This study demonstrates how royal portraiture functioned during the Revolutionary
and Napoleonic wars as a vehicle for visualizing and processing the contemporary
political upheavals. It does so by considering a notion of the 'sovereignty of the
portrait', that is, the semiotic integrity (or precisely the lack thereof) and the material
territory of royal portraiture at this historical juncture. Working from an assumption
that the precariousness of sovereignty which delineated the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars goes hand in hand with the precariousness of representation during
the same period, it reframes prevailing readings of royal portraiture in the aftermath
of the French Revolution by approaching the genre less as one defined by the oneway
propagation of a message, and more as a highly unstable intermedial network of
representation. This theoretical undertaking is refracted through the figure of Maria
Carolina, Queen of Naples (1752-1814), close sister and foil to Queen Marie-
Antoinette of France, and who, as de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Naples, physically
survived revolution but was twice dethroned and thrice exiled. A diverse ecology of
royal portraiture revolving around Maria Carolina is presented across five case
studies. Close attention to the materiality of a hyperrealistic wax bust of Maria
Carolina reveals how portraiture absorbed the trauma of the French Revolution; Maria
Carolina’s correspondence in invisible ink is used as a tool to read a highly distinctive
visual language of 'hidden' silhouettes of sovereigns and to explore the in/visibility of
exile; a novel reading of Antonio Canova's work for the Neapolitan Bourbons
through the lens of contemporary caricature problematizes the binary between ancien
régime and parvenue monarchy; and a unique miniature of Maria Carolina offers
itself as a material metaphor for post-revolutionary sovereignty. Finally, Maria
Carolina’s death mask testifies to how Maria Carolina herself became a relic of the
ancien régime.This thesis is not currently available in OR