Page - 193 - in Die Repräsentation der Habsburg-Lothringischen Dynastie in Musik, visuellen Medien und Architektur - 1618–1918

State and National Representation in the Case of Ljubljana’s Town Hall 193 common genre in his work remained landscape and portraiture, even though as a young student he had intended to achieve a breakthrough as a painter of histori- cal and national themes (as a student he had worked with his teacher Brožík on big historical paintings)24 which should awaken a sense of national identity in his fellow Slovenians. His painting for Ljubljana’s town hall partially realised his youthful ambi- tions.25 The historical painting The Visit of the Emperor Franz Joseph I (Fig. 2), created at the end of the nineteenth century, is one of the biggest of its kind in the Slovene artis- tic space – even the largest when speaking of dimensions (155,5 x 273 cm) as well as when taking into consideration the number of depicted people. The scene shows the true event, taking place on 7 May 1895 during the official journey of Franz Joseph I to Pula, when the Austro-Hungarian Emperor spent a couple of hours in Ljubljana, which at that time was suffering from the earthquake aftermaths. Before making the painting, which was presented to the public in the town hall on 30 September 189926, the painter made a study (Fig. 3) with the intention to please the commis- sioner’s wishes.27 When comparing the study and the final work, it becomes clearly visible that the painter made some meaningful changes deriving from his intimate, personal comprehension of the moment, from the commissioner’s vision and from the real development of the event itself. The event was publicly mentioned only in a number of shorter newspaper notices and by the only known photograph entitled His Majesty the Emperor Franz Joseph I in Ljubljana (Fig. 4) which was taken by Julij Müller and published in the newspaper Dom in svet.28 Even though Germ must have known this photograph (as it was men- tioned by Hribar on various occasions in the extensive chain of letters that he and the artist exchanged when the painting was made) and even though the artist depicted the members of the municipal council in extreme, almost photorealistic detail (he even respected the individual height of every council member)29, he still decided that for the full imitation of the real event he would install it in front of the Town Hall, instead of the platform of Ljubljana’s railway station where the event took place in reality. The circumstance surrounding the Emperor’s extremely short visit to the town, which was still recovering from the earthquake, did not allow the official visits to be held in front of the Town Hall as the houses of the old town centre were par- tially or completely destroyed. Yet Germ still chose the space of today’s Town Square (Mestni trg) and he did it with a special intention: to draw attention not only to the Emperor’s visit (which did not take place as depicted), but also to accentuate the importance of the Municipal Council, to present the painting’s commissioner and to glorify the Town Hall as the centre of all important state events. The Town Hall should be shown as the space where the idea of creating the painting as a symbol