Page - 75 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

Habsburg Portraiture Face-to-Face with the French Revolution 75 César.”59 The significance of Adam’s prints of Franz II and Marie Therese might like- wise be understood in such terms. Certainly, in the profile format of the portraits at their centre, encircled by Roman lettering declaring the sitters’ respective Latin titles, the prints consciously cite a language of numismatics. For Didi-Huberman, it is the indexicality of the portrait struck into the coin which ensures that the portrait’s sym- bolic value is not diminished through dissemination: “Voilà peut-être ce que Walter Benjamin n’a pas su voir dans son fameux texte sur la reproductibilité des images: que l’élément du contact demeure une ga- rantie d’unicité, d’authenticité et de pouvoir – donc d’aura – par-delà sa repro- duction même. Ce n’est pas la reproduction en soi qui fait ‘disparaître’ l’aura, comme on l’affirme trop souvent; plutôt la perte de contact que supposerait une répétition sans matrice et sans processus d’empreinte. Tel serait donc le grand pouvoir des empreintes, leur magie essentielle: une ad- hérence capable de dissémination. Magique, le pouvoir que prend la monnaie de s’échanger autant à Rome que dans la plus éloignée des provinces syriennes. Magique, le pouvoir du sceau qui, à chaque fois – c’est-à-dire à chaque ritual de son empreinte dans la cire – manifeste la même autorité de signature ou de pacte.”60 The comparison with a seal here is germane, for the portrait cast in wax – a medium admired and reviled for its ability to mimic the appearance and consistency of human flesh – allows for a certain carnality that cold, hard metal could never accommodate. Rather, as Didi-Huberman has observed elsewhere, “Wax is also, as we know, the privileged material of seals, where it legitimates the existence of a symbolic power […] Unlike a simple mimetic or metaphorical representation, the wax imprint, we may say, incarnates the symbolic power [emphasis original].”61 Indeed, it might be said that Bombelli’s print, in its heraldic structure itself remi- niscent of a seal, the carnality of the bodies of the imperial couple (represented by their silhouettes) and the symbolic power contained in the imperial emblem liter- ally collide, their contours one and the same.62 Adam’s prints after wax portraits, in turn based on casts, have at their origin the imperial physiognomy – imperial power incarnate – which is then compounded through an armoury of indexical references, both iconographical and material. The indexicality of the wax portrait after which the printed portrait has been produced is reinforced through the association with the indexicality of modern, Enlightenment silhouette portraiture, while the borrowing of numismatic structures in the image is a reminder of the indexicality central to one of the oldest forms of dissemination of the imperial portrait, that struck into the metal