The German Genius

serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where “the real joints of nature” are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine “imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.”

The Brandenburg Gate, the Iron Cross, and the German Raphaels
     
    W e shall be describing a curious phenomenon in this chapter, a whole raft of artists who have fallen very much out of favor in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but who were, in their own time, very fashionable indeed. In fact, they were the most famous painters, sculptors, and architects of their day. This change of fortune is nowhere more apparent than with Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79). 1
    In the first published biography of him, Giovanni Lodovico Bianconi’s Elogio storico del Cavaliere Antonio Raffaelle Mengs (Milan, 1780), Mengs was held to be “the most notable painter of his century and of comparable stature and importance to Raphael and Apelles in the total history of art.” 2 The greatest praise was that bestowed on Mengs by Winckelmann himself, who dedicated his History of Antiquity to the painter, and said in the text that he was “the single modern painter who had most closely approached the taste and perfection of the ancients in his art.” Mengs’s studio in Rome was a meeting place and sanctuary “to which all connoisseurs and aspiring young artists of classicising taste and bent” would naturally gravitate.
    Mengs’s father, Ismael, was court painter in Dresden and named his son after Correggio (Anton) and Raphael. The boy was raised with a strict formal training in art, beginning at age six when his father put him to drawing simple straight lines, and from there allowed him to progress to circles “and other pure geometric forms.” 3 In 1741, at the age of thirteen, Mengs was taken to Rome, where he was forced to concentrate on Raphael, but only after he had “mastered” Michelangelo’s sculptures. (He had to tell his father at the end of every day what he thought he had learned.) After three years in Rome, the Mengs family returned to Dresden where, famously, Anton Raphael was “discovered” as a child prodigy (he was fifteen), and made court painter in 1745, aged barely sixteen. He proved popular with Friedrich August II, who acquired seventeen of his works. Dresden is the only place in Germany where Mengs’s work can be seen.
    Despite these early successes, Ismael decided that a second tour in Italy was desirable for his prodigious son, mere portraits being less worthy than history painting. This time the family—granted leave by the Dresden court—traveled via Venice, where they studied the Titians, Bologna, for the Carracci, and Parma, for the Correggios. After his second spell in Rome, Mengs returned again to Dresden and was promoted from court painter to first painter to Friedrich August II. Rather than satisfy Mengs, this rapid promotion seems only to have stimulated his ambition, and in 1752 he left for Rome a third time. He stayed nine years and never saw Dresden or his royal patron again.
    The pre-eminence of Rome was partly due to Winckelmann, but not entirely. The French Academy in Rome had been established as long ago as 1666 for the reception and further training of the best young painters, sculptors, and architects, who usually spent a few years along the Tiber before returning to France (the usual term was six years, but one painter spent nearly two decades there).
    Mengs formed important friendships with Monsignor (and after 1756, Cardinal) Albericho Archinto, who had persuaded Winckelmann to convert to Catholicism, and Cardinal Alessandro Albani, a nephew of Pope Clement XI. These contacts led to Mengs’s first really important commission in Rome, for the ceiling of S. Eusebio in 1757. 4 This was one of the most ancient churches there, dating from the fifth century, and when his picture was unveiled it was universally welcomed as “ eine Schöpfung der Zauberkunst ,” a magical creation. 5
    Mengs and Winckelmann were natural companions in Rome and sought each other out, even planning a joint treatise on the taste of the Greeks. In fact, Mengs was as important for his taste as for his painting and he became more and more interested in the art of antiquity. On a visit to Naples in 1758–59 he had begun a collection of