MENGS, ANTON RAPHAEL. – Painter, born at Aussig in Bohemia on 22 March 1728, died in Rome on 29 June 1779. The son of Ismael, himself also a painter, he was still a boy when his father took him to Rome. There, between 1741 and 1744, he studied under M. Benefial and S. Conca, but was chiefly interested in the works of Raffaello.
Returning to his homeland, to Dresden, he achieved great success there for his exceptional gifts as a portraitist; despite this, he soon wished to return to Rome, where he was again in 1746. There, having converted to Catholicism (he was Jewish) and taken a Roman woman as his wife, he frequently portrayed her, from 1749 onward, with the attributes of the Madonna in compositions depicting the Holy Family. A highly sought-after painter and famous portraitist, M. carried out, despite his frequent journeys abroad, most of his activity in Rome, where in 1755 he met Winckelmann, whose aesthetic theories partly coincided with his own in their inclination toward the pursuit of an ideal beauty, achieved through the selection of models to be drawn, according to M., from the works of the great painters of the past: above all from Raffaello, Correggio, Tiziano, and Michelangelo. These ideas, deriving from Bellori and therefore only partly coinciding with those of the pure neoclassicists, who located beauty in the great models of classical antiquity, were developed by M. in numerous writings and expressed in paintings such as, in 1757–58, the ceiling of the church of S. Eusebio in Rome and, in 1761, the fresco depicting the Parnaso in the villa of Cardinal Albani. In 1761 M. was also in Naples and then in Madrid, to paint at that court and reorganize the Academy. Returning to Rome and elected prince of the Accademia di S. Luca, in 1772 he decorated the Sala dei papiri in the Vatican Library. In 1773 he was again in Madrid, but his poor health forced him to return to Rome, where he died six years later. His works, among which several highly valuable portraits still inclined toward the aspects of the most graceful eighteenth-century style, are found in the major Italian and foreign collections.