Study of Portraits of Austro-Hungarian Monarchs (18th Century) from the Collection of Chernivtsi Art Museum

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to introduce into scientific circulation new information regarding the attribution of portraits of unknown persons from the collection of the Chernivtsi Art Museum and to examine the process of studying these works. The methodology of this study involves the use of various methods: historical, systematic, verification of the received data, artistic, and comparative analysis, among others. The application of these scientific methods allowed to comprehensively and objectively study and systematise the information available in various sources regarding the studied paintings and discover the names of the portrait subjects. The scientific novelty of the research results consists in the fact that for the first time the stylistic features of the works were analysed, the similarity of museum paintings with portraits made by other European artists of the 18th century was revealed; the faces of the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire depicted by artists, the time of execution and the provenance of the portraits were determined. Conclusions. The study of pictorial portraits that entered the collection of the Chernivtsi Art Museum, such as "Portrait of a Woman" and "Portrait of a Man" by unknown authors, began with an analysis of stylistics, which made it possible to roughly establish the time of the creation of images as the second half of the 18th century, when in the fine arts of Europe the rococo style prevailed and in some places overlapped with older traditions of creating ceremonial portraits, which were characterised by emphasised restraint and some conventionality and flatness in the interpretation of form. Further restoration and research of the works, in particular the features of the costume, attributes and awards in the portrait of a young man, allowed to assume that the portrait depicts members of one of the royal families of Europe. Comparative analysis revealed that the paintings from the museum's collection are ceremonial portraits of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary (1717–1780) and her son Emperor Joseph II (1741–1790). The found analogies with similar works of European masters also helped to establish that the works of the court artists of these monarchs, in particular, Joseph Hickel and Anton von Maron, as well as the works of other artists, served as models for the portraits from the museum in Chernivtsi. The study of the biographies of the portrait subjects and the time of execution of the works, which became samples, also confirmed the preliminary dating of the works ‒ 1770s.