Anton Raphael Mengs

1728-1779

Anton Raphael Mengs was a painter of Bohemian birth and German-Danish descent who became a leading advocate for Neoclassical art across Europe. Born in 1728 in Ústí nad Labem, he trained under his father Ismael Mengs and moved to Rome as a boy, where he spent much of his career despite appointments as court painter in Dresden. His reputation rested on ambitious fresco cycles—notably the Parnassus at Villa Albani and the Glory of Saint Eusebius in Rome—and on two extended periods in Madrid under Charles III, where he painted the celebrated ceiling of the Royal Palace depicting the Triumph of Trajan. Mengs championed classical antiquity through friendship with Winckelmann, yet his own work remained rooted in Baroque tradition, a tension that made him as much a conclusion to the old style as a beginning of the new. He was also a prolific theorist, writing extensively on art in Spanish, Italian, and German. He died in Rome in 1779.