Marketing Maximilian: The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor (review)

It is easy to forget, given the dynasty's later history of dominance in central Europe, how tenuous Habsburg authority was in the late fifteenth century. To be sure, the family had furnished several Holy Roman Emperors over the preceding centuries but never until 1493 had a Habsburg son succeeded his father as King of the Romans and subsequently as Emperor. The death of Frederick III in that year saw the elevation of his son, Maximilian I, who ruled until his death in 1519. Professor Larry Silver's contention is that Maximilian's patronage of the arts was intended, above all, to solidify his political position by creating an image of himself as the unquestioned heir not only to earlier Habsburgs, but to Charlemagne and the Caesars as well.

Silver's focus is on the artistic production that Maximilian supervised with great personal interest and an iron hand. In a letter of 1517, the emperor complained to court scholar Johann Stabius, an adviser on the Arch of Honor woodcut project, that the image in question was 'not rendered according to the content of our command and according to the exemplar that you have in your hand … so that we are greatly displeased' (p. 84). In fact, this vast woodcut sequence, which the author describes as 'a large fantasy hybrid creation on paper' (p. 92), forms something of an organising motif for the entire book. Silver returns to it frequently, drawing on its complex allegorical schemes and its representations of Maximilian's real and imagined forebears to demonstrate the process of imperial myth creation. Silver follows Maximilian and his scholarly advisers as they trace the imperial lineage along Roman, Frankish, biblical, and even Trojan lines, reconciling or choosing between these various strands (Noah was out of favour as an imperial ancestor; Hector was not) before having artists, including Dürer and his workshop, turn constructed myth into visual reinforcement of Habsburg legitimacy.

Much of this is uncontentious. Ideas of translatio imperii ('translation of the empire', the subject of Chapter 2) from antiquity to contemporary standard bearers had been common in medieval discourse and have exercised modern scholars at least since Robert Folz's The Concept of Empire in Western Europe. The importance of constructed genealogies (dealt with in Chapter 1) was also typical of later medieval dynastic image making and was by no means new to Maximilian. In this sense the book is not especially groundbreaking at the conceptual level. Its strength lies instead in the wealth of detail that Silver has accumulated on the process of producing imagery to support Maximilian's status. This imagery included not only the great woodcut sequences such as the (never completed) Triumphal Procession but also architectural initiatives and celebratory coinage (like the woodcuts, an 'expensive form of publicity' in Silver's view, p. 101). The analyses of these initiatives, and the interpretation of their intended meanings, form the core of the book.

Where Silver does claim novelty for his subject is in Maximilian's use of the printing press. Here his argument is not entirely convincing. It is one thing to claim that Maximilian was the first leader to make significant use of the new technological tool for propaganda purposes. It is another thing entirely to state that modern political spin and 'the constant manipulation of television coverage by political leaders' are 'a most direct outcome of the shaping of public opinion by Maximilian' (p. ix). By ignoring the intervening five centuries, such a claim lends to Maximilian an importance in the history of political image-making that is impossibly over-inflated. A 'Great Communicator' he may have been; Ronald Reagan he was not. One might contend that the book's very title is based on an unfortunate anachronism: to suggest that Maximilian was intent on 'marketing' himself is to ascribe to him a set of modern, commercial motivations that do not sit...