Anton Raphael Mengs 

Throughout his career, Mengs established himself as Rome’s principal rival to Pompeo Batoni, not only as a painter of portraits but also altarpieces and history pictures. Like many of Batoni’s clientele, Mengs’s sitters were British gentlemen on Grand Tour, and included John Viscount Garlies, whom the artist depicted in Van Dyck costume (1758, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the famous expatriate collector Lord Cowper (ca. 1770–73, Cassa di Risparmio, Florence), William Burton Conyngham (ca. 1754–55, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). Particularly intriguing is his unfinished Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento, duquesa de Huescar (1775, private collection), haunting in its modernity. However, Mengs’s self-portraits are arguably his most psychologically self-aware, and confront the viewer with an uncompromising, direct gaze. The same is true of portraits of friends, for example his visage of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (ca. 1777, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which also holds in its collections a particularly striking self-portrait of the artist near the end of his life.

It was in Rome, specifically in 1755, when the latter returned to Eternal City, that Mengs befriended and became Johan Joachim Winckelmann, the German artist and archeologist credited with the reassessment of classical art through his art historical writings. His History of Ancient Art, published in 1764, became a foundational text of neoclassical thinking, particularly with regard to the idealization of the human form. Winckelmann’s ideal provided much of the theoretical inspiration underlying Mengs’s work. Indeed, Mengs, whom Winckelmann called the Apelle sassone (the Saxon Apelles),was known for his talents at painting in the antique style, once famously fooling Winckelmann with a fake antique fresco of his own creation.

Winckelmann also helped provide Mengs with important commissions. For Winckelman’s patron, Cardinal Alessandro Albani, Mengs painted what is perhaps his best-known work, the ceiling fresco Parnassus (1761) in the Villa Albani (now the Villa Torlonia), Rome. The scheme became the basis for Mengs’s outstanding contemporary reputation. Mengs also worked as court painter in Spain between 1761–69 and 1774–77, executing an immense amount of the decoration in the Royal Palace, Madrid, as well as portraits of the upper echelons of Spanish society in a way which anticipates the court portraiture of Goya.