Page - 73 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

Habsburg Portraiture Face-to-Face with the French Revolution 73 of the print, “Si vedono sopra le ali i Retratti di Francesco II. Impera- tore e di Maria Teresa Imperatrice Augusta”, points out, nestled into the neck of their dynastic attribute are the silhouettes of Franz and Marie Therese. Such captions were rather the norm in hidden silhou- ette prints, and seem to confirm the notion that, contrary to what has sometimes been assumed, these prints were not actually genuinely secret images but rather partici- pated actively and openly in a vi- sual discourse around the French Revolution and its repercussions. In April 1794 the French Revo- lutionary army invaded Liguria, making the vulnerability of the Ital- ian peninsula alarmingly apparent. It seems likely therefore that the biblical excerpt that crowns Bombelli’s image – published in Rome – refers to the French invasion of Northern Italy, or at least more broadly to the ongoing hostilities between France and the Holy Roman Empire in the early 1790s. Taken from Deuteronomy 28:49, the caption at the top of the image, “In similitudinem aquile volantis” (“Like an eagle that flieth swiftly”)48, is an up-to-the-minute invocation of the symbolic potency of the Habsburg heraldic eagle in the Holy Roman Empire’s resistance to Revolutionary France. Taken in its wider biblical context, the religious significance of this resistance – and by extension the longstanding Habsburg self-identity of pietas austriaca, now di- rected against a democratizing and secularizing Republican France – comes into play: “because thou heardst not the voice of the Lord thy God, and didst not keep his commandments and ceremonies which he commanded thee […] The Lord will bring upon thee a nation from afar […] like an eagle that flieth swiftly: whose tongue thou canst not understand.”49 Figure 7: Pier Leone Bombelli, Aquila Imperiale, 1794.