Thinking Peripherally with Miramare, Part I
A Fourfold Palatial Riddle
Perched on a limestone escarpment above lapping Adriatic waves, a bone-white edifice commands a panoramic view of the Gulf of Trieste: Miramare Castle (Castello di Miramare), the passion project and former home of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria, the younger brother of Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef. Miramare’s isolation amplifies the drama of its setting. Fifty-four acres of forested parkland and manicured gardens surround the Schloss, shielding it from curious eyes on the coastal motorway, Strada Costiera. Whether approached by land or water, Miramare looms precipitously above visitors. Miramare’s setting projects a romantic atmosphere of grandeur and mystery (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Miramare looms above the Adriatic. Photograph by author.
Enigmas abound within the palace as well. In the rooms of state, a riddle adorns the wall in the form of three painted panels. Each panel (Figure 2 a,b,c), depicts a castle, none of which is Miramare itself. The first portrays a sprawling campus, with a luscious, English-style garden in the foreground and the baroque façade of an imposing royal residence in the background: Schönbrunn Palace, one of Vienna’s iconic imperial domiciles. The second panel renders a more modest structure, a composite of residential and military elements situated in a mountainous landscape. The lush, sylvan setting suggests a Mitteleuropean vista, but this is a deception: Chapultepec Castle is a bastion above Mexico City. The third panel features the humblest structure of all, an ivy-encased Medieval manse, possibly in ruins, silhouetted against a landscape of lakes, knolls, and, on the horizon, snow-capped tors. This is Schloss Habsburg, the ancestral home of the Habsburg dynasty, located outside the eponymous Swiss town.
Three castles, represented in miniature within a fourth. They stand today in disparate political circumstances, located in Austria, Mexico, and Switzerland, while the palazzo that contains them resides in Italy. Each of the scenes is a study in 19th Century Romantic landscape painting, while Miramare’s grounds exemplify Romantic landscape architecture. What draws these four castles together? How to interpret, and to narrate, this curious assemblage, this fourfold palatial riddle?
The solution lies in the biography of Maximilian, Miramare’s planner and patron. Both professional and personal impetuses led Maximilian to Adriatic shores. He made his military career in the Imperial Austrian Navy and became its commander-in-chief at the tender age of twenty-two. Maximilian’s naval vocation conveniently separated him from Vienna and his brother, the regent—competition between the two princes in childhood yielded to a frosty relationship in early adulthood. Maximilian’s commissioning of Miramare in 1854 expressed a double desire for proximity to the sea and distance from the capital.
The three palaces depicted on Miramare’s walls provocatively narrate Maximilian’s past, present, and future. Schloss Habsburg is the point of royal origin, the fount from which the dynasty sprung. Schönbrunn is an ambivalent site, both embodiment of Maximilian’s nonage and gesture to a disavowed Viennese present. Finally, Chapultepec represents Maximilian’s future. In 1864, Maximilian and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium, embarked from Miramare to sail across the Atlantic for Mexico, where he became the Emperador Maximiliano I. The royal pair took up residence in Mexico City’s Chapultepec, though only briefly—Maximilian’s Quixotic imperial adventure ended in 1867 opposite a firing squad of Benito Juarez’s Republicans on the Cerro de las Campanas, a dusty hillock in Querátaro City.
“Miramare is a distinctly peripheral place, a space inhabited by peripheries.”
The burden of reorientation is one of the few architectural verities that transcends geography and history. By partitioning space materially, buildings reorient human subjects in relation to themselves and others, both externally and internally. Frequently, this effect of reorientation is also one of recentering. Temples and ministries, homes and markets—each entails a recentering in relation to other structures, both near at hand and distant. For this reason, structures that draw attention to their own peripherality provoke a peculiar fascination.
Miramare is a distinctly peripheral place, a space inhabited by peripheries. As such, the castello offers a critical, off-center perspective on the textures and temporalities of empire and its aftermaths, both in relation the Habsburgs and generally. This post-imperial portrait takes on shape and hue through three intersecting peripheries that occupy and define Miramare: biographical, aesthetic, and geopolitical. The first half of this two-part essay focuses on Maximilian’s story and the architectural and stylistic features of Miramare, while the second meditates on Trieste’s spatial peripherality in relation to other peripheries.
A Quixotic Imperial Trajectory: Maximilian’s Peripheral Biography
One of Miramare’s most peculiar rooms is also its most resplendent. A gargantuan portrait of Maximilian dominates the space—he appears both formidable and freighted with worry, his gaze distracted and his chest burdened with medals and military paraphernalia (figure 3). Nearby, an equally massive panel depicts the Habsburg-Lorraine family tree, culminating with Charlotte and Maximilian—not Franz Josef—at its apex. Opposite, a vast map of the world encapsulates the cosmopolitan scale of the dynasty’s ambition. At the far end of the hall, crimson velvet drapery embroidered with gold fringe frames a small coronation stool.
Figure 3. Maximillian in imperial splendor. Santiago Rebull, Portrait of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico (1865). Photograph of original by author.
This is Miramare’s throne room. Unlike iconic palaces such as Buckingham, Versailles, Topkapı, the Forbidden Palace, or, for that matter, the Hofburg and Schönbrunn, Miramare was not a dynastic seat for generations of rulers. What cause was there for a throne room on a promontory north of the Habsburg Empire’s principal port city? Another large canvas unravels this riddle (Figure 4). A painting by Istrian-born artist Cesare Dell’Acqua features Maximilian on its left, opposite a coterie of formally-dressed ambassadors. This is a scene of geopolitical gravity: Maximilian greets a delegation of Mexican royalists led by José Maria Gutiérrez de Estrada and accepts their offer of the Mexican throne. Although he did not officially inherit the mantle of Montezuma in Miramare, the throne room forecasts the stature that Maximilian would assume upon arrival in Veracruz.
Figure 4. Cesare Dell’Acqua, Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria is Appointed Emperor of Mexico (1867). Wikimedia Commons. Creative Common License CC-BY-SA-3.0
As bygone empires achieve consolidation in collective memory, the knotted dilemmas, political tensions, and historical contradictions that defined them are expunged in favor of smooth surfaces and uniform images. Frequently, this kneading of history into memory entails a process of personification. Polities of the past are embodied in historically outsized individuals: Catherine the Great and Süleyman the Magnificent; Queen Victoria and Charlemagne; Akbar and Atahualpa; Bismarck and Genghis Khan. For the Habsburgs, Emperor Franz Josef unquestionably commands this status—although earlier regents such as Charles V, Maria Theresa, and Joseph II continue to personify aspects and eras of the Habsburg Empire, he is dominant embodiment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire today. Consequently, to remember the empire from the perspective of his younger brother is to adopt a peripheral vantage on it.
Maximilian’s estrangement from the court of the double-headed eagle was both personal and political. Regardless of his individual charisma, the lottery of birth and iron imperative of primogeniture assigned him a subordinate role to that of his brother. Maximilian’s maritime enthusiasm—an eccentric passion for a royal of a decidedly continental polity—expressed and sublimated the effects of a fraternal rivalry in which he could not prevail. Even Trieste proved too proximate to Vienna—Mexico beckoned. By accepting the throne in Chapultepec, Maximilian became a pawn in the machinations of Napoleon III and the Mexican monarchists. He may have succeeded in exorcising fraternal demons, but he also initiated the trajectory that ended in martyrdom to causes and interests far from his Mitteleuropean roots.
From the perspective of geopolitical history, Maximilian and Charlotte’s Mexican misadventure is highly ambivalent. From one vantage, it comprises a chapter in the nineteenth century retrenchment of a conservative balance of imperial power, a short-lived renaissance of the ideals of the Congress of Vienna and Klemens von Metternich in the wake of the revolutions of 1848. From another, Maximilian’s installation as a Potemkin potentate in Mexico City was an anomalous moment of imperial mimicry. The thwarted Habsburg archduke and former naval officer echoed and mimed the pomp and circumstance of liberal imperialism as perfected by the British and the French, even as he ironically recapitulated the original Spanish Habsburg colonial incursion in central America. Yet this mimetic liberalism was also a politically potent rejoinder to conservative currents in Vienna at the time. Maximilian’s liberalism from the periphery aspired to recenter the project of empire in ways unimaginable along the Danube. Maximilian’s ambivalence was reflected in the continental response to his execution, with both aristocratic conservatives and progressives mourning his demise. Even staunch liberals such as Garibaldi and Victor Hugo protested Juarez’s implacability, while Édouard Manet, a Republican sympathizer, powerfully rendered Maximilian’s final moments as a variation on Goya’s Third of May 1808.
Figure 5. Édouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868-1869). Wikimedia Commons. Creative Common License CC-BY-SA-3.0
With its abrupt, violent conclusion, Maximilian’s biography is difficult to narrate without slipping into a tragic-romantic register. His inter-imperial arc was but a circuitous route to the firing squad. Even from the aerie of Chapultepec, Maximilian was peripheral to the behemoth imperial projects of his era, and his execution was a bloody counterpoint to their grand designs.
Exoticist Dreamscape: Peripheral Aesthetics
Across former Habsburg lands, from Prague to Zagreb, Trento to Lviv, architecture from the final decades of the empire defines the “historical” texture of today’s cities. Baroque revival, rococo, Secessionist and neoclassical structures constitute the definitive architectural heritage of post-imperial urban environments. They were designed by the same architectural firms, occupied by students of a handful of late imperial starchitects such as Otto Wagner. Often, the architectural legacy of the Habsburgs is identifiable on the basis of color alone: the iconic Schönbrunn yellow, after the distinctive hue of the Viennese palace and found throughout the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
Evaluated in the context of late-era Habsburg architecture, Miramare is both eccentric and archetypal (Figure 6). The castle was designed by Carl Junker, an architect-engineer otherwise remembered for his contributions to Viennese waterworks. It defies immediate stylistic categorization; depending on one’s perspective, rococo, neo-Gothic, or neo-Renaissance details predominate. Miramare’s interior design also revels in anomalies. Maximilian’s chambers, with their low ceilings, blonde oak paneling, and claustrophobic built-in bunks, mimic a sailor’s quarters on a ship.
“Historicism’s quest for beauty and authority in the styles of earlier epochs resonated with another romance of distance and power, the exoticism of Orientalism.”
Figure 6. Miramare’s eclectic historicist detail. Photograph by author.
Although Miramare has few siblings as an individual edifice, it epitomizes the historicist architectural currents that dominated the mid-nineteenth century. As Anthony Alofsin has argued, historicism was one of the most enduring architectural “languages” in which a response to the aesthetic and political dilemmas that racked the late Habsburg Empire was formulated. The paradox and irony of historicism is that it resulted in anachronistic eclecticism, with neo-Gothic, neo-Baroque, neo-Classical, and even more obscure historical styles achieving juxtaposition in space and coexistence in time. The “language of history” in architecture is not so much a style as a meta-style, one that subordinates aesthetic imperatives in the present to the precedents of erstwhile eras. Historicism also has a curious tendency to collapse the past. Thus, while Miramare embodies the mid- nineteenth century fashion for neo-Gothic villas and castles, predominant especially in the British Isles, it also calls to mind Manueline or late Portuguese Gothic architecture, exemplified by Lisbon’s famous Tower of Belém—an era and place far from central Europe of the 19th Century.
Historicism’s quest for beauty and authority in the styles of earlier epochs resonated with another romance of distance and power, the exoticism of Orientalism. The heyday of Orientalist and neo-Moorish architecture in the empire was yet to come when Junker drew up his blueprints for the archduke. As Maximilian Hartmuth has shown, the onset of Habsburg rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 spurred a neo-Moorish Orientalist architectural style deemed suitable to the empire’s new Muslim subjects, however distant its aesthetic origins. Nonetheless, Orientalist details permeate Miramare, especially in its decorative features. The so-called Chinese and Japanese rooms brim with exotica. On the pier below the castle, a granite Egyptian sphinx from the Ptolemaic period keeps solemn watch over the Adriatic, a gesture to both ancient dynastic might and Napoleon’s recent imperial expeditions in Egypt and the “Illyrian provinces” of the Adriatic (Figure 7). Most telling of all, the walls of the Seagull Room host a series of paintings by Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger, who accompanied Maximilian and his younger brother, Karl Ludwig, on a late adolescent voyage to Ottoman Smyrna (Izmir), where they were fêted by the governor, Halim Pasha.
Figure 7. A Ptolemaic sphinx lends Orientalist grandeur and authority to Miramare. Photograph by author.
Like Orientalism at large, Miramare’s exoticist dreamscape articulates a triadic relationship among knowledge, power, and aesthetics: For the Orientalist gaze, to know the Orientalized Other is both to control it and to enjoy it. Maximilian clearly savored Orientalist fantasies of dominating exoticized Others. One of Nepomuk Geiger’s souvenirs from Smyrna features the archduke surveying the city’s slave market: enveloped in a nimbus, Maximilian epitomizes a white savior narrative in potentia (Figure 8). Closer to home, Maximilian and Charlotte maintained two “Moorish” pages, Ali and Said, who feature in Germano Prosdocimi’s exaggerated paintings of the “Moorish Lounge” that occupied the royal couple’s first residence in Trieste, Villa Lazarovich (Figure Nine).
Figure 8. Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger, The Archduke Maximilian Visits the Slave Market at Smyrna (1850). Photograph of original by author.
Figure 9. Germano Prosdocimi, Moorish Lounge in Villa Lazarovich (c. 1854). Wikimedia Commons. Creative Common License CC-BY-SA-3.0
The exotic ornamentation of Miramare is by no means innocent. In exemplary Orientalist fashion, the aesthetics of the castle reify the distant and the unfamiliar by drawing it close, by domesticating it. Miramare’s exoticist dreamscape traverses peripheries and collapses frontiers, both geopolitical and personal. Suffused by images of civilizational otherness and geographic peripherality, Miramare was an effective crucible for Maximilian’s imperialist dreams, which came to tragicomic realization in far-off central America.
Notes
The author would like to thank Pamela Ballinger, Maura Hametz, Maximilian Hartmuth, Daša Ličen, Alessio Mazzaro, and Robert Walton for their exceptional comments and recommendations.
