Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Anton Raphael Mengs y la Antigüedad

2016; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jhc/fhw039

1477-8564

Peter Mason,

Historical Studies of Medieval Iberia

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Spanish art students unable to travel to Italy who wanted to become familiar with classical sculpture had to make do with those that Velázquez had sent from Rome to Madrid to adorn the Alcázar and the seventy-three statues and busts from the collection of Christina of Sweden that had found their way to the palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso. Against this background, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the vast collection of moulds and casts that Anton Raphael Mengs donated via the Spanish monarch to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in the Spanish capital in 1776. At the age of twelve, the young Mengs was taken by his Danish father, the miniaturist and enamellist Ismael Mengs, to Rome to make drawings of the most admired works of antiquity and the Stanze of Raphael. Imbued with the notion that it was in those works that true beauty was to be found, after a brief period in Dresden the artist returned to Italy accompanied by a carriage laden with plaster casts of classical sculpture that his father must have taken back to Germany at the end of their previous visit.