Seeing is Believing: The Ducal House of Lorraine and Visual Displays in the Projection of Royal Status

Abstract

This article examines the visual strategies employed in the early modern period by a dynasty ruling a smaller state, the Duchy of Lorraine, to survive in the face of expansion by larger neighbours (notably France). The central argument posits that in order to be treated as fully royal (and therefore with inherent rights to exist independently, as full members of the society of princes), princes like the dukes of Lorraine had to appear as royal in their visual representation. The article therefore looks at different examples of selfrepresentation produced by the dynasty over time, including genealogical treatises, coins, portraits, and printed material, in order to see how this was achieved and what symbols were used. What emerges is a sense that this strategy was more closely tied to dynasticism, not necessarily state-building, and while it can be said to have failed for the Duchy of Lorraine as a state, it proved successful, even beyond what had been imagined, for the dynasty itself. This idea repositions our conceptions of “sovereignty” in this period, to see it, at least in some cases, as a quality pertaining to dynasties rather than more rigidly to the states they governed. Their hereditary estates in Lorraine were lost in 1737 but the dynasty survived, as grand dukes of Tuscany, and was deemed worthy of transformation into a fully royal—even imperial—dynasty through marriage to the Habsburg heiress Maria Theresa and the election of Francis Stephen of Lorraine as Holy Roman Emperor in 1745.