Messerschmidt
Franz Xavier
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (February 6, 1736 – August 19,
1783) was a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his
"character heads", a collection of busts with faces
contorted in extreme facial expressions.
Early years
Born in southwestern Germany, in the region of the
Swabian alps, Messerschmidt grew up in the Munich home of
his uncle, the sculptor Johann Baptist Straub, who became
his first master. He spent two years in Graz, in the
workshop of his other maternal uncle, the sculptor Philipp
Jakob Straub. At the end of 1755 he matriculated at the
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and became a pupil of Jacob
Schletterer. Graduated, he got work at the imperial arms
collection. Here, in the building's salon in 1760-63 he made
his first known works of art, the bronze busts of the
imperial couple and reliefs representing the heir of the
crown and his wife. With these works he joined the Late
Baroque art of courtly representation, which was under the
determining influence of Balthasar Ferdinand Moll. To this
trend belong two other, larger than lifesize tin statues
representing the imperial couple, commissioned by Maria
Theresa of Austria and executed between 1764 and 1766.
Besides some other portraits he also made works with a
religious subject. A number of statues commissioned by the
Princess of Savoy have survived as well.
Maturity
The Baroque period of his oeuvre ended in 1769 with a
bust of the court physician Gerard van Swieten, commissioned
by the Empress. At the same time his first early Neo-Classic
works appeared, made—characteristically—for the Academy. To
these and later works he applied many experiences gained in
1765 during a study trip to Rome. One of these early, severe
heads from the years 1769-70, influenced by Roman republican
portraits, represents the well-known doctor Franz Anton
Mesmer. At about the same time, in 1770-72 Messerschmidt
began to work on his so-called character heads, which it has
been argued (notably by Ernst Kris) were connected with
certain paranoid ideas and hallucinations from which, at the
beginning of the seventies, the master began to suffer.
Messerschmidt found himself increasingly at odds with his
milieu. His situation worsened to such an extent, that in
1774, when he applied for the newly-vacant office of a
leading professor at the Academy, where he had been teaching
since 1769, instead of getting it he was expelled from
teaching. In a letter to the Empress, Count Kaunitz praised
Messerschmidt's abilities, but suggested that the nature of
his illness (referred to as a "confusion in the head") would
make such an appointment detrimental to the institution.
Later years
Embittered he left Vienna, moved to his native village,
Wiesensteig, and from there in the same year, following an
invitation, to Munich. Here he waited two years for a
promised commission and for a permanent employment at the
Court. In 1777 he went to Pressburg (now Bratislava) where
his brother, Johann Adam worked as a sculptor. Here he spent
the last six years of his life almost in retirement, on the
outskirts of the town. He dedicated himself primarily to his
character heads.
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