Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun, court-painter to Maria Theresa's ill-fated daughter Marie Antoinette, observed in her memoirs that “[in the eighteenth century] women ruled; the Revolution dethroned them.” Even today, the image of Maria Theresa as benevolent Landesmutter holds a strong, if sentimentalized, place in Austrian political culture, a position symbolically expressed by her presiding over the Maria-Theresian Platz via Kaspar von Zumbusch's bronze monument erected between 1874–1888. With such references to Theresian mythologization bookending his introduction and conclusion, Michael Yonan's Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art is a groundbreaking study of the political semantics surrounding Maria Theresa's patronage of the visual and applied arts. In particular, Yonan focuses on Maria Theresa's “monarchical identity,” a term by which the author means “a fictive image of the ruler, a construction not necessarily reducible to a single textual reference or painting, but a collective ideological tissue born of various statements, legends, actions and representations” (6). In other words, what concerns Yonan is not the empress herself, but “how her power was justified, manipulated, and understood and the role that culture, particularly visual and material culture, played in representing ideas about power to her subjects, her court, her family and herself” (3). The author effectively harnesses the empress's image in paintings and the decorative arts, its spatialization in interior architecture, and its naturalization in gardens to reveal the complex, often overlapping roles of sovereign, empress, mother, and widow in Theresian imagery.
The Habsburg matriarch's subtle, often indirect manipulation of imperial imagery is a central leitmotiv of Yonan's study: the idea that, because of the constraints of her gender, as a matriarch ruling in a patriarchal world, “sometimes making the biggest impact requires staying in the background” (190). Indeed, Yonan's arguments will strike a chord with readers familiar with the author's scholarly articles and book chapters. Yet the book reframes earlier material in an overarching analytical framework centering on the problems of representing a sovereign female. While influenced by Peter Burke's The Fabrication of Louis XIV, a classic study of the construction of Sun King mythology, Yonan claims his work as “more limited and broader” than Burke's in privileging nonrepresentational, nonreferential constructions. Yonan likewise dismisses the Kantorowiczian notion of the king's two bodies, that is, the physical body and the body politic, as an insufficient analytical framework for conceptualizing a female sovereign (or more accurately, given that Maria Theresa ruled Hungary and Bohemia as King, a king in skirts) in an absolutist system viewing authority as inherently masculine. Using evidence from the visual arts, architecture, interior design, and written records, including the empress's correspondence and memoirs such as those of Grand-Chamberlain Khevenhüller-Metsch, Yonan hammers out a highly complex semantic narrative, maintaining that “through her manipulation of monarchical roles, she became wife, queen, king, diplomat, empress, mother and later widow, as she saw fit” (31).
Yonan writes with a keen eye for visual description throughout the book's lavishly illustrated chapters. Beginning with a solid overview of the Pragmatic Sanction, contextualized in terms of the French tradition of Salic Law, Chapters One and Two scrutinize the uniqueness of Theresian portraiture, arguing that representations of the empress merged aspects of traditional Habsburg iconography with feminine virtues of modesty and piety stemming from the pietas Austriaca legend. Early representations, for instance Andreas Möller's Archduchess Maria Theresia at Age Ten (1727), stressed Maria Theresa's modesty and fertility, a quality which, given the tradition of Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube in ensuring dynastic power and succession, later trumped celebrations of war in the empress's interior decoration schemes for Schönbrunn. Chapters Three, Four, and Five argue that Maria Theresa's post-1765 interior renovations of Schönbrunn allowed her to carve out a space as a powerful widow, defying the convention of imperial widows retreating to a secluded Witwesitz. Yonan interprets the empress's transformation of her deceased husband Franz Stephan of Lorraine's study into a memorial shrine as a clever means of enhancing her own authority by recourse to the dynasty's past, present (Pompeo Batoni's famous double-portrait of Joseph II and his brother the Grand-Duke Leopold), and future (the fertility of future generations as expressed in a portrait of her daughter-in-law Maria Luisa holding the heir apparent). In his interpretations of the Millionen Zimmer, a diplomatic reception space featuring Mughal miniatures collaged in elaborate rococo cartouches, Yonan points to the absence of the empress's likeness as a subtler way of representing Maria Theresa's sovereignty by deferring to her maternity. As Yonan surmises, “[i]f Louis XIV's images are statements about his monarchical glory, then Maria Theresia's are sometimes less proclamations than whispers” (7).
Finally, Chapter Six turns to landscape architecture as an expression of the female ruler's place in Habsburg mythology, to an architectural program that Yonan describes as less “absolute” and more specific to feminine virtues than Versailles. Throughout the book, Yonan points to the uniqueness of the Theresian situation as she was not a consort, regent, or royal by marriage like most other early modern “women who ruled.” Because Yonan clearly situates Maria Theresa in the early modern period, comparisons to the reign of Queen Victoria and the “Uncrowned King” Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha are left unexplored.
Certain aspects of Yonan's important work may give the reader pause. Foremost among them is the author's handling of the person of Maria Theresa, a historical figure whose historiographical neglect demands redress and in particular an updated scholarly biography. As Yonan rightly argues, it is curious that Maria Theresa has not received more attention from women and gender historians. Yet, readers cannot but wonder what the empress herself might have thought of Yonan's occasionally excessive analysis: the interpretation of the empress as a sort of Central European Scheherazade, the famed storyteller of One-Thousand-and-One Arabian Nights, in the chapter on the “Millionen-Zimmer” comes to mind. At the same time, the empress is often reduced to silence as Yonan “freely and unapologetically speculate[s]” on her image's construction. Undoubtedly, part of the problem lies in gaps in the sources, such as Hofbauamt's incomplete records or ambiguity surrounding commissions' origins. Nonetheless, if a central thrust of women's history is understood to be reclaiming female agency, one feels disappointed that Maria Theresa's own opinions receive short shrift in some chapters.
Despite occasional inconsistencies, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art remains a highly original, important work cutting across art history, cultural history, and gender studies. Yonan's analytical framework of “monarchical image” will not only stimulate further discussion within the field of Habsburg and Austrian studies, but also among those interested in the semantics of power more broadly.
