page_title: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt
section_title: Maturity
hierarchical_section_title: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt / Maturity
caption_attribution_description: English: Character Study: 'Strong Smell', circa 1770-1781 CE. Lead-tin alloy. From Austria (Pressburg), now Slovakia (Bratislava). By Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Purchased with funds from the Captain H. B. Murray Bequest.
context_page_description: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his "character heads", a collection of busts with faces contorted in extreme facial expressions.
context_section_description: The Baroque period of his oeuvre ended in 1769 with a bust of the court physician Gerard van Swieten, commissioned by the Empress. At the same time his first early Neo-Classic works appeared, made—characteristically—for the Academy. To these and later works he applied many experiences gained in 1765 during a study trip to Rome. One of these early, severe heads from the years 1769-70, influenced by Roman republican portraits, represents the well-known doctor Franz Anton Mesmer. At about the same time, in 1770-72 Messerschmidt began to work on his so-called character heads, which it has been argued (notably by Ernst Kris) were connected with certain paranoid ideas and hallucinations from which, at the beginning of the seventies, the master began to suffer.  Messerschmidt found himself increasingly at odds with his milieu. His situation worsened to such an extent, that in 1774, when he applied for the newly-vacant office of a leading professor at the Academy, where he had been teaching since 1769, instead of getting it he was expelled from teaching. In a letter to the Empress, Count Kaunitz praised Messerschmidt's abilities, but suggested that the nature of his illness (referred to as a "confusion in the head") would make such an appointment detrimental to the institution.
caption: Character Study Strong Smell, circa 1770-1781 CE. From Austria, Pressburg, now Slovakia, Bratislava. By Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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