In 1515 Maximilian I of Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, commissioned Albrecht Dürer with an imposing engraving of a triumphal arch in praise of his reign and that of his ancestors. Modeled after the arches of the emperors of Rome, the work consisted of one hundred and ninety-five woodblock prints printed on thirty-six sheets of paper that formed a composite print of 11.5 by 9.6 feet.¹ The reason for ordering an engraving of these dimensions, over a sculpture or a bas-relief, was in the economy and the ease of dissemination. The first edition of the engraving reached seven hundred copies and is considered one of the first and most imposing (and ornate) pieces of imperial propaganda.

Albrecht Dürer, The Triumphal Arch or Emperor Maximilian I (1515)

As can be expected, Maximilian’s Triumphal Arch is bursting with heraldic images and references to the nobility and stability of the House of Habsburg. Indeed, the composition’s central arch is dedicated to a genealogical account of the house of Austria that flows from three sources: France, the Germanic tribe of Sicambria and, of course, Troy, mythological origin of the Roman Empire through Aeneas. For sociologist and design theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, the Arch of Maximilian can be read as “a vast org-chart of authority”,² and its architectural verticality expresses in a particularly clear way the hierarchies—familial, state and bureaucratic—that constitute sovereignty. Seen thus, the family tree set in the central arch acts as a gigantic family org-chart, a workflow or orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, which in this case expresses the exercise of sovereignty, a power that comes directly from its mythological and divine sources (1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 1.6) However, in this case the figure of the family tree, already diluted and limited to a winding branch, loses its organic character in favor of the arch’s architectural composition. Upon ascending to the top of the engraving, where Maximilian seats on his throne above the Reichsadler or two-headed imperial eagle of the Germanic empire, the composition has reversed the vertical axis of ascent-descent that determines a golden age at the beginning of time, superior in all aspects, which descends until it reaches the current sovereign.

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1. “The Triumphal Arch of Emperor Maximilian I”, Public Domain Review, May 6, 2021,  http://www.publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-triumphal-arch-of-emperor-maximilian-i-1515. ↩︎
2. Benjamin Bratton, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution, 43. ↩︎