Portret van Thomas Wazanini 1814 - 1836

This portrait of Thomas Wazanini was made by Johann Carl Bock, but we don’t know when. It’s a small print, an easily reproducible format that was gaining popularity around the turn of the 19th century. As “Oberinspector” of a teachers’ seminary, Wazanini was one of the many new faces of the modern bureaucratic state in Bavaria. We can understand the image as a visual expression of the social conditions that shaped Wazanini’s career. He is pictured as a man of reason, of the Enlightenment – an agent of the modern state apparatus. But the image also raises a few questions. Was it commissioned by Wazanini himself? What role did institutional portraits play in the making of a professional class? These are the questions that social historians of art can begin to answer. By researching the history of Bavarian state institutions, and by looking closely at the context in which images like this one were made, we can better understand the complex relationship between art and society.