Maria Luisa of Spain | |||||
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![]() Grand Duchess Maria Luisa with her children pointing to a bust of Empress Maria Theresa by Mengs circa 1770 | |||||
Holy Roman Empress | |||||
Tenure | 20 February 1790 – 1 March 1792 | ||||
Grand Duchess of Tuscany | |||||
Tenure | 16 February 1764 – 20 February 1790 | ||||
Born | Palace of Portici, Naples | 24 November 1745||||
Died | 15 May 1792 Hofburg Palace, Vienna | (aged 46)||||
Burial | Imperial Crypt, Vienna | ||||
Spouse | Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor | ||||
Issue | Maria Theresa, Queen of Saxony Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany Charles, Duke of Teschen Archduke Alexander Leopold Joseph, Palatine of Hungary Maria Clementina, Duchess of Calabria Anton Victor, Archbishop of Cologne Archduke Johann Archduke Rainer Joseph Archduke Louis Rudolf, Archbishop of Olmütz | ||||
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House | House of Bourbon | ||||
Father | Charles III of Spain | ||||
Mother | Maria Amalia of Saxony |
Maria Luísa of Spain (24 November 1745 – 15 May 1792) was Holy Roman Empress, German Queen, Queen of Bohemia and Hungary as the spouse of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor.
Maria Luisa was born in Portici, in Campania, the site of the summer palace (Reggia di Portici) of her parents, King Charles, King of Naples and Sicily and Maria Amalia of Saxony. She was the fifth daughter, and second surviving child, of her parents. Her father became King of Spain as Charles III in 1759, and she moved with her family to Spain. Her first cousins included Louis XVI, Maria I of Portugal and Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia.
On 16 February 1764 she was married by proxy at Madrid to Archduke Peter Leopold, the second son of Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and the heir apparent to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. The next year, on 5 August, she married him in person at Innsbruck. Only a few days later, the death of Emperor Francis made Maria Luisa's husband the new Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the newly married couple moved to Florence, where they would live for the next twenty-five years.
In 1790, on the death of Peter Leopold's childless brother, Joseph II, Maria Luisa's husband inherited the Habsburg lands in Central Europe, and was shortly thereafter elected Holy Roman Emperor. Taking the name of Leopold II, the new Emperor moved his family to Vienna, where Maria Luisa took on the role of imperial consort. Leopold died scarcely two years later, dying on 1 March 1792. Maria Luisa followed her husband to the grave in less than three months, not living long enough to see her eldest son Francis elected as the last Holy Roman Emperor.
Mozart's opera La clemenza di Tito was commissioned by the Estates of Bohemia as part of the festivities that accompanied the coronation of Maria Luisa and her husband Leopold as king and queen of Bohemia in Prague on 6 September 1791. In musical circles, Maria Luisa is famous for her putative denigration of Mozart's opera as "German rubbish" ("una porcheria tedesca"), however no claim that she made this remark pre-dates the publication in 1871 of Alfred Meissner's Rococo-Bilder: nach Aufzeichnungen meines Grossvaters, a collection of stories about cultural and political life in Prague in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.