Mengs, Anton Raphael

Related Category: European Art, 1600 to the Present: Biographies

(än´tôn rä´fäĕl mĕngs), 1728–79, German historical and portrait painter, b. Bohemia. He was the pupil of his father, Ismael Mengs (c.1688–1764), a Dresden miniaturist who took him to Italy in 1741. Anton was appointed Dresden court painter in 1749. Influenced by the theories of Winckelmann, he became the leading light of the neoclassical movement. His major works include Parnassus (1761; Villa Albani, Rome) and Apotheosis of Trajan (Madrid), which he created as court painter to Charles III of Spain. His portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann is in the Metropolitan Museum. Mengs was also an important theoretician.

See his Collected Works (1780). His most famous work was Considerations on Beauty and Taste in Painting (1762).