RICHARD is a virtual exhibition-film dedicated to the hidden, tender, and tragic bond between King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Richard Ritter von Hornig—his equerry, private secretary, intimate confidant, and perhaps the most mysterious figure in the king’s emotional life.
This project was inspired by the real archival manuscripts and letters preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB), including Ludwig II’s surviving handwritten letters to Richard Hornig, and by Paulina Kirton’s remarkable biographical study:
„auf Deinen Befehl gehe ich in die Hölle“
A biographical account of Ludwig II’s royal stable master Richard Ritter von Hornig (1841–1911).
History made Ludwig into a legend of castles, beauty, solitude, and death.
But Richard remains more elusive—more shadow than monument, more trace than certainty, more intimate precisely because he was never fully brought into the light.
And perhaps that is why he becomes so powerful.
He is the one standing beside the myth.
The one receiving the letters.
The one history did not know how to keep.
The one whose silence may contain an entire forbidden world.
This exhibition honors not only Ludwig, but their love—a love constrained by its century, obscured by decorum, wounded by the Church, by society, by rank, by secrecy, and by the violence done to all tenderness that cannot speak its name openly.
What survives, then?
A letter.
A name.
A flower.
A command.
A vow.
A trace.
And sometimes, an image.
SCHÜTZEN means:
to protect
to shelter
to guard
to preserve from harm
That is the heart of this exhibition.
To protect what history left fragile.
To guard what official narratives reduced to rumor or footnote.
To shelter, in aeternum, a bond that may have been too deep for its world and too dangerous for its time.
LIEBER RICHARD — Dear Richard — is both an address and an invocation.
It is the beginning of a letter, the beginning of a prayer, the beginning of a mourning that never ended.
This is not a literal reconstruction.
It is a digital reliquary.
A chamber of memory built from letters, royal signs, flowers, houses, relics, seals, fragments of language, and imagined remains—each work attempting to preserve what the archive could not fully contain: longing, fidelity, secrecy, grief, and love.
Not merely in history.
Not merely in art.
But in aeternum.
A virtual exhibition created in Oncyber.
Concept, digital artworks, exhibition design, and film:
Mădălina Biță, 2026

Lieber Richard.
In treuer Seele.
In aeternum.
#LudwigII #RichardHornig #ForbiddenLove #QueerHistory #Bavaria #DigitalArt #VirtualExhibition #Oncyber #LieberRichard #Schutzen #InAeternum

Видео Ludwig II & Richard Hornig — A Forbidden Love In Aeternum (Virtual Exhibition) канала Madalina Bita