Overview

Between 1740 and 1780, Empress Maria Theresa governed the Habsburg Empire, a multilingual conglomeration of states centered on Austria. Although recent historical scholarship has addressed Maria Theresa’s legacy, she remains entirely absent from art history despite her notable role in shaping eighteenth-century European diplomatic, artistic, and cultural developments. In Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art, Michael Yonan explores the role that material culture—paintings, architecture, porcelain, garden sculpture, and decorative objects—played in forming the monarchical identity of this historically prominent woman ruler. Maria Theresa never obtained her power from men, but rather inherited it directly through birthright. In the art and architecture she commissioned, as well as the objects she incorporated into court life, she redefined visually the idea of a sovereign monarch to make strong claims for her divine right to rule and for hereditary continuity, but also allowed for flexibility among multiple and conflicting social roles. Through an examination of Maria Theresa’s patronage, Michael Yonan demonstrates how women, art, and power interrelated in an unusual historical situation in which power was legitimated in women’s terms.

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9780271037226

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Reviews

Michael Yonan s Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art contributes significantly to scholarship on Maria Theresa and the Habsburg Empire in particular, and to eighteenth-century studies and art history in general. Yonan deftly explores a number of paintings and architectural spaces as points of departure for understanding the construction of Maria Theresa s complicated and often conflicting imperial identity. He compellingly demonstrates the importance of visual and material culture in promulgating and communicating notions about gender and positions of power. Julie-Anne Plax, University of Arizona

Michael Yonan's Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art is a groundbreaking study of the political semantics surrounding Maria Theresa's patronage of the visual and applied arts. Yonan effectively harnesses the empress's image in paintings and the decorative arts, its spatialization in interior architecture, and its naturalization in gardens to reveal the complex, often overlapping roles of sovereign, empress, mother, and widow in Theresian imagery. Yonan writes with a keen eye for visual description throughout the book's lavishly illustrated chapters. Empress Maria Theresa remains a highly original, important work cutting across art history, cultural history, and gender studies. Yonan's analytical framework of 'monarchical image' will stimulate further discussion not only within the field of Habsburg and Austrian studies but also among those interested in the semantics of power more broadly. --Megan Brandow-Faller, Austrian History Yearbook

Author Information

Michael Yonan is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri–Columbia.

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