Seite - 92 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

92 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation which emerged from the “fleeting expression of a human face.”30 Such a preservation of aura would have bolstered Franz Joseph’s sacrosanct privilege as the divinely ap- pointed leader of the Austrian Empire. The photographic increase in accessibility to monarchs makes them even more revered, but only as a reproduction, as this image replaces the actual individual in the hearts of their subjects. Most subjects never saw their monarchs; their experience of this sanctified leader was limited to his or her photographic portrait, which takes on an equivalence with the body of the monarch. As a result, the photomontages allowed the Habsburg court to erase the real Elisabeth and replace her with a more compliant duplicate. The significance of the reference to the original bodies of the imperial family is demonstrated by a caption that Ludwig Angerer added to an enlargement of his original 1860 portrait.31 At the lower left of the image, Angerer added “Nach dem Leben photographirt von L. Angerer.” The insistence that this was produced nach dem Leben could be Angerer’s attempt to distinguish his product from the more fan- ciful montages sold by Bermann’s Kunsthandlung. Under this rubric, the appearance of photography in mass-produced images of the imperial family is essential, because they record the physical presence of the monarchs. This evokes a similar sentimental response to one experienced by Barthes when looking at a photograph of Napoleon Bonaparte’s youngest brother Jérôme. Staring into eyes that had once looked at Na- poleon Bonaparte, Barthes felt a deep connection to Jérôme, “a sort of umbilical cord link[ing] of the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.”32 These photomontages may have stirred such a response in its viewers: gazing upon their ruler, his beautiful wife seated beside him, they too might have been reminded of the singular existence of their monarchs, and, by extension, their dynastic claim to authority. This further reinforced the reverence that Franz Joseph sought to inspire through the reinstitution of Spanish court etiquette following the 1848 revolutions.33 The ceremonial of this regime created an artificial distance between Franz Joseph and his subjects, a gap that was crucial to the re-establishment of Habsburg hegemony. Yet, Franz Joseph also needed to inspire loyalty among his heterogeneous subjects. Photography allowed the court to visually resolve the paradox between emphasizing Franz Joseph’s divine status while making himself more available and visible to them. It also obfuscated Elisabeth’s problematic behavior by referencing her healthy body in scenes that high- lighted her qualities as a wife and mother. Such an indexical interpretation of photography has its limitations, as the visual inconsistencies of the Habsburg photomontages make it unlikely that nineteenth- century viewers understood them as unproblematic indexical representations of the imperial family. Recent scholarship has scrutinized Barthes’s discussion of the photo- graphic index, going so far as to question the very existence and composition of im-