MENGS, ANTON RAPHAEL. - Painter, b. at Aussig in Bohemia on 22 March 1728, d. at Rome on 29 June 1779. Son of Ismael, himself also a painter, he was still a boy when his father took him to Rome. Here, between 1741 and 1744, he attended the school of M. Benefial and S. Conca, but he was interested above all in the works of Raphael.
Having returned to his homeland, to Dresden, he won 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 having taken a Roman woman as his wife, he often portrayed her, from 1749 onward, with the attributes of the Madonna in compositions depicting the Holy Family. A highly sought-after painter and a famous portraitist, M. carried on, despite frequent travels abroad, the greatest part of his activity in Rome, where in 1755 he met Winckelmann, whose aesthetic theories partly coincided with his own, as a tendency toward the search for an ideal beauty pursued by means of the selection of models to be drawn, according to M., from the works of the great painters of the past: above all from Raphael, Correggio, Titian and Michelangelo. These ideas, deriving from Bellori and therefore only partly coinciding with those of the pure Neoclassicists who identified beauty in the great models of classical antiquity, M. developed in numerous writings and bore witness to in paintings, such as, between 1757-58, the ceiling of the church of S. Eusebio in Rome and, in 1761, in the fresco depicting Parnassus in the villa of Card. Albani. In 1761 M. was also in Naples and then in Madrid to paint at that court and to give a new organization to the Academy. Having returned to Rome and been elected prince of the Academy of St. Luke, in 1772 he decorated the Sala dei papiri in the Vatican Library. In 1773 he was again in Madrid, but failing health forced him to return to Rome, where he died six years later. His works, among which some portraits still inclined to the aspects of the most graceful eighteenth century are of great value, are in the major Italian and foreign collections.
Bibliography3 works
Emilio Lavagnino