Page - 88 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

88 Sektion I: Themen und Medien der Repräsentation three-year-old Archduchess Gisela. Overall, the portrait offers neither a pleasing in- timacy with the royal family nor a didactic perspective on the patriarchal authority of Franz Joseph. These discrepancies did not prevent artists from mining the image to produce a more appropriate portrait. The family hierarchy in an anonymous photomontage of the Kaiserfamilie is far more coherent (Fig. 6). Elisabeth and Franz Joseph appear at the center with the others positioned like satellites around them. Elisabeth pages through a carte de visite album, a gesture that repeats the activity of the viewer, who presumably inserted this image into a very similar book. The artist placed Elisabeth at the direct center of the portrait, a compositional choice perhaps intended to dem- onstrate her importance as the mother of the future emperor. The special emphasis on Elisabeth’s motherhood invokes a bourgeois value celebrated in group portrai- ture dating to the eighteenth century21, especially within images of Empress Maria Theresa and her family. Self-styled as Landesmutter, Maria Theresa commissioned numerous portraits of her family, the majority of which featured her and her husband surrounded by their expanding offspring. These children, particularly the Archduke Joseph and his brothers, demonstrated the empire’s future strength and legitimized Maria Theresa’s contribution to the Habsburg legacy.22 The original iconography of motherhood has been traced by Carol Duncan to the secularization of the Holy Fam- ily, whose domestic bliss was documented in centuries of Western painting. Like the Holy Family, the imperial family possessed a weighty destiny as inheritors and execu- tors of the Austrian Empire.23 A portrait of the Habsburgs needed to communicate their suitability for this task. Without Elisabeth, a portrait of Franz Joseph and his successors suggests a differ- ent narrative, especially when compared with recent Biedermeier painting. Portraits of a father alone with his children were haunted by the missing mother, who is pre- sumed deceased. In his 1837 portrait of the widower Rudolf von Arthaber and his children (Fig. 7), Viennese painter Friedrich von Amerling24 includes many remind- ers of the recently deceased mother, such as the fashionable shawl hanging on the arm of the couch. The family seems uncomfortably pressed into the corner of the loveseat rather than in its center, but this arrangement suggests a space for the absent mother beside them. Many parallels exist between Amerling’s portrait and the carte de visite produced by Angerer of Franz Joseph with Rudolf and Gisela (Fig. 1). Amerling uses the physi- cal relationship of von Arthaber to his children to demonstrate a gentle love among the family members. Each child touches the father in some way, whether by sitting directly upon his lap or leaning on his knees. The physical contact of Franz Joseph with his children in the carte suggests a similar closeness: Rudolf sits in his father’s