Overview

Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), wife of Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph I, was celebrated as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Glamorous painted portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and widely collected photographs spread news of her beauty, and the twentieth-century German-language film trilogy Sissi (1955-57) cemented this legacy. Despite the enduring fascination with the empress, art historians have never considered Elisabeth’s role in producing her public portraiture or the influence of her creation. The Celebrity Monarch reveals how portraits of Elisabeth transformed monarchs from divinely appointed sovereigns to public personalities whose daily lives were consumed by spectators. With resources ranging from the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Elisabeth’s private collection of celebrity photography to twenty-first century collages and films by T. J. Wilcox, this book positions Elisabeth herself as the primary engineer of her public image and argues for the widespread influence of her construction on both modern art and the emerging phenomenon of celebrity.  

Full Product Details

Author:   Olivia Gruber Florek
Publisher:   University of Delaware Press
Imprint:   University of Delaware Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.50cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.467kg
ISBN:  

9781644532867

ISBN 10:   1644532867
Pages:   248
Publication Date:   18 November 2022
Recommended Age:   From 18 to 99 years
Audience:   College/higher education ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations    Acknowledgments      Introduction    Chapter One: Staging the State Portrait    Chapter Two: Styling Authenticity: The Boundless Hair of the Celebrity Monarch    Chapter Three: The Imaginary Empress: Photomontage and the Simulation of Intimacy    Chapter Four: Elisabeth and the Modernist Imagination of Anton Romako    Chapter Five: Sissi in New York: T. J. Wilcox and Elisabeth’s Descendants in the United States      Endnotes    Bibliography     Index      

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Author Information

OLIVIA GRUBER FLOREK is an Associate Professor of Art History at Delaware County Community College in Media, PA. Her work has appeared in Sissi's World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth (2018), edited by Maura Hametz and Heidi Schlippacke, and Representing the Habsburg-Lorraine Dynasty in Music, Visual Media, and Architecture, ca. 1618-1918 (2017), edited by Werner Telesko.

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