Page - 71 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

Habsburg Portraiture Face-to-Face with the French Revolution 71 coins.42 Again unlike the image of Custine, which is depicted with eyes closed, his brow in a grimace and his pouted mouth suggestive of clenched teeth, Louis’ facial features do not bear the expres- sion of someone who has moments before faced the horror of having their neck pressed on the guillo- tine’s block and heard the clunking of the pulley, the sudden slack- ing of the rope and the weight of the blade descending. There is no blood dribbling from the mouth or other signs on the face of the physi- cal trauma of the guillotine blade. Rather, as if to uphold the connec- tion to the numismatic profile and thereby emphasize the audacity of the act just completed, the clean, composed face and physiognomy is kept quite distinct from those features of the image – the oblique view of the raw wound, the hair at the back of the head that has been hacked short in preparation for the execution, and the hand and forearm synecdoche of the Republic – that indicate the actual act of decapitation. The emphasis on a clear silhouette profile of Louis XVI must also have been par- ticularly desirable because of the popularity at the end of the eighteenth century of the pseudo-science of physiognomy, championed by Johann Kaspar Lavater, which promised to reveal truths about a sitter’s soul by ‘reading’ the nuances of their physi- ognomy.43 As demonstrated by a print showing Franz’s face in three-quarter profile and turned in such a way that his silhouette is cast as a shadow on a wall behind him, the principle of silhouette portraiture was indexical, placing it on the same spec- trum of ‘automatic’ portraiture as wax portraits, guaranteeing some kind of privileged access to the imperial person in their true nature (Fig. 6). An image such as this, which hands the physiognomy of the Emperor over to the scrutiny of his subjects, fostered, through its ostensible intimacy, a perceived emotional bond – modelled Figure 5: Wahre Abbildung des Unschuldigen Königs Ludwig XVI, after 1793.