Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

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Franz Xaver Messerschmidt : biography

February 6, 1736 – August 19, 1783

Sources

  • Michael Krapf, Almut Krapf-Weiler, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Hatje Cantz Publishers, ISBN 3-7757-1246-1, 2003.
  • Maria Pötzl-Malíková. "" In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, (accessed January 10, 2012; subscription required).
  • Maria Pötzl Malikova, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Jugend and Volk Publishing Company, ISBN 37141679431982. Translation into English: Herb Ranharter, 2006
  • Theodor Schmid, 49 Köpfe, Theodor Schmid Verlag, ISBN 3-906566-61-7, 2004.
  • Franz Xaver Messerschmidt 1736-1783. From Neoclassicism to Expressionism, edited by Maria Pötzl Malikova and Guilhem Scherf, Officina Libraria/Neue Galerie/Musée du Louvre, ISBN 978-88-89854-54-9, 2010.
  • Eric R. Kandel,The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, Random House Publishing Group, ISBN 978-1-4000-6871-5, 2012.

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.