Page - 34 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

34 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation picture, for example, she appears as a sculpted bust, a work of art within this work of art (Fig. 4). But what about the lacquer that gives the room its name? Why was it included here? One way of explaining its presence would be through the history of taste, and indeed this has been the default explanation in the scholarly literature. Asian art enjoyed great popularity among eighteenth-century elites, and in inserting lac- quer into this room’s design program, the Habsburg court remained current with broader artistic trends. The Faszination Asien that modern travelers enjoy has its eighteenth-century predecessor here. Yet this is a superficial and circular explana- tion. A second approach would be through notions of luxury and of representation as described earlier. The room demonstrates that costly, rare, imported Asian lac- quers adequately displayed the high status of its occupants, and that it represented their eliteness in material form. This is more convincing, since a room like this certainly impressed, and one way it did so was through the rarity and high monet- ary value of its materials. But that does not account for the room’s incorporation of lacquer specifically, since any number of other rare, expensive materials could have conveyed that meaning. Lacquer, it turns out, is a fascinatingly complex substance, one with wide-ranging associations and rich metaphorical resonances.22 The eighteenth century understood lacquered wood not just through its distant origins and role in international trade, but also as exemplifying great age and optical brilliance. The best lacquer, connois- seurs claimed, was the oldest, and at a minimum, lacquer acted as a preservative that kept old wood looking beautiful for centuries, seemingly insulating it from the rav- ages of time.23 That concept is built into the room associatively, and in this respect the lacquer supports the myths of dynastic continuity presented overtly in the room’s portraiture. Likewise, lacquer possesses a brilliant shine, and indeed part of its ap- peal lay in how it could be both darkly colored and shiny at the same time. This contradiction parallels the material pleasure that eighteenth-century observers found in porcelain, which likewise manipulated light in ways that defied the logic of op- tics. Lacquer brought optical brilliance into otherwise dark spaces like the Emperor’s former Retirade. Combine these physical qualities with the East Asian origin of the panels, which derive from paravents cut to fit the walls’ surfaces, and lacquer’s mater- iality comes to metaphorize at least three different components of imperial identity: longevity, light, and geography. On this level, then, lacquer is more than a decorative insert into the room, but a material that echoes subtly the themes expressed in the paintings and one that is appropriate for its site in an imperial Lustschloss. And the lacquer panels do this irrespective of what they actually represent pictorially, which are entirely typical Asiatic landscape scenes.