Franz Xaver Messerschmidt: the Hogarth of Sculpture

Prof. Michael Yoanan is the Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies – Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Art – at the Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Missouri (http://aha.missouri.edu/people/yonan.html). His paper shall interpret Messerschmidt’s famous “Character Heads” by examining his relationship to two historical contemporaries. The first is William Hogarth (1697–1764). Commentators often linked Messerschmidt and Hogarth explicitly in their art criticism, an association that sheds light on the reception of both. The second is the Göttingen-based mathematician and physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799). By examining the role of the face in the activities of three personages – Messerschmidt, Hogarth, and Lichtenberg - we can explain the interconnected dimensions of eighteenth-century visual satire as they applied to the expressive face.