MAULBERTSCH, Franz Anton

The detail shows the self-portrait of the artist.

Tha artist made no distinction between religious and mythological or allegorical subjects, he appalied the same rococo style for all.

This painting was Maulbertsch’s reception piece in 1770 for the Engravers’ Academy in Vienna, founded in 1766 by his eventual father-in-law Jacob Schmutzer. The Engravers’ Academy was united with the Academy of Fine Arts in 1772.

This study was executed for the fresco on the nave ceiling in the Cathedral of Szombathely.

Franz Anton Maulbertsch was one of the most skilful Austrian masters of the Rococo. This painting is a sketch for a ceiling decoration.

The detail depicts the Preaching of St Stephen.

The painting and its companion-piece, Rebecca and Eliezer, are early works showing the influence of Troger and the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Pittoni. The stylistic features of his early work may be studied in this brilliantly coloured Biblical composition.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

�tienne Nicolas M�hul: Joseph, aria

The picture shows the influence Piazzetta’s painting.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 20 minutes):

Ludwig August Lebrun: Concerto in C major for oboe

The painting and its companion-piece, Joseph and his Brothers, are early works showing the influence of Troger and the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Pittoni.

In this altarpiece Maulbertsch transposed the compositional criteria of a ceiling painting, the apparently boundless heavenly space and the view from below, onto the altarpiece.

The painting was comissioned for the Parish Church at Balassagyarmat, Hungary.

The Golden Legend, drawing on the apocryphal gospels, tells how the Virgin Mary was brought up as a child in the Temple at Jerusalem ‘with other virgins’…and was visited daily of angels’, since it had been foretold to her parents, Joachim and Anne, that their daughter was to be consecrated to the Lord as the ‘chosen vessel’ of Christ’s Incarnation. The theme became popular in the 16th century and remained so after the Counter-Reformation in spite of some disapproval by the Church because of its apocryphal character. Mary is seen in earlier examples teaching her young companions, sewing the priest vestments or being ministered to by angels who bring bread and water. But the favourite theme, especially in Counter-Reformation art, depicts her education in the strict sense, at the knee of her mother Anne, learning to read.

You can view other depictions of the Education of the Virgin in the Web Gallery of Art.

Maulbertsch’s painting of the Last Supper is an interesting example of the Baroque style of sketching. The figures, which lean far forward or far back, the abrupt foreshortening and the countless diagonal lines make this scene of men grouped around a table appear disturbed and agitated.

Maulbertsch depicts the moment when Abraham raises the knife to comply with God’s cruel command, the sacrifice of his own son. The bound Isaac helplessly awaits death but the Lord’s angel, arriving in all haste, intercedes. According to the Bible the angel addresses Abraham from the heavens but Maulbertsch makes a minor dramatic readjustment of this point and the winged messenger from heaven is physically present to prevent the testing from reaching its murderous conclusion.

It was as a master of fresco-painting and as a most prolific decorator of churches and palaces in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that Franz Anton Maulbertsch was most appreciated by his contemporaries. Perhaps nowadays greater value is placed on his surviving bozzetti - sketches painted in gloriously fresh colours with brilliant technique.

His late works, such as The Holy Trinity, a sketch for an altar-piece, are fluid in their handling, and the light colours give a silvery effect. In these sketches Maulbertsch captured his subjects with a few unbelievably light strokes of the brush and some spots of colour permeated with light. When he elaborated these sketches in their final form, however, particularly in the case of the later altarpieces, the spontaneity was often lost, the forms becoming heavier and the hues muted.

This sketch from the late period of the artist was identified as a study for the altarpiece in the Parish Church in Wien-Reindorf.

The composition is based on a painting by Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet executed for the church Notre-Dame in Paris. The use of classical elements signals the late Baroque period of the artist.