This intriguing book is adorned by sixty-seven well-reproduced illustrations, most of them from Schönbrunn, the Habsburg summer palace that in the eighteenth century was outside the confines of Vienna. These pictures show its layout, architecture, paintings, and wall decorations as they developed during the reign of the Empress Maria Theresa (1740–80). The author, Michael Yonan, claims to derive from a study of this artistic development a new understanding of the Empress's political, social, and philosophical attitudes.

Among the insights he arrives at are these:

The two astonishing grand rooms that she created after her husband's death, the Vieux-Laque Zimmer and the Millionen-Zimmer, with their lavish oriental decoration, evoke from the author especially heady claims: “The Millionen-Zimmer must have made the Empress seem to her visitors more complex, emphasized her exoticism, rendered her into art . . . and enabled her otherwise simplest motions to take on the most unusual veneer . . . Maria Theresa just might be the Habsburg sati mata or at the very least the Scheherezade who makes this story come together” (p. 152).

Yonan concludes with a pioneering study of the landscaping of the grounds of Schönbrunn. Maria Theresa had statues of several female classical heroines, Minerva, Diana, Artemisia, Angerona, and Egeria, erected there. He declares, “It is Egeria's spring, her legacy, and her reincarnation in Maria Theresa that testifies to the Habsburg Empire's success and future vigor” (p. 185).

This lengthy and original discussion of Schönbrunn's décor certainly brings out how strongly certain types of eastern art appealed to the Empress. She wrote, “it is only what comes from the Indies, especially lacquer, but also tapestries, that gives me pleasure.” But what this personal preference had to do with the promotion of herself as ruler and of the dynasty is far from clear: there was very little contemporary discussion of it, and nothing she wrote supports the more elaborate interpretations of Yonan. While emphasizing the grandeur of the new rooms and the landscaping, he omits evidence of her informality: for example, the paintings by her daughter, Marie Christine, of the family at its ease; the unstuffy reception given to the Mozart family; and the charming intimacy of the Berglzimmer at Schönbrunn. There is only a very short section (p. 38) on her notorious piety.

The book concentrates on the period of her widowhood, 1765–80, when these oriental rooms were created. But it begins with discussion of the first quarter-century of her reign, 1740–65, during which her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, was alive. In writing about the layout of the palace and the court's etiquette at this time, Yonan has no difficulty in showing how different its practice was from that of the French court, often seen as the model for all eighteenth-century courts.

Unfortunately, however, he does not fully grasp the uniqueness of the Austrian court during Maria Theresa's reign. The major difficulty is that he just does not understand the relationship between the Holy Roman Empire and its head on the one hand and the ruler of the Austrian monarchy on the other. “The Austrian Monarchy” was what the Habsburgs’ lands were called in this period—never “the Austrian Empire.” The author's “belief that royal imagery is about conveying something” (p. 7) is incontestable, but nothing had to be conveyed as clearly as the ruler's precise constitutional position. On the same page he writes of “a conglomeration of ideas [that] entered into the social sphere to explain the nature of imperial power.” But Maria Theresa never possessed one iota of imperial power. That belonged during her reign, first, from 1742 to 1745, to the Emperor Charles VII, based in Bavaria, who does not rate a single mention in this book; next, to her husband Francis Stephen from 1745 to 1765; and then to her son Joseph II from 1765 to 1780. Unlike her, all previous and subsequent rulers of the monarchy from the sixteenth century until 1804 were also Emperors but, though they exercised their power in both capacities from Vienna (and from the same palaces), they knew perfectly well, as they absolutely needed to know, when they were acting as Emperor and when as ruler of the monarchy. Yonan does not appear to realize that, before being crowned as Emperors, they had to be elected by Electors, all but one of whom were based outside the monarchy, and that the affairs of the Empire were managed by the Emperor through a bureaucracy entirely distinct from that through which the monarchy, or “the Habsburg lands,” were ruled. For the affairs of the monarchy, Maria Theresa appointed a co-regent, first her husband and then her son. Both of them were explicitly asked to review court ceremonial and both succeeded in getting it changed, and so must have also influenced the artistic development of Schönbrunn. But there was never a co-Emperor.

Yonan fails also to grasp the internal complexity of the monarchy. In speaking of a book published in 1741 on the Erbhuldigung of Austrian provinces (pp. 20–23), he clearly does not understand that this term meant a ceremony of homage to the new ruler.

Fascinating though Schönbrunn was and is, the Hofburg in central Vienna remained the headquarters of the ruler. From 1765 onward, while his mother was redecorating Schönbrunn, Joseph II, the Emperor and her co-regent in the monarchy, was giving a quite different example, opening royal parks to the public and receiving petitioners of every class without formality on the Controleurgang in the Hofburg.