ABSTRACT
Anna Amalia, Duchess of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, was an important figure in the creation of eighteenth-century German culture; Weimar became an important cultural center in the eighteenth century primarily because she desired it to be one. The products of Anna Amalia's interaction with her circle on the Grand Tour offer up an image of the duchess that suggest what it meant to be a woman of intellectual and worldly substance in the eighteenth-century German-speaking world. Anna Amalia's portraits illustrate that she understood the cultural agenda of art and that it could be a powerful tool when constructing an identity; her use of that tool also harked back to her earlier cultural ambitions for her duchy. At the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, the demarcation of gender, rising nationalism, and a greater emphasis on institutionalism in the Germanic nations eliminated the place for sociability.
