Page - 84 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

84 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation ers cracks in the illusionism of the photomontage. Elisabeth’s massive skirts could not fit in the narrow space between the children and Franz Joseph, and the tilt of Gisela’s head creates an unnatural angle between her face and body. These fissures reveal the constructed nature of the image, for the artist could not reconcile the dif- ferent sizes of the photomontaged heads within a singular, unified space. Although this disruptive quality was appealing for twentieth-century avant-garde practitioners, certainly the nineteenth-century photomonteur desired a more illusionistic quality. Nevertheless, the continued production of such photomontages through the end of the century indicates that the awkwardness was overlooked or even accepted by their original viewers, perhaps because of the access photomontages granted to the increas- ingly absent empress.10 Widely available for visual consumption, but self-consciously secluded from pub- lic life, Elisabeth embodies the paradox of intimacy and distance central to the de- velopment of celebrity in the nineteenth century.11 As described by Leo Braudy, the personal lives of celebrities played out on the international stage, yet they cemented their status by also portraying themselves as “consummate outsiders”, distinguished from the realm of everyday life.12 Not coincidentally, the same intimacy and distance witnessed in celebrity culture was politically desirable for monarchs, who needed to appeal to their subjects while also insisting upon their ancestral right to rule. The photomontages addressed this tension by creating narratives that recalled Elis- abeth’s unique physical body while also assuring the public of her bourgeois values. To achieve this effect, artists paired traditional strategies of imperial and Biedermeier group portraiture with the emerging visual culture of celebrity, creating hybrid im- ages that transform Elisabeth into an ideal mother and supportive wife. This paper offers a case study of three examples, all sold at Joseph Bermann’s Kunsthandlung, in which artists drew upon a range of sophisticated narrative techniques that contradict the perception of Elisabeth as an absent wife and parent. In these photomontages, public desire for cartes de visite of Emperor Franz Joseph and his family collide with centuries of carefully-controlled imperial representation; the resulting images reveal the slippery boundaries between monarchical portraits and the imagined relation- ships they evoke. While photographic portraiture had been available since the 1840s, what distin- guished this new visual culture from earlier media was the nearly universal participa- tion in the craze. Bourgeoisie and aristocracy alike visited carte de visite studios, and posed for portraits in which they appear indistinguishable from each other. Although a sitter could choose which attitude to adopt, the number of positions was somewhat limited, and the small scale and repetitive poses render the images relatively banal. Geoffrey Batchen suggests that the success of the carte lies in this repetition, because