The fashionable topic of visual representations of empire has been slow to reach Austria, but it now seems to be making up for lost time. Selma Krasa-Florian is already in competition with two stout volumes by Werner Telesko: Geschichtsraum Österreich. Die Habsburger und ihre Geschichte in der bildenden Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2006), and Kulturraum Österreich. Die Identität der Regionen in der bildenden Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2008). Her treatment is more narrowly focused on symbolic depictions of Austria. That was a notoriously vague word; and well into the nineteenth century, many of the female figures painted or sculpted to show it off continued to personify the archduchies of Niederösterreich and Oberösterreich alone. But by that time the term “Austria” was widely propagated as denoting the totality of the Habsburg lands, considered separately from the German Reich, and eventually incorporated (in some sense) into their own empire from 1804. This stock figure hence came to assume the same quasi-tutelary role for the Austrian state as its contemporaries Germania or the French Marianne, from whom it was often distinguished—though here it is never quite explained why—by wearing a kind of castellated crown (Mauerkrone).

In 1848 this imperial Austria came under siege from the liberal and national movements that briefly tore the monarchy apart; and the main value of Krasa-Florian's study is to trace, through her chosen visual imagery, the subsequent ideological defense of Habsburg sovereignty. A range of attributes were stressed in the absolutist 1850s: dynastic, conservative, military, Catholic, and above all supranational ones—although those sat awkwardly with Austria's continuing pretension to a sovereign role in Germany, as shown here tellingly in the portrayal of Francis Joseph presiding over the 1863 Fürstentag in front of a large mural of Charlemagne (117). Yet once that claim was extinguished, the “allegory of Austria” became still harder to sustain, as the Ausgleich undermined its legitimacy as an epitome of the entire monarchy. Now multinational themes were invoked, together with allusions to the commercial and industrial development in which the dualist state took pride. There was a last fling after 1900 in association with revived ideas of a (real or proposed) Großösterreich, particularly in the circle around Francis Ferdinand, and a clutch of grand military monuments that tended (typically) to remain unfinished. On the whole, Krasa-Florian conveys an impression, which conforms with other recent findings about the nature of patriotism in the late Habsburg era, that the Austrian Reichsidee ended up more and more as a mere loyalty to the dynasty.

Krasa-Florian covers this ground in a competent fashion, helped by some fascinating illustrations (though many of the reproductions are too small). She is rather insecure about the wider context, and there are worrying slips. Hence, Sir Robert Filmer—cited for his patriarchal views on monarchy—appears as “Wilmers” (49); the Schiller celebrations of 1859 are described as a “bicentenary” (152); Germans appear (179) as comprising 38 percent of the population of Austria-Hungary (recte just its Austrian half) in 1880. Her treatment works best at the technical level, as a repository of imperial motifs and also of the artists who delivered them. Whereas a few of the latter, like Otto Wagner, are famous names, many more have been quite forgotten. And that is not perhaps just a coincidence. Take the case of the sculptor Franz Hampel (137), who ruined his career by designing for the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873 a colossal bust of Empress Elizabeth, with an internal staircase that led up to a bench in her crown with sitting room for twelve people. He discovered that levity was not one of the imperial attributes.