Time, narrative and social interpretation overlap in the portrait of Maria Antonia Margaretha, Countess of Starhemberg. 

The legend told at Schloss Weinberg about this painting connects the chain with the life of Maria Antonia Margaretha. 

The Countess is said to have felt constrained and to have wished to be portrayed with a chain. The legend of the “White Lady”, whose ghost haunts the castle’s rooms, is also associated with her. Historical facts, open questions and later reinterpretations are closely intertwined here.

The chain becomes the starting point for an investigation through painting. Maria Antonia Margaretha’s own perspective remains absent from the historical record. This absence raises questions about women’s dependence and self-determination, about who has the authority to interpret an image, and about how women’s histories are told.

The painting belongs to the historic collection of paintings at Schloss Weinberg.

Project:

My engagement with the Countess’s portrait connects with my process-based and serial approach. In my painting, I work with surfaces already marked by use and history. Their traces, damage and existing signs form an initial pictorial layer that I take up in my work. Layering reveals different times, meanings and readings.

I understand paintings as layered material bodies. Original paint layers, later reworkings, restorations and traces of the painting’s history accumulate within them. In the Countess’s portrait, a key question is when the chain was introduced: does it belong to the original version, or was it added later? This uncertainty creates another layer of meaning. The chain changes how the entire figure is read, and with it the interpretation of the portrait. Depending on the period to which it is assigned, it appears as part of the original staging, a later addition or an intervention in the painting’s historical transmission.

There is an analogy here with my own painting: a surface that already has a history and is altered through further interventions. New layers cover what is already there while allowing it to reappear in places. The image becomes an open structure in which different temporal and thematic layers overlap. The question of what was original and what was added later itself becomes part of how the image is perceived.

The chain also extends this investigation to a material form of memory. As a motif, it points to the relationship between image, body, ownership and social attribution. From a feminist perspective, I am interested in the conditions under which the image of a woman is created, read and passed down. 

A portrait and a few biographical details of Maria Antonia Margaretha survive; her own perspective remains largely inaccessible. The historical record is therefore fragmentary and shaped by selection. An open space emerges between the painting’s layered surfaces, the chain, whether added later or possibly original, and present-day interpretations.