i

Messerschmidt’s Character Heads

This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver
Messerschmidt (1736–​ 1783) known as his “Character Heads.” These are busts
of  human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often
inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art.
Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to
illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures
are simultaneously explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits
that would be placed on that power.

Michael Yonan is associate professor of art history at the University of Missouri–​

Columbia, USA. He is a specialist in eighteenth-​century European art and material
culture.
ii

Studies in Art Historiography

Series Editor: Richard Woodfield, University of Birmingham

The aim of this series is to support and promote the study of the history and practice of
art historical writing focusing on its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the
past to the present day in all areas and all periods. Besides addressing the major innova-
tors of the past it also encourages re-​thinking ways in which the subject may be written
in the future. It ignores the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the Anglophone expres-
sion “art history” and allows and encourages the full range of enquiry that encom-
passes the visual arts in its broadest sense as well as topics falling within archaeology,
anthropology, ethnography, and other specialist disciplines and approaches.

Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary

Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire
Ahmet A. Ersoy

Painting and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gauguin

Edited by Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren

Pictures-​within-​Pictures in Nineteenth-​Century Britain

Catherine Roach

The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History

Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-​Century Mexico
Ray Hernandez-​Duran

Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism

International Experiments in Italy
Marin R. Sullivan

Comparativism in Art History

Edited by Jaś Elsner

Constructing the Viennese Modern Body

Art, Hysteria and the Puppet
Nathan J. Timpano

Messerschmidt’s Character Heads
Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History
Michael Yonan
 iii

Messerschmidt’s Character Heads
Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art
History

Michael Yonan
iv

First published 2018

by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of Michael Yonan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​21343-​2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​44840-​4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Out of House Publishing
 v

For Mike Wells
vi
 vi

Contents

List of Figures viii

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

PART I
Writing the Artist’s Mind 11
Introduction to Part I
1 Nicolai’s Dreamer 13
2 Kris’s Psychotic 41

PART II
Writing the Artist’s Context 69
Introduction to Part II
3 Mesmer’s Acolyte 71
4 Lichtenberg’s Ally 98

PART III
Writing the Artist’s Project 125
Introduction to Part III
5 The Game of Making 127
6 The Envy of the Gods 152
Conclusion 179

Bibliography 182
Index 191
vi

Figures

0.1 Matthias Rudolph Toma (1792–​1869), Messerschmidts

Charakterbüsten, 1839. Lithograph. Photo: ÖNB, Vienna. 2
1.1 Anton Graff, Portrait of Friedrich Nicolai, c. 1783. Oil on canvas.
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin. Photo: Deutsches Historisches
Museum, Berlin. 14
1.2 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 17 (Der Schaafkopf),
Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 5509. Photo: © Belvedere, Vienna. 21
1.3 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 8 (Sanfter ruhiger
Schlaf). Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Inv. Nr. 53656. Photo:
© Museum of Fine Arts Budapest/​Scala/​Art Resource, New York. 22
1.4 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 24 (Der weinerliche
Alte). Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 5674. Photo: © Belvedere,
Vienna. 23
1.5 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 19 (Ein Schmerzhaft
stark Verwundeter). Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 5695.
Photo: © Belvedere, Vienna. 24
1.6 Gianlorenzo Bernini, David, 1623–​1624. Detail of face. Galleria
Borghese, Rome. Photo: Andrea Jemolo/​Scala/​Art Resource, New York. 31
2.1 Photo of Ernst Kris, 1955. Photo: U.S. National Library of Medicine,
Washington, D.C. 42
2.2 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 29 (Ein aus dem
Wasser Geretteter). Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 5861. Photo:
© Belvedere, Vienna. 47
2.3 René Magritte, Le Viol, 1934. Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.
Photo: Visual Arts Library/​Art Resource, New York; © 2017
C. Herskovici/​Artists Rights Society, New York. 49
2.4 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 6 (Zweiter
Schnabelkopf). Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 5640. Photo:
© Belvedere, Vienna. 50
2.5 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 36 (Ein
Hipochondrist), about 1775–​1780. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. 61
3.1 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 47 (Innerlich
verschlossener Gram), after 1774. Landesmuseum Württemberg,
Stuttgart. Photo: H. Zwietasch. 72
x i

Figures  ix
3.2 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Portrait of Franz Anton Mesmer, 1770.
Private collection. Photo: © Belvedere, loan from a private collection. 73
3.3 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Portrait of Gerard van Swieten, 1770–​
1772. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 8921. Photo: Erich
Lessing/​Art Resource, New York. 76
3.4 “Tafl zur Anleitung der Stahl-​Magneten.” Plate from Maximilian Hell,
Anleitung zum nützlichen Gebrauch der künstlichen Stahl-​Magneten,
Vienna, 1762. Photo: Courtesy of the Clendening History of Medicine
Library, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City. 83
3.5 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 30 (Ein mit
Verstopfung Behafteter). Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg.
Photo: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. 91
3.6 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 25 (Ein Erhängter).
Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 5637. Photo: © Belvedere, Vienna. 92
3.7 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 45 (Ein Gelehrter,
Dichter), copy of a lost original. Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr.
5686. Photo: © Belvedere, Vienna. 93
3.8 Anonymous, Le Baquet de M. Mesmer, où Répresentation fidelle des
Opérations du Magnétisme Animal, 1779. Photo: HIP/​Art Resource,
New York. 94
4.1 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 26 (Der Satirikus).
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. Photo: Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg. 103
4.2 Joseph Ducreux, Self-​Portrait of the Artist in the Guise of a Mocker,
c. 1793. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © RMN-​Grand Palais/​Art
Resource, New York. 105
4.3 William Hogarth, The Idle Prentice Turn’d Away and Sent to Sea,
1747. Plate 5 from Industry and Idleness. Metropolitan Museum
of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1932, 32.35(41).
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 110
4.4 William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, Plate 2, 1732. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Sarah Lazarus, 1891, 91.1.129.
Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 115
4.5 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 12 (Der Nieser),
plaster cast of a lost original. Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr.
5683. Photo: © Belvedere, Vienna. 118
5.1 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 10 (Der
Bekümmerte). Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 3198. Photo:
© Belvedere, Vienna. 129
5.2 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 10, side view.
Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv. Nr. 3198. Photo: © Belvedere, Vienna. 133
5.3 Jean-​Antoine Houdon, Voltaire (François-​Marie Arouet), 1778.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: © Metropolitan
Museum of Art/​Art Resource, New York. 135
5.4 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 48 (Ein alter
fröhlicher Lächler). Wax and wood. Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Inv.
Nr. 2286. Photo: © Belvedere, Vienna. 142
x

x Figures
5.5 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Character Head No. 39 (Ein Heuchler
und Verleumder). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo:
© Metropolitan Museum of Art/​Art Resource, New York. 146
6.1 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Maria Immaculata, 1766. Photo:
ÖNB, Vienna. 157
6.2 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Seated Male Nude Holding a Staff,
1760s. Black and white chalk on blue paper. Harris Brisbane Dick
Fund, 47.155.1, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo:
© Metropolitan Museum of Art/​Art Resource, New York. 164
6.3 Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Franz von Scheyb, 1770. Wien Museum,
Vienna. Photo: © Wien Museum. 169
6.4 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Parody of Raphael’s School of Athens, 1750–​
1751. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Photo: National Gallery of
Ireland. 174
7.1 Seal of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. State Archives of Bratislava,
Slovakia (Štátny archív v Bratislave). Photo: author. 180
 xi

Acknowledgments

Perhaps fittingly, this book about an unusual artist has unusual origins. It had its
beginnings in—​of all places—​Las Vegas, where I first presented some thoughts about
Messerschmidt in a panel on “Faces” at the 2005 meeting of the American Society for
Eighteenth-​Century Studies. Since then, my desire to understand his Character Heads
and their interpretation has led me to diverse locales, pushed me into unfamiliar intel-
lectual terrains, and occasionally thrown me into controversy. The resulting book has
been challenging to write, which means that the support of friends and colleagues has
been more than usually welcome.
First and foremost, thanks to Paula Radisich for chairing that ASECS session.
I  am lucky as well to have heard the thought-​provoking contributions of my fel-
low panelists Philippe Bordes, Kathleen Nicholson, and Barbara Maria Stafford, who
collectively jumpstarted my thinking about this subject. Stafford’s scholarship on
eighteenth-​century physiognomy often guided me through the complex idea worlds
of Lavater and Lichtenberg. Jennifer Germann, Joan Greer, Ben Harvey, Christina
Lindeman, Meredith Martin, Heather McPherson, Julie-​Anne Plax, Wendy Wassyng
Roworth, Stacey Sloboda, Kristel Smentek, James van Dyke, and Tara Zanardi offered
encouragement as the project took shape. I  will be forever grateful to Julia Simon,
who supported the publication of an article in Eighteenth-​Century Studies in which
I  sketched out some initial ideas. Likewise I  thank Elizabeth Mansfield and Kelly
Malone for their comments on an essay containing some parts of Chapter 4, which
appeared in the volume Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford:  Voltaire
Foundation, 2013).
My thinking about Messerschmidt deepened substantially while I was a research
fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala, a unique and won-
derful institution. Despite a connection to Sweden through his mentor Martin van
Meytens, Messerschmidt never traveled so far north. That was very much his mistake!
I thank Björn Wittrock, Barbro Klein, Mikael Ahlund, Carolina Brown Ahlund, Maris
Gillette, Mirja Hartimo, Linda Hinners, Petter Johansson, Jari Kaukua, and Pärtel
Piirimäe for many great discussions. Thanks as well to the entire SCAS staff for wel-
coming me and supporting my research with calm Swedish assurance. I am likewise
grateful to the University of Missouri Research Board for awarding me a Provost’s
Research Leave in 2013–​2014, which enabled me to write the manuscript.
Closer to Messerschmidt’s home, I would like to thank Mgr. Miroslava Hivková
of the former Archív hlavného mesta SR Bratislavy, Slovakia, for helping me study
papers housed there. In Vienna, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere has been unfail-
ingly helpful in assisting my research and in a real sense inspired it. I  would also
newgenprepdf

xi

xii Acknowledgments
like to thank Niki Conley, Sean Franzel, Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Norman Land, Susan
Langdon, Claire Mádl, Martin Mádl, Daryl Maude, Dawn McInnis, Christopher
Reed, Anne Rudloff Stanton, Drew Wallenberg, and Larry Wolff, and the audiences
from Mississippi to Prague who have listened to and commented on my arguments.
At the publication stage, this book owes its existence to Margaret Michniewicz, who
judiciously guided it through its initial reviews, and later to Isabella Vitti and Julia
Michaelis, who stewarded it to completion with care. Thanks to them all. Richard
Woodfield has done so much to promote the study of art historiography that that
alone would earn him my gratitude, but he also commented on aspects of the manu-
script with great discernment. I am fortunate to have benefited from his editorship of
the Studies in Art Historiography series.
My final thanks go to two important people in my life. Mary Sheriff was a cher-
ished teacher, mentor, colleague, travel companion, and friend to me for more than
20 years. As I finished writing this book, it became clear how much it owes to her, how
much the spirit of her thinking floats through its pages. My appreciation for all that
she brought to my life is beyond the power of words. Luck indeed. Mike Wells is that
rarest of things: a true friend, someone who has appreciated me, distracted me, and
at the right moments ignored me, but he has always grounded me with reminders to
keep things in perspective. I’ve been fortunate to have access to his counsel, his wit,
his openheartedness, and his puppies. A major book lover himself, I dedicate this one
to him.
 1

Introduction

Like many fascinated with the sculptures of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, my interest
was ignited when I encountered his “Character Heads” for the first time in person. That
encounter, however, was neither my introduction to the man nor to his art. Previously
I had seen his unusual sculptures reproduced in books, had read Ernst Kris’s famous
essay during my doctoral studies, and even examined a metal bust by Messerschmidt
closely in the home of an art collector in North Carolina. Messerschmidt was on my
radar, then, when I  visited Vienna’s Belvedere Museum in 2002 to view the retro-
spective exhibition mounted for him by that institution, the first of several that would
occur over the following decade. Seeing dozens of Character Heads displayed along-
side each other, and in galleries not far from others that housed Messerschmidt’s more
conventional sculptures, made for a unique and powerful museum experience. I spent
hours looking at them, thinking about what they showed, and I  recall recognizing
what many others have taken away from similar encounters: that in these sculptures,
Messerschmidt undertook a serious artistic project, albeit it one with highly uncon-
ventional, even idiosyncratic products. Furthermore, I comprehended that this project
lay outside of the possibilities typically understood for eighteenth-​century artists, or
for that matter artists in most contexts prior to the advent of modern art. I  pon-
dered the exhibition for days after seeing it, and one morning casually mentioned to a
Viennese library clerk that Messerschmidt’s sculptures had really made an impression
on me. Me too, he responded. “Sicher war der Mann geisteskrank.”
That was his takeaway: the person who made these objects was insane. And even
further, the clerk was sure—​sicher—​about this, since the sculptures seemed to display
that insanity so vividly. Actually, the Belvedere had gone to great lengths to challenge
exactly this interpretation and offered explicit alternatives to it in the wall texts and
published catalogue. Yet the sculptures seemed to work against such revision by tell-
ing a transparent story of madness generating weird art. One can hardly fault the clerk
for arriving at his conclusion. Messerschmidt’s Character Heads are indeed extremely
odd. They push even the most jaded museumgoers out of their reverential lull and into
confused stares and laughter, often resulting in puzzled smirks not too different from
what the sculptures themselves convey. No amount of careful museological framing
can prevent visitors from posing the same basic questions when looking at them.
What was Messerschmidt thinking when he made these sculptures? Are they some
kind of joke? Did he not understand the rules of art? Did he not care? Are they just a
historical curiosity, and if they are more than that, in what does their value lie?
Attempting to grapple with questions like these took me to the critical literature
on Messerschmidt, and in reading through it, I came to realize how successfully this
2

Figure 0.1  Matthias Rudolph Toma (1792–​1869), Messerschmidts Charakterbüsten, 1839.

Lithograph. Photo: ÖNB, Vienna.
 3

Introduction  3
artist evaded simple explanations for his art. A surprisingly rich historiographical trail
exists for this artist, a succession of textual responses far exceeding what one might
expect for a sculptor ostensibly on the margins of art history.1 Yet most if not all
explanations offered for the Character Heads in this literature stumble over the murky
circumstances of their making, their unconventional appearance, and what might be
called their inscrutability. My own position on them formed gradually. I realized that
inconsistency and inscrutability are what these sculptures are about, and rather than
smoothing over the confusions they present, I tried to accept them. The result of that
process is this book, which digs into the semantic problem of the Character Heads by
exploring why an eighteenth-​century artist would make a deliberately puzzling group
of objects, works that bear little resemblance to the art of his peers and that defy
persistent and critically sophisticated attempts to explain them.2 It unpacks various
scholarly explanations for them, tests the applicability and limitations of select crit-
ical frameworks, and engages with the objects themselves in detail in order to reach
a more precise understanding of what they actually do. I propose that in these sculp-
tures, Messerschmidt offers a repetitive, ironic exploration of the sculptural process,
particularly with respect to its representational capabilities and limits, and in so doing
both celebrates the creative freedoms that making art enables while satirizing the rules
by which it is judged. Messerschmidt’s sculptures are simultaneously explorations of
art’s material power and also critiques of the critical limits placed on that power.
It shall become clear to readers, however, that although this book has much to say
about the sculptor Messerschmidt, its real subject is the writing of art history. In its
modern incarnation, art history seeks to explain works of art as historical products,
a melding of aesthetic and historical concerns in and around the cultural artifact that
is the work of art. Messerschmidt’s Character Heads seem perfectly designed, one
dare say intended, to thwart or otherwise confuse the interpretive techniques one
might bring to explaining them. It seems to me that the typically befuddled response
to his art is not the result of critical failure, of observers somehow missing what
the sculptures are trying to say, but is a quality built into the objects themselves.
Messerschmidt’s sculptures demand critical reflection, but do so in order to muddle
the terms of that reflection and the easy assumptions that might emerge from it. At
its core, then, this book is about the narratives we use to assign meaning to artworks,
or the structures of art-​historical interpretation. Messerschmidt is a fascinating case
study for meaning-​making since the Character Heads are so semantically slippery.
My engagement with Messerschmidt’s art also emerges from a secondary motivation
born of dissatisfaction with the commonly circulated explanations of his sculptures.
As I wrote, I wondered if it might be possible to create a different kind of story about
these objects. Can we imagine that Messerschmidt’s heads are confusing for good
reasons, and that the confusion they generate might even be there to teach us, their
viewers, an important lesson?
Of course this is not how Messerschmidt’s sculptures have typically been
approached. Critical responses to them have been structured along essentially two
lines of explanation. The first is that Messerschmidt was mentally ill. My Viennese
library clerk’s assessment turns out to have a venerable academic pedigree, one trace-
able to the eighteenth century itself through the writings of a prominent philosopher,
Friedrich Nicolai, who claimed to visit Messerschmidt in his studio. Nicolai wrote
that Messerschmidt told him about strange visions he experienced that influenced his
sculptures. Numerous later writers assumed an understanding of Messerschmidt based
4

4  Messerschmidt’s Character Heads
on Nicolai’s text, among them the renowned twentieth-​century art historian-​turned-​
psychoanalyst Ernst Kris. Kris penned a highly influential essay about Messerschmidt
in which he diagnosed the artist postmortem as a paranoid schizophrenic. A second
line of interpretation, more credible to academic viewers than to popular audiences,
is that in these sculptures Messerschmidt attempted to illustrate some sort of philo-
sophical system. Interpreters have identified this system as ancient Egyptian hermeti-
cism, Mesmerism, the physiognomic theories of Johann Caspar Lavater, Freemasonic
ideals, and various other theories. None of these, upon closer observation, fits the
sculptures consistently and this has left scholars puzzled over which system should
prevail, which one unlocks their “true” meaning.3 To a surprising degree, sustaining
these explanations has required underplaying or overlooking formal aspects of the
sculptures themselves. Rather than smooth over discrepancies, or explain them away
through recourse to Messerschmidt’s mental problems, I have sought to place them at
the center of this book.
Rather than claiming that Messerschmidt was ill, then, I have come to see him as an
extremely canny artist, one who imagined at length how people would approach his
sculptures. Perhaps he was something more like a geek. I use this term in its modern,
reclaimed, non-​judgmental sense. This is the geekiness embraced by the unconven-
tional, perhaps socially awkward individual whose fascination with something drives
him to explore it quasi-​obsessively for ends that few others understand. It is in the
geek’s tinkering that new ideas have their origins, and to develop those ideas, geeks
have to break at least partially with the normative structures of society. The eight-
eenth century would have understood the geek as a kind of enthusiast, and indeed
Messerschmidt was often described in eighteenth-​century texts with language deriving
from the discourse of Enthusiasmus, which I treat at several points in this book. In
addition to fitting eighteenth-​century discourses better, recasting Messerschmidt as a
geek enables us to credit his achievement more generously. What so many have under-
stood as the outgrowth of mental aberration, I see as resulting from persistence, the
product of a fascination with making sculpture that brought about unusual but highly
compelling and ultimately influential objects.
Needless to say that developing a new critical framework like this requires breaking
down existing ones. The first two chapters of this book therefore are devoted to dis-
mantling prominent explanations of what Messerschmidt attempted in his Character
Heads. Chapter 1, “Nicolai’s Dreamer,” begins with the text that has most frequently
been used to understand Messerschmidt’s art, the aforementioned report by Friedrich
Nicolai. Through a close analysis of this text and a careful application of it to selected
sculptures, I  reveal it to be largely fictional. It is grounded in metaphors of artis-
tic eccentricity derived from Giorgio Vasari and filtered through Nicolai’s Protestant,
Enlightenment-​inspired notion of art as a socially beneficial utility. Nicolai’s discom-
fort with unexplained visions and the imagination, and especially with what psy-
choanalysts would later term the unconscious, rendered pure creative speculation
dangerous. Nicolai imagined Messerschmidt as possessing imaginative power run
amok and his text turned Messerschmidt into a negative example for his German
readership.
Chapter  2, “Kris’s Psychotic,” confronts the most widely distributed text on
Messerschmidt’s art ever published. Although Kris’s essay is often viewed as a major art-​
historical resource, it is actually a highly individual text, combining historical inquiry,
abstract psychoanalytic theorizing, and a generous projection of psychoanalytic
 5

Introduction  5
concepts onto a pastiched historical personage. I reveal this text to be a response to
Sigmund Freud’s famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci, which explored the relationship
between homosexuality and creativity with respect to Leonardo’s childhood memory
of the vulture. Kris recast Freud’s essay anew, describing Messerschmidt as a repressed
homosexual whose buried physical desires resulted in mental short-​circuiting, which
then produced bizarre visions and strange art. I also place this essay within the devel-
opment of Kris’s career and chart it against the changes to psychoanalytic attitudes
about homosexuality that coincided with it. The essay emerges not only as a singular
explanation for sculptural creativity, but also an episode in the use of homosexual
shame to shape aesthetic criteria. That it has little to do with Messerschmidt is one of
the unfortunate products of its ingenuity.
The book then turns to more recent attempts to explain Messerschmidt’s sculp-
tures through paradigms based in contextual interpretations. Chapter 3, “Mesmer’s
Acolyte,” examines the relationship between Messerschmidt’s sculptures and the
theories of animal magnetism propounded by Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer and
Messerschmidt have long been associated with each other, and indeed it can be docu-
mented that Messerschmidt fulfilled at least two commissions for Mesmer. This has led
some interpreters to propose that Mesmer’s theories are illustrated in Messerschmidt’s
sculptures. I show that there are indeed several references to Mesmerian séances in the
Character Heads, but that those references are artful and oblique, that they illustrate
Mesmer’s ideas less than they absorb them into a larger artistic process.
Chapter 4, “Lichtenberg’s Ally,” examines Messerschmidt’s relationship to eighteenth-​
century physiognomic theory. I enter this discussion through an unlikely figure, William
Hogarth, since eighteenth-​century critics compared the expressions in Messerschmidt’s
faces to those found in Hogarth’s prints. I examine the German reception of Hogarth
to understand how Messerschmidt may have fit into the broader late eighteenth-​cen-
tury German discussion of facial legibility.4 After revealing how poorly Messerschmidt’s
sculptures align with the physiognomic theories of Lavater, I propose a close parallel
in the pathognomic theories of the Göttingen-​based mathematician Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg. Messerschmidt and Lichtenberg thought of faces in similar ways and
undertook parallel examinations of how facial expression comes into form. Both pro-
pounded the idea that expression’s ultimate meaning lies not in the person who makes
a face, but rather the person who views it.
These critical possibilities examined, the book turns to the heads themselves. As
noted earlier, one of the more striking aspects of the Messerschmidt literature is the
degree to which the sculptures are mis-​described by those attempting to explain them.
Elements of their materiality are underplayed, ignored, or mischaracterized in order
to make them work within specific interpretive frameworks. Chapter 5, “The Game
of Making,” selects a small group of Messerschmidt’s sculptures, objects chosen as
representative of broader trends in his oeuvre, and subjects them to carefully sus-
tained visual analysis. In doing this, I develop a more precise understanding of what
is happening in them and thereby isolate and clarify Messerschmidt’s design process.
In my view, Messerschmidt’s heads play with form in order to represent faces, but
also to highlight the instability of representation. They do this haphazardly, with
some devoted to faithful renderings of facial elements and others to more bravura
technical elaboration. I surmise that these formal explorations are the heritage of
Messerschmidt’s training in a south German, rococo sculptural tradition that stressed
formal play and semantic complexity over faithful observation of nature.
6

6  Messerschmidt’s Character Heads
Chapter 6, “The Envy of the Gods,” situates Messerschmidt’s sculptural experimen-
tation within the artistic milieu of 1770s Vienna. This is the book’s most historical
and biographical chapter. I propose that Messerschmidt made these sculptures as a
way of critiquing pictorialism as a teachable academic process, a mockery of the aca-
demic rules to which art was put in an increasingly bureaucratized art world, and
of the broader sociopolitical systems that lent those rules credibility. The timing of
the Character Heads’ genesis coincides with a moment of top-​down administrative
restructuring in Vienna that put an end to his academic career. Messerschmidt’s heads
are both the reclamation of an older sculptural tradition and a satirical critique of
rule-​bound art-​making. The book concludes with reflections on how these sculptures
destabilize the interpretive act as they also illuminate the interpreter’s presumptions.
Two provisos should guide the reader from the outset. The first is that this book is a
critical study, not a comprehensive treatment of this artist nor an introduction to his art.
Readers interested in overviews of Messerschmidt’s art have Maria Pötzl-​Malikova’s
cornerstone publications (1982 and 2015) and the Vienna (2002), Frankfurt (2006),
and New York/​Paris (2010) catalogues to consult, all of which provide starting points
for such an inquiry. My focus remains on the Character Heads and their interpretation.
Second, my discomfort with interpretations that attempt (pseudo-​)medical diagnosis
of long-​dead artists through their art will immediately become apparent. Diagnosing
Messerschmidt the man has been a longstanding obsession in both popular and schol-
arly writings. Personally, I  do not believe that Messerschmidt suffered from what
today would be termed a clinical mental illness. But truthfully, we will never know
and perhaps it should not matter. Even if we could confirm mental illness, there would
be the question of whether it should direct scholarly interpretations of his art or if
it adequately explains his art’s visual characteristics. Equally contestable is whether
modern psychiatric categories can be applied productively to individuals from the
past. In my opinion, choosing among paranoia, hallucinatory schizophrenia, manic
depression, insomnia, and other ailments does not get us very far in understanding
Messerschmidt’s sculptures. Such attempts will surely continue; at the moment I write
this, Messerschmidt’s English Wikipedia page confidently claims that the sculptor suf-
fered from Crohn’s Disease and that this was the reason his art became so strange.5
And a recent article from the Czech Republic diagnoses Messerschmidt as suffering
from severe neurological ailments in addition to a host of psychological ones.6 As
much as possible, I  have tried to credit Messerschmidt with his creativity and not
presume that his art is the side-​effect of an ailment either physical or mental. It is too
easy to dismiss aspects of his sculptures that are difficult as the results of something
other than a talented artistic will. Maybe Messerschmidt’s heads look the way they do
because that is how he wanted them to look. Taking that possibility seriously is one
of this book’s goals.
All of the interpretations discussed in this book rest on a series of shared bio-
graphical particulars, which one might view as the theme upon which the variations
of interpretation have been developed. That theme goes as follows. Franz Xaver
Messerschmidt was born in 1736 into a family of tanners in the southern German
village of Wiesensteig. His father died when he was ten, after which his mother relo-
cated the family to Munich in order to support them. There they lived with relatives,
among them her uncle Johann Baptist Straub, the foremost Bavarian rococo sculptor
at that time. In Straub’s studio the young Franz Xaver apprenticed and from him
learned the basics of sculptural practice. Messerschmidt’s talents developed quickly,
 7

Introduction  7
and after further study in Graz he moved to Vienna around 1754. There he entered
the Vienna Academy of Art, appearing in its records for the first time on November 4,
1755. While studying there, Messerschmidt came under the mentorship of its director
Martin van Meytens and through his connections began to fulfill high-​profile com-
missions for Viennese patrons. These included various members of the local nobility
and of particular note are several sculptures made for the Habsburg imperial fam-
ily, including a pair of large cast bronzes representing Empress Maria Theresa and
Emperor Francis Stephen. These are highly ambitious works of art that garnered sig-
nificant attention from Vienna’s art-​loving public.
After a brief study trip to Rome in 1765, Messerschmidt developed a successful car-
eer in Vienna and attracted commissions increasingly from the city’s Enlightenment-​
oriented intellectual class. By 1770, Messerschmidt’s reputation was established
securely enough to allow him to purchase a house and in that same year the academy
promoted him to full membership. He was also granted the title of Substitutsprofessor,
an intermediate academic position that paved the path for an eventual full profes-
sorship. He was, by all accounts, the picture of late eighteenth-​century professional
success.
From that point forward, Messerschmidt’s life took a surprising turn. Characterizing
precisely what happened after 1770 is not so simple, but something occurred around
that time that changed forever Messerschmidt’s perspective on art and, arguably, life.
As we shall see, this change has been described in various ways: as the breakout of
psychosis, as the result of poor physical health, as paranoia brought about by aca-
demic backstabbing, or as a combination of these. All we can confirm securely is that
Messerschmidt’s career changed dramatically in the early 1770s. Commissions were
scarce and the artist struggled to keep up the appearance of prosperity. After Meytens
died in March 1770, Messerschmidt lost his securest institutional supporter. Meytens
had laid the administrative groundwork for Messerschmidt’s eventual promotion
within the academy, but when a position became vacant in 1774, Messerschmidt was
bypassed in favor of another sculptor, the Salzburg-​born Johann Baptist Hagenauer.
Texts written by court-​ affiliated officials describe Messerschmidt’s behavior as
increasingly strange, his thought process eccentric, and his reliability questionable.
Disgusted and embarrassed, the artist sold his Viennese home and left the city for-
ever in 1775. He traveled back to Wiesensteig and later Munich, where he attempted
unsuccessfully to secure an appointment at the Bavarian court. He then relocated one
last time to Bratislava, where his younger brother Johann Adam Messerschmidt lived.
Today the capital of Slovakia, Bratislava was then the administrative seat of Habsburg
Hungary and was often referenced by its German name, Pressburg. There he lived out
the remainder of his days, dying in 1783 at the age of 47, possibly of complications
from heavy metal poisoning.
In this latter phase of his life, sometime after 1770, Messerschmidt started to make
extremely strange sculptures. A secure chronology for the Character Heads is impos-
sible, although all date from roughly the final decade of his life.7 No one commis-
sioned Messerschmidt to produce them; as best we can confirm, he made them for
his own personal satisfaction, contemplation, and pleasure, although he may have
sold a few here and there.8 We also know that he made a large number, anywhere
from 50 to 70, and that they became familiar to locals and visitors who dropped
into Messerschmidt’s studio to see them. Moreover, Messerschmidt declined repeated
offers to sell the sculptures as a group, even turning down a generous proposal from
8

8  Messerschmidt’s Character Heads
the noted art collector Duke Albert of Sachsen-​Teschen. With the possible excep-
tion of Nicolai’s account, the veracity of which I examine in this book’s first chapter,
Messerschmidt also never left a written explanation of his motivations in making
these works. After his death, the sculptures passed into his brother’s possession and
in 1793 were brought to Vienna by the artist’s nephew, who arranged for them to be
exhibited publicly for the first time in a gallery at Vienna’s Burgspital. Soon there-
after they became known to a wider public through the publication of an anonymous
catalogue, called the Merkwürdige Lebensgeschichte des F. X. Messerschmidt, a book
whose authorship recently has been assigned to Franz Friedrich Strunz.9 From there
they became incorporated into public discourse. I shall have opportunity in Chapter 6
to revisit this basic outline of Messerschmidt’s life, but for now it suffices to say that
his odd busts fall into a distinct phase that can be associated directly with shifts in his
career and possibly his mental state. Deciding how those elements interconnect is the
biggest challenge involved in understanding this artist.
Another challenge is the problem of what to call these sculptures. As far as we
know, Messerschmidt did not name them, or if he did, he did not record their names.
They have come down to us as the “Character Heads” (Charakter-​Köpfe), a title that
associates them with the academic tradition of facial expression, têtes d’expression.
Propagated in the seventeenth century by Charles Le Brun for the French Royal
Academy of Painting and Sculpture, this systematic codification of expression in art
was adopted widely across Europe in the eighteenth century, including within the
Central European milieu where Messerschmidt lived and worked. Such academic typ-
ologies are relevant to Messerschmidt’s project, we shall see, but even a quick glance
at the busts reveals them to be operating somewhere outside of easy classification
as characters or expressions. A  few early observers referred to them as “Portraits”
(Portreen) or as Egyptian Heads (ägyptische Köpfe), and while these are suggestive
designations, neither appears to derive from Messerschmidt nor fits the broader sculp-
tural project consistently.
Confusing matters further are the posthumous titles assigned the heads in the
Merkwürdige Lebensgeschichte. These are often hilariously colorful and include such
monikers as The Constipated One, The Incapable Bassoonist, and The Enraged and
Vengeful Gypsy. They seem to be Lavaterian attempts to characterize the heads and
are very likely Strunz’s invention, attempts to render the busts comprehensible and
marketable at the time of their initial showing.10 They remain in widespread use today
in the world’s museums, in the critical literature, and in general parlance, and we
will likely continue to use them for the foreseeable future. Witty as they are, there is
no evidence that they come from Messerschmidt and they have had the unfortunate
effect of distracting viewers from approaching the sculptures on their own terms. It
is with great reluctance that I use them in this book, and I do so only because they
make identifying individual objects easier. In my opinion, they are neither reflective of
Messerschmidt’s intentions, his ideas behind the sculpted faces, nor his sculptural pro-
cess. It is also for the sake of convenience alone that I reference individual sculptures
through the ad hoc numbering system used in the Merkwürdige Lebensgeschichte, but
again this should not be understood as bearing any kind of significance attributable
to the artist himself.
A final word about scholarly inheritance. All writers on Messerschmidt owe a great
debt to the Slovak art historian Maria Pötzl-​Malikova, who has devoted most of
her career to writing about him, hunting down archival sources and exploring his
 9

Introduction  9
sculptures’ meanings in a lengthy series of superbly researched books and articles. Her
scholarship is the foundation for all future Messerschmidt studies, this book included,
and for proof one need look no further than the sheer number of citations she receives
in these pages. Yet it will become clear that my view of Messerschmidt differs from hers
substantially. My take on Messerschmidt resembles more that found in another, less
respectable book, one titled Charakter-Köpfe. Der Fall F. X. Messerschmidt: Wie ver-
rückt darf der Kunst sein? Co-​authored by Hans-​Georg Behr, Herbert Grohmann, and
Bernd-​Olaf Hagedorn, this volume was written to coincide with the Messerschmidt
anniversary in 1983.11 Published by the Swiss arm of the German press Beltz, known
for its titles in the history of psychology, the book was an outgrowth of the popular
magazine Psychologie Heute.
It is at considerable professional risk that I admit this. None of this book’s authors
are scholars. Behr was a journalist, perhaps best remembered today for a harrowing
memoir of his childhood in Nazi Austria. Grohmann is a publisher, Hagedorn a pho-
tographer. The book is written in a deliberately plurivocal manner that makes for
pleasingly disorienting reading. Its tone oscillates between seriousness and irreverence,
its focus between documentary analysis and broad speculation. The authors do this
deliberately, they say, since in their opinion Messerschmidt’s sculptures do not have
a single “answer” and therefore demand a text that presents multiple points of view.
The book hums with a brilliantly imaginative countercultural vibe and is great fun
to read.
That fun makes it an easy book to dismiss. Yet Charakter-​Köpfe strikes me as the
Messerschmidt literature’s most underestimated contribution. It offers interesting
insights into his art that have not been assessed adequately. Certainly not all know-
ledge flows from the halls of academe, and this is an instance in which we should
take that possibility seriously. Of course one can no longer endorse everything the
book says; much has come to light since 1983 to transform our understanding of
Messerschmidt in important ways. But part of my intent has been to salvage good
ideas from this book, and even to suggest that its non-​academic pedigree may be the
reason that those ideas could be voiced. If my book retains genetic traces of this illegit-
imate parentage, if the reader finds in my text a potpourri of observations both serious
and ridiculous, scholarly and gossipy, convincing and implausible, it is because visual
parallels to these oppositions are found in Messerschmidt’s sculptures. Perhaps these
works of art demand to be approached with an ironic smirk, which is, after all, what
many of them show.

Notes
1 Maria Pötzl-​Malikova, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt:  Monographie und Werkverzeichnis
(Weitra: Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, 2015), 151–​168.
2 On the existence of such deliberately baffling images in early modern European art,
see Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo, eds., Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 1–​10.
3 Pötzl-​Malikova, Messerschmidt, 2015, 137, on the inscrutability of the Character Heads.
4 The face has emerged in recent art history, especially in Germany, as a topic of renewed
critical interest. See Jeanette Kohl and Dominic Olariu, eds., En Face: Seven Essays on the
Human Face, special issue of Kritische Berichte 40:1 (2012); and Hans Belting, Faces: Eine
Geschichte des Gesichts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013).
5 https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Franz_​Xaver_​Messerschmidt. Accessed November 21, 2016.
01

10  Messerschmidt’s Character Heads

6 Michal Maršálek, “Dystonia in Art: The Impact of Psychiatric and Neurological Disease on
the Work of the Sculptor F. X. Messerschmidt,” in Dystonia and Dystonic Syndromes, ed.
Petr Kaňovský, Kailash P. Bhatia, and Raymond L. Rosales (Berlin: Springer, 2015): 227–​
244; an interpretation credited by Pötzl-​Malikova, Messerschmidt, 2015, 167–​182.
7 Pötzl-​Malikova, Messerschmidt, 2015, 137.
8 Pötzl-​Malikova, Messerschmidt, 2015, 117.
9 Anna Schirlbauer, “Die Charakterköpfe F. X. Messerschmidt und ihr erster Aussteller Franz
Strunz,” Ars 46:2 (2013): 292–​308; Pötzl-​Malikova, Messerschmidt, 2015, 14.
10 Pötzl-​Malikova, Messerschmidt, 2015, 119–​120.
11 Hans-​ Georg Behr, Herbert Grohmann, and Bernd-​ Olaf Hagedorn, Charakter-​Köpfe.
Der Fall F. X. Messerschmidt: Wie verrückt darf Kunst sein? (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz
Verlag, 1982).
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