Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779)

The myth of Raphael Sanzio da Urbino (hailed as the ‘prince of painters’) was still very much alive in the mid-18th century. The remarkable prestige enjoyed by the master extended to all his followers, starting with the Carracci family, especially Annibale, and continuing with Domenichino, Guido Reni and Andrea Sacchi, right up to Carlo Maratti, the last great artist to espouse Raphael’s Classicist approach.

Mengs was to some extent heir to that tradition. Moreover, driven by his unbridled ambition, he sought to outpaint Raphael, i.e. to deliberately imitate and surpass his work, an aspiration regarded at the time as disrespectful to the memory of the master. The best example is Mengs’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ, where – on a panel the same size as Raphael’s Christ falling on the Way to Calvary – he posed a clear challenge, albeit employing his own artistic language. Echoes of Carracci and his followers can be discerned in other paintings and drawings on show in this room.

In the 1740s, when Mengs arrived there on his first visit from Dresden, Rome was a hotbed of artistic activity. Three stimuli provided by the city, during this and later stays, were crucial in shaping both his painterly practice and his theoretical views. In the first place, he gained direct access to classical ruins, and also to major works by the painters he most admired, particularly Raphael and Annibale Carracci. Secondly, there was no shortage of illustrious clients, led by the Pope himself and a number of British travellers on the Grand Tour. The third stimulus was the arrival, in 1755, of the German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, with whom Mengs forged a sincere and fruitful friendship; Winckelmann introduced him to a concept of beauty only to be found in ancient statuary.

With this underpinning, Mengs set out on a career that was to radically change the future of painting; a change that would have been inconceivable without his powerful artistic personality.

The theoretical views developed by Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Joachim Winckelmann from 1755 onwards were founded on the conviction that Classical Greek art was superior to any other. In the absence of paintings from that period, they focused on sculptures, particularly of adult males, from which they inferred a vague concept of ideal beauty, which Mengs attempted to capture in his pictures. In doing so, he ushered in one of the most exciting periods in the history of painting, a period that would later prove remarkably significant.

The creative process advocated by Mengs began with drawing, either from life or from classical statues, which became an indispensable element in art education. Ancient sculptures provided the canon of formal perfection, together with an inexhaustible catalogue of feelings – passion, for example, and pain – and physical characteristics such as beauty, which Mengs incorporated into his painting as canonical representations sanctioned by the irrefutable prestige of Antiquity.

The breakdown of the friendship between Mengs and Winckelmann was a dark moment in the lives of both men. It was triggered by the appearance in 1760 of a fake fresco, purportedly ancient, which had in fact been painted by Mengs, apparently with a view to damaging the archaeologist’s reputation. Winckelmann not only regarded it as ancient, but also wrote about it in glowing terms. The subsequent discovery of the deception put an end to the friendship between scholar and painter.

It is not clear what prompted Mengs to behave in such a perfidious manner. One reason may have been Winckelmann’s failure to acknowledge Mengs’s contribution to his new theories restating the importance of Graeco-Roman statuary, which they both regarded as the core of modern artistic creation. Mengs provided the vision of an artist with first-hand knowledge of the technical and material aspects of sculpture, which Winckelmann – for all his inexhaustible book learning – could not supply.

In the course of his life, Mengs published a couple of essays setting out his views on art. On his death, seeking to perpetuate his memory, José Nicolás de Azara placed a bust of his friend in the Pantheon in Rome, and published his works in Italian and Spanish, together with a biography and a list of his paintings in Spain. That edition included a number of unpublished writings, as well as other texts purporting to be by Mengs – one on the Academia de San Fernando and another on the development of the fine arts in Spain – which were in fact by Azara, who set himself up as the interpreter of Mengs’s artistic ideas. The book circulated widely, through several subsequent reprints and translations.

Biographies of Mengs had earlier been published by Carlo Giuseppe Ratti (1779) and Giovanni Lodovico Bianconi (1779-80), the latter having had access to the manuscript written by Monsignor Giovanni Maria Riminaldi, a friend of the painter’s, which was also sent to Azara, and is exhibited here for the first time.

Mengs was summoned to Spain to take part in decorating the New Royal Palace in Madrid. He initially feared that his work might not be well received, and that he might be employed only to paint portraits, as in Spain he was known only for the likeness he had painted of the King of Naples. Once he had completed his first murals for the palace, he started work on pictures of the royal family; the first of these were sent to foreign courts, among them a full-length portrait of Charles III commissioned by the King of Denmark. Having produced portraits of various members of the royal family in Madrid, he was commissioned to paint Charles III’s relations in Italy: the family of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, in Florence, and the royal family in Naples.

At the same time, Mengs painted portraits of several court figures, notably the superb likeness of Isabel Parreño, wife of José Agustín de Llano, better known by her later title of Marchioness of Llano.

Having completed the first murals, the commission that had brought him to Spain, Mengs went on to paint several religious pictures for Charles III; some were intended for the Royal Palace in Madrid, and others – small-format devotional images – for the personal use of the king and various members of his family. Religious paintings by Mengs graced the bedchambers of His Catholic Majesty, the Prince of Asturias and the Infante Luis of Bourbon, and accompanied them on their “royal sojourns”, a perpetual tour of the Royal Palaces at El Pardo, Aranjuez, La Granja de San Ildefonso and San Lorenzo de El Escorial, interspersed with short stays in Madrid to celebrate the main festivities: Christmas and Easter. 

After the early death of Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, Charles III never remarried. He enjoyed, until shortly before his death, the spiritual support of his confessor, the Franciscan friar Joaquín de Eleta, who favoured the establishment – in Aranjuez – of the Real Convento de San Pascual for Alcantarine monks. 

Mengs’s religious paintings were a prominent feature of the Royal Palace in Madrid, and particularly of the apartments intended for such a pious king. The decoration of Charles III’s bedchamber was dominated by the Passion of Christ, comprising two panels in the style of Raphael Sanzio – Lamentation over the Dead Christ and God the Father – and overdoors painted on canvas, in which Mengs apparently sought to measure himself against Antonio Allegri da Correggio and Diego Velázquez by including figures recalling some of their pictures.

The king’s private chapel and drawing room focused on more cheerful themes: the adoration of the shepherds, with the birth of Jesus, of which he was to paint three versions, and the Annunciation. This was the subject of his last painting in Rome, commissioned for the public chapel at the Royal Palace in Aranjuez, although Charles III kept it in his drawing room beside the panel of the Adoration of the Shepherds, also sent from Italy, which included a self-portrait by Mengs.

By the 1740s, when Mengs moved to Rome, the painterly formulas on which local artists relied were showing irreversible signs of wear. From the following decade onwards, Mengs and Winckelmann championed new approaches destined to place the concept of classical beauty at the centre of the aesthetic debate. 

New generations of artists, among them, the sculptor Antonio Canova and the painter Jacques-Louis David, espoused these ideas and extended their reach. Drawing on a more thorough knowledge of the ancient world, they refined classical lines and, at times, endowed their work with a civic dimension – in the service of a range of political ideals – that outstepped Mengs’s original intentions. Francisco de Goya himself showed an interest in classical statuary which can only be attributed to Mengs’s influence. 

This refinement of Mengs’s approach has gone down in the history of styles under the name of Neoclassicism, a movement that spread throughout Europe and America and would have been impossible without the powerful personality of Anton Raphael Mengs.