Portrait Series of Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian Rulers in the Nineteenth Century An Interpretation

The article discusses the ubiquity of portrait series of Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian rulers and determines their place in what Michael Billig calls “the dialectic of collective remembering and forgetting, and of imagination and unimaginative repetition” (Billig 1995: 10), which formed the national identifications of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians in the nineteenth century. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the broad reception of the cycles along with the wide range of functions which they played in daily life in relation to interpretations of history, the imagined past, and the culture of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians.