All rulers' portraits are, in several senses, forms of representation. In the first and most obvious instance, all portraits epitomize one of the basic functions of visual art as imitation (mimesis). Portraits represent a person by providing his or her likeness. The Renaissance sculptor Vincenzo Danti (1530–1576), a contemporary of the artists discussed here, pointed to this basic mimetic function when he defined one of the fundamental forms of artistic imitation as ritrarre, using a verb related to the Italian word for portrait, ritratto. Because they are works in three dimensions, sculpted portraits may approach this end even more directly, as seen in the sculpted heritage of Charles V that is the subject of this paper. In any case, hyperrealist works of the 1970s and wax sculpture of the past, including a small wax sculpture of Emperor Rudolf II with a favorite hound (London, Victoria and Albert Museum) (see Figure 1), demonstrate that sculpture may make the effort to portray individuals as close to life as possible.

In 1863, the geologist Adolf Schmidl published a thick book on the Bihar/Bihor Mountains, a highland region on the border between the Hungarian Kingdom and Transylvania. Calling the Bihar/Bihor Mountains one of the “least known regions in the Austrian Monarchy,” Schmidl offered his work as small contribution to Vaterlandskunde and one, he hoped, that would inspire others to follow him into the region. The book provided a detailed analysis of the mountains' hydrography, topography, flora, and fauna. The biological diversity of the region especially excited Schmidl, and his discoveries included four new species of plants and a new species of animal (a leech found only in thermal waters). Schmidl was no less impressed by the ethnographic diversity of this region. Although Romanians belonging to the Greek Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches comprised the vast majority of the population, Schmidl counted six ethnic groups and as many religions in the mountains. According to Schmidl, “national agitation” was “entirely foreign” to the region, whose inhabitants enjoyed peaceful and fraternal relations with one another. The Romanians, he underlined, “are among the most loyal in the Austrian monarchy and their devotion to the dynasty is unfeigned and unshakeable.”

In the accounts of life in Austria-Hungary at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, one reads about a world dominated by nations and nationalism. Both contemporaries and historians describe a nationality conflict in which politics, economy, literature, music, journalism, sports, and science were all placed in the “service of the nation.” According to Helmut Rumpler, it was a time when even the once-powerful state and its bureaucracy were forced to withdraw in the face of different nationalisms. Primary sources often paint a similar picture: A German from Celje/Cilli, Fritz Zangger, claims that in his home town even “the God of Germans and of Slovenes had nothing in common.” Contemporary newspapers described incessant nationalist conflicts between Czechs and Germans, Germans and Slovenes, Slovenes and Italians, or Croats and Hungarians. Minutes of parliamentary sessions tell us about obstructionism carried out by nationalist parties, and in the War Ministry the “Disciplinary Measures to Prevent National Endeavours from Invading” [the Military] (Massregeln zur Verhütung des Eindringens nationaler Bestrebungen) grew longer every year. Therefore, it is no surprise that descriptions of a different reality in which nationalism had hardly played a role, like those of the novelist Joseph Roth, were often dismissed as figments of a nostalgic imagination or depictions of a vanishing world.

In February 1919, Theresia Prokop submitted an application for German citizenship to the Bautzen administrative district in Saxony. The application showed that Prokop was originally from northern Bohemia, had lived in Saxony since 1901, and was a “Bohemian” citizen of “German-Austrian” nationality. Further, it noted: “It is her dearest wish to become German.”

In anticipation of Czechoslovakia's 1930 population census, one observer, writing in the Zionist Jüdische Volksstimme, assessed the importance of this statistical event for the Jewish nationalist movement:

Read any textbook account of interwar Europe, and “indifference to nation” is not likely to figure as a heading. On the contrary, the talk will be of untrammeled nationalist rivalries leading the continent to ruin. In the territories of Eastern and South Eastern Europe that had once been part of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires, we will be reminded, nationalist hatred and border conflicts paved the way to World War I. And in the aftermath of that war, the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler took glorification of the national community to new heights, unleashing colonial and continental wars of conquest and annihilation. Small wonder that when many Europeans looked back from the rubble of 1945, what they saw was far too much commitment to nation, not too little. Indeed, the aspiration of many idealists in 1945 was precisely to supersede the nationalist rivalries and affiliations that they saw as so detrimental to peaceful coexistence and to create some kind of supranational European loyalty and structure instead.

In the 1990s, the Julian (Giulian) Region that includes the cities of Trieste and Gorizia and the Istrian peninsula attracted the renewed attention of scholars for its qualities as a space in which both cosmopolitanism and nationalist polarization had flourished in the late Habsburg era. Although a healthy debate exists as to the degree to which forms of interethnic tolerance remain a feature of everyday life in these areas, most historians agree that this region underwent a series of increasing nationalizations (Italian, Slovene, Croatian, and Yugoslav) that began in the nineteenth century and culminated in the partisan anti-Fascist uprising and massive demographic shifts after World War II, as the majority of Istria's “Italian” population (together with a significant number of individuals self-identifying as Slovene or Croat) migrated from the territory that passed from Italian to Yugoslav control. The historiography of the modern era in the Julian Region has thus confirmed many of the assumptions made by nationalist activists along this classic “language frontier” about the inevitability, exclusivity, and irreversibility of ethnonational identifications.

After touring Transylvania in 1773, Joseph II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and co-regent of the Habsburg monarchy, wrote to Empress Maria Theresa complaining about the state of the province's economy and its administrative corruption. Such problems required urgent reform of the sort that could be carried out only by a strong, centralized government acting in the spirit of Enlightened Absolutism. However, success in these endeavors required something more. In Joseph II's words: “We have to remember that the best intentions fail often and the lack of knowledge of local realities makes such a real difference in governance, that what is often considered the best and wisest decisions, cannot be applied locally efficiently; the total ignorance of Your Majesty's advisers at the court and the Transylvanian Chancellery is a real hindrance and harm for the administration.”

Austria emerged in 1955 from a ten-year occupation administered by the four major powers of the successful anti-Third Reich coalition of World War II—France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as a united, independent state. The 15 May 1955 State Treaty signed by these countries and Austria spared Austria the fate of Cold War division suffered by Austria's neighbor to the north (in the ultimate East-West breakdown of Germany's parallel postwar quadripartite occupation). Paving the way for Austria's good fortune was a political quid pro quo agreed between Austrian leaders and their Soviet counterparts in Moscow the previous April. In the 15 April 1955 Moscow Memorandum, Austria consented to becoming a permanently neutral state modeled on Switzerland. This neutrality precluded a possible Austrian membership in NATO in exchange for a long-delayed Soviet assent to an end of Austria's occupation regime with a concomitant abandonment of the Soviet occupation zone and the withdrawal of all occupation troops. After the completion of this withdrawal, a fully sovereign Austria made good on its pledge with the passage on 26 October 1955 of a constitutional law declaring Austria to be “permanently neutral” and foreswearing all military alliances.