Page - 31 - 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 31 that the object materializes aspects of the structure that held together the society that produced it; that the object is a material record of its historical world. It makes those structures apparent in a specific material form, but it also idealizes and decorates that social structure to make it appear glorious, precious, and inevitable. Such processes of formal communication in art have been emphasized in an important essay by the late Alfred Gell, a British cultural anthropologist who has argued that there is a paral- lel “between the technical processes involved in making art and technical processes generally, each being seen in light of the other.”20 Stated more simply, art stands in for, inflects, connects, metaphorizes, and indeed materializes how a society imagines itself functioning. The snuffbox seems an excellent example of this. The workings of the Habsburg dynastic system are conveyed here in a surprisingly honest way. Maria Theresa was at once the Empress and also a widow: a woman para- doxically in control of an Empire, but one who shared control with at least two other individuals, her co-regent Joseph and the court chancellor Kaunitz. Something of her complex political and social position, at once a figurehead and also hidden, operating through a combination of official and clandestine actions, is conveyed through her presence on the snuffbox’s bottom. The official power of the sons is therefore shown to rely upon the true, but initially invisible source of power: the Empress. This only becomes apparent when chosen individuals handle the object. The physical construc- tion of this object – one might better say its materiality – therefore conveys tacitly what held this elite community together in a way that would be difficult to represent through other means. One may ask if such a message was intentional, and if so intended by Mack, Ben- cini, the Empress, Charles Alexander, or for that matter anyone else. Such a question is impossible to answer definitively, but probably it was not. Yet the judgments in- volved in making art, the many decisions that arise regarding arrangement, style, and what can only be called rightness (convenance), are all in some respect metaphors for how a society imagines itself functioning, so says Gell. The Empress’s portrait could not appear along the sides of the snuffbox, nor would a Habsburg sense of female piety allow her to be represented directly on its top. Her location artfully materializes her place in the Habsburg political system. By virtue of its rightness, its apparent suc- cess as an art object, it conveys precisely that reality. Viewing this object through the lens of material culture studies, then, reveals rich strands of meaning that otherwise would remain difficult to see. Yet such approaches are not only relevant to portable things such as this one ̶ to objects in a literal sense, and to show that, we shall turn to another case study. This is the beautiful Vieux- Laque-Zimmer at Schloss Schönbrunn (Fig. 3). Looking carefully at it allows us to see that material culture studies do not simply concern objects, but that its concepts