Page - 64 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

64 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation ary’.4 These portraits, it will become clear, operate in dialogue – at times directly, at times indirectly – with one another through a visual and material vocabulary of indexicality. What is meant by this term is the form of indexical signification as laid out in the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, whereby an index signifies by means of being ‘really affected’ by the object (or in- deed person) it represents through some existential or physical, real connection, in the manner of a fingerprint.5 Moreover, what fol- lows is concerned with how the vi- sual and material affinities between these portraits position them at the centre of discourses of legitimacy, at a time when royal legitimacy was being fundamentally questioned. Only relatively little is known about the printmaker, Jakob Adam, but he appears to have been a noteworthy figure in the artistic community of late eighteenth-century Vienna, where he was born in 1748, trained at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, and lived until his death in 1811.6 His “fleißig[…] punktirte[r]” style and the ‘Sauber- keit’ it produced in his prints was considered by contemporaries to be in the French manner, recalling especially the work of Étienne Ficquet.7 He was most recognized for his portraits, a genre to which his particular technique was evidently well suited. We do not know who initiated the collaboration between Adam and Josef Müller (an alias for Graf Deym von Střítetž), but there must have been mutual agreement that Adam was the right printmaker to be ‘publishing’ Müller-Deym’s wax portraits. Indeed, this was not the first time that Adam had made prints after wax portraits. His prints after Müller-Deym’s wax portraits of Franz and Marie Therese made from casts followed three depicting the prominent military leaders, the Count of Wurmser (Fig. 3), the Duke of Württemberg and Baron Mack von Leiberich, published in Figure 2: Jakob Adam (printmaker) after Josef Müller (modeller and sculptor in wax), Emperor Francis II., 1794.