Page - 63 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

Habsburg Portraiture Face-to-Face with the French Revolution 63 hered – in their broad structure at least – to an established format of portraits of rulers and grands hom- mes, they in fact possessed a unique selling proposition. As the inscrip- tion on the lower perimeter of the main image declares, these were not merely prints after drawings or paintings. They were a collabora- tion between the printmaker Jakob Adam and the wax modeller Josef Müller-Deym: “Ioseph Müller ad Vivum formav. et in cera fecit / Ia- cob Adam del. Et sculpsit Viennae 1794”. The Viennese public was in fact being offered an image after a wax portrait which had been ‘taken from life’, that is, created by means of a cast of the sitter’s face. As the notice in the Wiener Zeitung emphasised, “der rühmlich bekannte Künstler, Hr. Jo- seph Müller die allerhöchste Gnade hatte [das Kaiserpaar], nach dem Leben abzufor- men, und in Wachs zu machen, und [die Bildnisse wurden] dann von dem ohnehin bekannten Künstler Hrn. Jacob Adam in Kupfer gestochen”.2 Indeed, it was precisely this quality – what we might describe as the ‘material provenance’ of these printed portraits as having derived directly from the sitters’ physiognomy – which guaranteed their implicit significance, not to mention value: “Man sagt nichts weiter zu ihrer Empfehlung, sondern läßt es den Kennern über, den Werth dieser Kupfer zu bestimmen.”3 This essay will consider how these exceptional images operated in the thick of a multimedial network of Habsburg imperial portraiture created during the most vio- lent throes of the French Revolution, around 1794. In doing so it will map out an ‘ecology’ of portraiture – one that traverses ‘national’ and linguistic boundaries and the interfaces between the public and the private, the official and the unofficial, and even, at times, what we might describe as the ‘revolutionary’ and ‘counterrevolution- Figure 1: Jakob Adam (printmaker) after Josef Müller (modeller and sculptor in wax), Empress Marie Therese, 1794.