Seite - 29 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

Interdisciplinary Material Culture Studies and the Problem of Habsburg-Lorraine Representation 29 mother. Ilsebill Barta and Werner Telesko have demonstrated how important such visual techniques were for promoting the Habsburg-Lorraine dynastic ideology.18 The proliferation of offspring represented assumes a subtle ranking and gendering. At the top are the two eldest surviving male children, Joseph and Leopold; they are the individuals who will continue the Habsburg line after Maria Theresa’s reign. In 1773 Joseph was already Emperor and co-regent, but representing both sons was es- sential since the family line would pass not through Joseph but rather his brother. In true Habsburg tradition, Leopold fathered sixteen children during his reign as Grand Duke of Tuscany, one of whom later became the Emperor Franz II/I. The box therefore privileges dynastic lineage in its arrangement. Once the two succes- sive male inheritors are established, the box continues this gendered ranking on its curved sides. The two younger sons, Ferdinand and Maximilian, appear immediately below their elder brothers on the object’s front, creating a quartet of individual male portraits. Around the box’s circumference the archduchesses come into view, totaling six and including Maria Christine, co-founder of the modern Graphische Sammlung Albertina, and Marie Antoinette, queen of France. They are essential to the message of dynastic augmentation conveyed on the box, but are less important due to their sex since they, unlike their mother, would never directly carry forward the primary Habsburg-Lorraine line. Their job was to be available for marriage into foreign states, and since many of them already had done so, there is an implicit and imagined geog- raphy built into the box. For its recipient, Charles of Lorraine, contemplating this object must have conveyed Habsburg sovereignty in a European setting ideally by insisting on the familial character of these rulers, their individual noble selves and the regions they linked through blood ties. Thus far, Maria Theresa appears on this box only as an emblem in diamonds on its top, at least until one lifts the box and turns it over. On its bottom surface we find Maria Theresa at last, represented in her widow’s costume, and larger in scale than the others (Fig. 2). She is flanked by portraits of Charles and Maria Anna. Modern viewers may find the positioning of diamond-encrusted images like these on the box’s underside strange, but remember that a snuffbox demands a tactile engagement as well as an optical one. Their designers expected them to be picked up, turned around in the hands and scrutinized closely, a process that invites the beholder to imagine relationships, official as well as covert, among the people represented. Manipulat- ing the object through turning reveals the Empress through surprise, a telling detail since it recasts the official statement of imperial power represented on the top and sides into something unorthodox – a sovereign, female, widowed monarch who holds pride of place below and at the center of the object’s three-dimensional arrangement. When we recognize the significance of this arrangement, then the absence of Maria