Page - 67 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

Habsburg Portraiture Face-to-Face with the French Revolution 67 of the Neapolitan royal family, despite the fact that they would not have had the op- portunity to sit for him again in the interim, the implication being that Müller-Deym almost certainly re-used the casts of the royal family’s faces taken in Naples to create the portraits displayed in his Kunstkabinett.23 The tableau of wax portraits of the impe- rial family sent to Naples in 1793, intended as a personal gift to mark the name day of Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and mother of Marie Therese, was itself exhibited publicly at the Kunstkabinett for six days prior to its delivery to Naples.24 While these portraits were first and foremost intended for private use, and indeed fulfilled such a function for Maria Carolina, their unveiling in Naples was a very public affair, with the court even seeking to perform the baciamano ceremony on the waxen Marie Therese.25 The capacity for wax portraiture to bridge the private and the public was recog- nized and exploited by Müller-Deym as ‘curator’ of his Kunstkabinett, where the tableau of the imperial family was set up as a domestic scene, purporting to provide a privileged insight into their private sphere. Central to this was the verisimilitude of life-size wax portraiture, as a 1797 guidebook to the Kunstkabinett (no doubt au- thored by Müller-Deym himself26) makes clear: “Bey allen diesen Statuen wird man die sprechende Ähnlichkeit mit den sämmt- lichen erhabenen Personen bewundern, und jeder, der das Glück hatte, diese hohe Familie zu sehen, wird mit innigem Vergnügen hier auf einer Stelle ver- weilen, wo er sie alle beysammen in einer wirklichen Scene ihres Privatlebens zu finden glaubt.“27 The intersection of private and public present in the wax portraits themselves was then reiterated in Adam’s prints. They ensured that the wax objects after which they were drawn reached an even wider public than that which visited the Kunstkabinett (or indeed serving as a souvenir, maintained in the domestic sphere, of a visit to the Kunstkabinett), all the while reminding the viewer of the very intimate circum- stances of their genesis, the cast from life of the imperial physiognomy. And to only further muddy the divide between public and private, the existence of these prints in what is now the Porträtsammlung of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Bild- archiv suggests that they were added to Franz’s own private library, comprising an extensive collection of portraits of rulers and prominent figures past and present – a collection which of course could never be divorced from its owner’s public and politi- cal function.28 Adam’s prints may therefore be regarded as consummate artefacts of what Werner Telesko has described as “ein[…] permanente[r] Austauschprozess[…] zwischen privaten Porträtformen und offiziellen Bildnissen” of Habsburg rulers that emerged in the late eighteenth century.29