Published in collaboration with an exhibition of Jean-Étienne Liotard’s portraits of the Austrian imperial family at Geneva’s Musée d’art et d’histoire.
Geneva-born artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) was one of the great portraitists of his time. Held in high regard by Empress Maria Theresa, he created numerous portraits of members of the Austrian imperial family, among them Archduchess Maria-Antonia (1755–1793), later Marie-Antoinette, Queen-consort of France, and Emperor Franz I Stephan. A group of eleven portrait drawings depicting members of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine are held today in the collection of Geneva’s Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH).
Liotard & Marie-Antoinette is published to coincide with an exhibition of the portraits at the MAH. It is based on a unique interdisciplinary research project that combined conventional archival research with state-of-the art facial recognition technology and forensics, comparing historic paintings and drawings as well as modern digital images to identify with precision the individuals portrayed by Liotard. The book makes the findings of this fascinating dialogue between art historians, scholars of eighteenth-century history, and researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and forensics accessible to a broader audience. It offers an unusually multifaceted view of Liotard’s masterful drawings and an approach to understanding the stories hidden within them that is equally exciting and novel.
