Spencer Alley: Portraits by Anton Raphael Mengs

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Portraits by Anton Raphael Mengs

Anton Raphael Mengs
Self-portrait
1776
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) was a dominant force in 18th-century European painting. He was German by birth but based in Rome, with constant European travels to study and paint and publish and secure allies in his campaign to establish the Neoclassical style on the grave of the Baroque. His greatest ally was the scholar and theorist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) whose portrait by Mengs is immediately below.

Anton Raphael Mengs
Portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann
ca. 1777
Metropolitan Museum of Art

In his 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity, Winckelmann created a space of the highest possible honor for Mengs – "The embodiment of all the beauties described here in the figures of the ancients is found in the immortal works of Anton Raphael Mengs, first court painter to the kings of Spain and Poland, the greatest painter of his time and perhaps of the following age as well. He has arisen like a phoenix, as it were, out of the ashes of the first Raphael to instruct the world about beauty in art and to achieve in it the highest flight of human powers."

As court painter, Mengs made two long stays in Madrid, decorating palaces and painting royal and noble portraits. Though his reputation today is only a pale shadow of what it was in his lifetime, his high-finish work is still lavishly represented at the Prado.