Mengs, Anton Raphael (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 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim (yō`hän yōä`khĭm vĭng`kəlmän)
..... Click the link for more information. , 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.

Bibliography

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

Mengs, Anton Raphael

(born March 22, 1728, Aussig, Bohemia—died June 29, 1779, Rome, Papal States) German painter. After study in Dresden and Rome, he became painter to the Saxon court in Dresden in 1745. Back in Rome in the late 1740s and again in the early 1750s, he developed an enthusiasm for Classical antiquity. His fresco Parnassus (1760–61) at the Villa Albani helped establish the ascendancy of Neoclassical painting. He also worked extensively for the Spanish court in Madrid. He was regarded as Europe's greatest living painter in his day, but his reputation has since declined.