Imperial Identity Seen Through Art. The Case of Maria Theresa – Considerations

Abstract During the reign of Maria Theresa (1740-1780) a reassessment of the role women played in a closed society occurred. The main question this article aims to answer is how one can identify these changes by analysing images with high symbolic value, which celebrated and presented Maria Theresa in instances of official relevance, images produced in a period when nations were designing themselves. The present article seeks to underline some of the most representative ideas on how the monarchical identity of Maria Theresa was constructed in art to serve political and propagandistic functions, in an age considered the richest in formal expressions, that is the Baroque, or the ‘Late Baroque’. Hereditary successor to a long line of Holy Roman emperors, Maria Theresa changed the perspective on monarchy and constructed a different identity, that of female agency. Metaphorical images and realism define the analysed portraits in order to demonstrate how the political and the natural body of the monarch combined to illustrate power and aristocratic descent. In my study, the theoretical works on the role Maria Theresa played as female heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire (rex femineus) are to be viewed as main sources of the imagery surrounding her natural and political body. What I propose is an inquiry into the iconographic representations of Maria Theresa’s body of state, which was public and eternal, and thus privileged as a site of discourse for absolutist statehood.