Page - 70 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

70 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation table, indeed a terrifying, ‘portrait machine.’”36 Much as the portrait derived from a cast aspires to do, the guillotine-as-portrait-machine “does away with the unreliable ‘hu- man agent,’” producing the most truthful of portraits.37 This idea, Arasse argues, can be witnessed in the so-called portrait de guillotiné, the prime version of which depicts the guillotined head of Louis XVI held aloft from the hair, blood dripping from the wound at the neck (Fig. 4). Originally titled “Matière à reflection pour les jon- gleurs couronnées” and captioned with the line from the Marseillaise, “qu’un sang impur abreuve vos sillons”, the print was also disseminated in the German-speaking world, having been re-presented and re-captioned with a distinctly counterrevolu- tionary verse: “Mensch wenn bei diesem Bild, dein Aug nicht Tränen stand, dann bist du härter noch als selbst die Henckers Hand” (Fig. 5).38 Like Müller-Deym’s wax portraits of the imperial couple, the portrait de guillotiné claimed to be “taken from life”, supposedly “deriv[ing] directly from the event”, in this case, instead of the mo- ment of the encounter between modeler and sitter, the event of decapitation.39 As if to underline the portrait de guillotiné ’s claim to truth and its direct connection to the sitter, in the French print the precise time and location of the portrait’s origin, that is, Louis XVI’s execution, is recorded: “lundi 21 janvier 1793 à 10 heures un quart du matin sur la place de la Revolution.” In the German version viewers are encouraged to consider the “Wahre Abbildung” as a faithful documentary record, likening the printed sheet, through the purported indexicality of the portrait it carries, to a form of secular Veil of Veronica.40 Yet both the French and German prints are of course much less documentary than they purport to be. Unlike a similar print of General Custine41, in which the head is presented in three-quarter profile, the head of Louis XVI is displayed in di- rect profile, as if directly referencing the fundamental numismatic profile struck into Figure 4: Villeneuve (publisher), Matière à reflection pour les jongleurs couronnées, 1793.