Page - 66 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

66 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation This distinction is reflected in Adam’s prints after the respective modelers’ portraits; those after Müller-Deym’s emphasized in the credit line the “ad Vivum formav.” that was central to his working method as one based on casts of his sitters’ faces, while Posch’s wax portraits are merely indicated as having been produced “ad vivum”, ter- minology that could also be used in prints after painted or drawn portraits.14 The imperial family clearly had great enthusiasm for wax portraiture and were keen clients of Müller-Deym. He took death masks of various members of the family, including Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II15, and a full-length wax portrait he had created of the deceased Archduchess Ludovica, now in the collection of the Habsburg Fideikommissbibliothek within the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, kept Em- peror Franz II company in his private apartments.16 Franz himself was a pupil of small-scale wax modelling, employing Posch as his tutor.17 Following a visit by Franz and Marie Therese to the Kunstkabinett on 26 March 179518, Müller-Deym was hon- oured as “K. K. privilegirt”, permitting him to bear the title of “K. K. Hofmodeleur und Statuaire” and to display the imperial eagle on his premises.19 While there, Franz and Marie Therese would have seen versions of the many wax portraits of their ex- tended family – both the imperial family and that of Marie Therese’s birth, the royal family of Naples – which Müller created from life. Like much wax portraiture, most of these objects no longer exist, and are known only through textual sources, most notably the private correspondence between members of the extended family now conserved in Vienna’s Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv.20 Adam’s prints after Müller- Deym’s sculptures are therefore of great significance as extremely rare surviving ex- amples of direct and detailed visual records of the many life-size polychrome wax portraits that existed in Europe during the French Revolutionary period. Adam’s prints are also significant for what they reveal about the status of Müller- Deym’s wax portraits of the imperial family as objects on the threshold between private and public portraiture. From one plaster cast of a sitter’s face, it was possible to make multiple wax portraits. This was an important feature of the creative process given the known discomfort and potential danger of having a cast taken21, not to mention the indecorousness of it when it came to royal and imperial sitters, whose faces had to be handled and whose nostrils had to be filled with straws to prevent suffocation.22 It seems likely that the portraits of the imperial family that were on public display in Müller- Deym’s Kunstkabinett originated in commissions that were in the first instance private, intended, for example, as gifts to other family members. This was probably the case with a series of wax busts which Müller-Deym produced of the Neapolitan royal family in 1793–94 as a gift for Marie Therese, in direct response to a tableau of wax portraits of the imperial family which Müller-Deym personally brought to Naples in 1793. In the ensuing years the Müllersches Kunstkabinett would contain full-length wax portraits