The German Genius

“Etruscan” vases, which would eventually comprise 300 pieces when he donated it to the Vatican Library. He also had another collection of plaster casts, modeled after famous antique statues. This he gave to the king of Spain in the hope that they would help improve what he regarded as “the lamentable state of public taste in Spain.” A second collection was acquired, after his death, by the court in Dresden “where it influenced the Dresden and Meissen porcelain produced in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.” 6
    Mengs’s first painting to treat an ancient historical subject has disappeared (a lot of his work has been lost) and the earliest classical history painting of his that does survive is The Judgment of Paris . Paris, seated, looks out on the three nude goddesses, as described in Ovid and as shown in an existing painting by Raphael. Mengs’s evolution toward neoclassicism is shown still more clearly in a small tondo painting, Joseph in Prison , now in Madrid, where the flat stones and smooth ashlar masonry look forward to Jacques-Louis David. 7 Mengs had by now discovered in Rome the paintings of Nicolas Poussin.
    Such compositions made Mengs the obvious artist for patrons making the grand tour, but to establish himself as a serious exponent of classicism he needed a project on a grander scale. This arrived when he was given the commission to decorate the Villa Albani, which Thomas Pelzel describes as the most significant commission of Mengs’s career. The contents of the cardinal’s magnificent new villa, near the Porta Salaria, were so important that it was an obligatory stop for any informed visitor to Rome. 8 The ceiling took Mengs about nine months. In the center of the composition is Parnassus , with the laurel-crowned Apollo holding a laurel branch and a lyre. They are surrounded by the nine muses and their mother, Mnemosyne, a reference to Cardinal Albani as patron and protector of the arts. The muses are known to be likenesses of Albani’s favorites among the more ravishing women of Rome. In this flattering view, Villa Albani is established as the center of the neoclassical world. 9
    In this composition, Pelzel says, Mengs was convinced he was going further than Raphael. Mengs believed that Raphael did not have “that knowledge of true beauty which the Greeks possessed.” 10 Mengs, on the other hand, in his own mind, had the advantage of the new discoveries at Herculaneum. In the Albani ceiling it was therefore Mengs’s aim to improve upon the style of Raphael “in the light of his own superior knowledge of Greek art.” When the ceiling was unveiled in 1761, Winckelmann said he could “recall nothing in the works of Raphael to place beside it.” It was in connection with this ceiling that Winckelmann called Mengs “the German Raphael.” 11
    Mengs’s fame was now spreading, and in 1772 he was elected president of the Accademia di S. Luca, soon after receiving a major commission from Pope Clement XIV. 12 Mengs selected an Allegory of History . He remained interested in antiquity to the end of his life, even when he was so ill that he was forced to paint from bed. It was then that he was awarded the biggest honor of his career, the commission for a large altarpiece for St. Peter’s. This, the Giving of the Keys , was never carried further than the initial cartoon, for Mengs died in June 1779.
    Winckelmann thought Mengs was the one modern painter who had “most clearly approached the taste of the ancients” and this too was the verdict of later authorities who studied the neoclassical movement. In Winckelmann’s letters there are copious references to life in Mengs’s convivial house in Rome, and several of Mengs’s pupils served in academic posts all over Germany, including Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, who described him as “the most accomplished German painter since Dürer.” 13 According to one account, as many as 500 German artists passed through Rome at this time.
    But Mengs’s most enduring influence was outside his own country, in the genesis of French neoclassicism. According to the French historian Jean Locquin, any Frenchman of classical or archaeological inclination who found himself in Rome in the late eighteenth century would have sought inspiration “de la bouche du Maître [Mengs], qui répond si parfaitement aux aspirations de l’époque.” 14 Joseph-Marie Vien, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and, above all, David were influenced by the general milieu