Empress Sisi: Her Real Face Brought to Life
Empress Sisi was a woman who felt defined by her beauty. First, when her husband, Emperor Franz Josef of Austria fell in love with her at first sight, at only 16. Then, when she became celebrated by her empire for her beauty. However, the free-spirited Sisi felt deeply trapped by court life, her domineering mother in law, and the gossip that surrounded her because of her quirky personality.
Sisi’s famous long hair.
However, her life was certainly not defined by her appearance. She was an amazing advocate for Hungarian rights, at a time where Austria was trying to absorb the region in authoritarian rule. She cared deeply about ordinary people, and was a woman known for her free spirit and authenticity. Sisi swam naked in the ocean, loved researching medical innovations, wrote poetry, and even got an anchor tattoo on her shoulder to represent her love of the sea.
A modern re-creation of Sisi’s wedding dress, showing her famously tiny waist.
In her mid-twenties, Empress Sisi began to become almost pathologically obsessed about her appearance, developing a toxic relationship with food and exercise. As we know now, eating disorders are often an issue of control. It’s possible that Sisi felt so trapped that her body was the only thing she felt was under her personal control. Mental illness, mainly depression, was also known to have run in her family.
Standing at 5’8”, Sisi never weighed more than 110 pounds, and was known throughout Europe for her insanely small waist, measuring only 16” for most of her life. She resented that she was forced to appear in public during her pregnancies.
In fact, she actually developed a “horror of fat women”, something which she passed down to her youngest daughter, who was terrified when, as a little girl, she first met Queen Victoria.
She ate extremely little, usually only milk and eggs, sometimes paired with a thin broth, and would spend hours exercising daily, riding horseback, or walking, and demanded a gym be built in any palace she stayed in.
A photograph of Sisi in her mid-twenties.
Sisi was an occasional cocaine user (actually pretty common for the time), but her real vice was smoking secretly at night (scandalous for women of the time).
Her hair was another vanity - falling almost to her ankles, she had her dark chestnut hair cared for in a 3-hour daily routing. If any hairs fell out in the middle of the process, she demanded that each hair be collected, and presented to her for inspection in a silver bowl.
Once a week, her schedule was cleared to accommodate washing it. Sisi would sit for hours as her hair was washed with cognac and eggs. She would use this time to learn new languages, read, and write her own poetry.
She was very particular about portraits of herself - during the mid 1860s we have these two portraits of her: The Winterhalter Portrait and the Georg Raab portrait, painted in her late twenties. In order to appear “eternally youthful”, Sisi didn’t allow photographs to be taken of herself after around the age of thirty. And although she lived to sixty, her last official portrait was made when she was 42.
Sisi has a bit of an enigmatic face - looking slightly different in each image, but her defining features are her beautiful dark eyes and unique lips, making it easy to see why Franz Joseph fell in love with her at first sight.
I’ve brought Sisi to life by compositing images of her over time. I wanted to make her look more like her photographs of course, which vary slightly from the stylized painted portraits.
