European Networks in the Baroque Era Conference
Vienna, 26-29 September 2012
Mark de Vitis
mark.devitis@sydney.edu.au
The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Mark de Vitis lectures at the University of Sydney and at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia. He has
recently submitted his doctoral dissertation, On Foreign Relations: Difference as Distinction at the Bourbon
Court of France, which considers images of the foreign-born members of the royal family of France and their
role in realising the ambitions of the wider monarchy. Other than the genre of portraiture, his main research
interests include dress and the body in early modern culture and the print industry in the seventeenth century.
On The Value of Likeness in Portraits of Queen Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche
This paper will discuss representations of the queen of France, Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche (16381683), as a site of socio-political exchange. A Spanish-Hapsburg by birth, Marie-Thérèse arrived in
France to marry King Louis XIV in 1660 as a condition of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) in an
attempt to extend its surety. As such, representations of the new queen sought to position her as a
point of contact between the two most powerful royal houses of Europe. Rather than erase traces of
cultural difference, portraits of the Queen openly displayed her cultural hybridity as a sign of the
status of the Bourbon regime within the changing political landscape of the post-regency period.
Charles and Henri Beaubrun were commissioned to produce the first portraits of the new queen. The
Beaubrun family of artists shared a long-established client-patron relationship with the Bourbon, and
the choice of the Beaubrun as the Queen’s portraitists was an act of inclusion. Their prescriptive
compositions functioned to figure the Queen within a recognisable visual program and in doing so
confirmed her Bourbon credentials to an image viewing public. Interwoven within such highly
recognisable constructs, however, were signs of the Queen’s Hapsburg ancestry, which functioned as
an expression of her role as a vessel of Franco-Spanish cooperation.
Portraits of the new queen of France promoted the benefits of the Peace of the Pyrenees through their
pictorial hybridity as part of a wider effort to demonstrate to the capability of a young and relatively
untested ruler. Louis XIV’s success in the 1660s relied on his ability to establish mutuallyadvantageous dialogues with individuals and social groups across foreign borders and within France
itself. Such interchanges operated along kin networks, as evidenced by the role of Louis XIV’s bride
in the development of his political authority. The politicisation of the image of the Queen disrupts the
absolutist tag applied to the Bourbon court and reveals its nature as a collaborative entity reliant on
negotiation and exchange.