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Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

[The following selection does not include the illustrations printed throughout the text.]
Chapter One
Introducing an Original Strangeling

In the region where his works are located, Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724-96) is recognized as one of the greatest masters of fresco and oil painting of the eighteenth century, yet he may also be considered one of the "odd men out" in the history of art.[1] Maulbertsch painted frescoes in churches and palaces in almost sixty places, and over thirty such works survive (Figure 1; Plate 1). These paintings are spread throughout the present states of Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Germany, while his oil sketches and drawings are found in collections in many other countries as well. Maulbertsch's astonishing use of color, luminous compositions, and bold inventions have in Central Europe gained for him a reputation of genius. Several noted Germanophone art historians and the well-known painter Oskar Kokoschka have compared him to his contemporary Mozart.[2] However, Maulbertsch has also long been treated as strange, odd, and eccentric. Outside Central Europe he has still not obtained the broader attention that he would seem to deserve.

This story starts with some of the first writings in the history of art (Kunstgeschichte) as such, where Maulbertsch's originality is emphasized. In a manuscript that was probably compiled during the years 1785-92,[3] Andreas Schweigel, the leading sculptor of the later eighteenth century in Moravia, and often a collaborator of Maulbertsch, calls him a "Viennese Academic Painter," yet includes him in a survey of the fine arts in Moravia ("Anmerkung der bildenden Künste in Betreff der schönen Gebäuden, Malereien und Statuen in Mähren") because of the mass of work he executed in that margravate. Schweigel praises Maulbertsch, saying that he was to be considered a true original (ein wahres eigenes Originel zu betrachten).[4] In the context of Schweigel's discussion, and in light of the language of eighteenth-century criticism, originality is here to be regarded as a virtue.[5]

Yet within a decade Maulbertsch's originality was being treated quite differently in one of the earliest accounts to call itself a history (Geschichte) of art. In a history of the fine arts in Vienna (Geschichte der bildenden Künste in Wien) published in 1801, Hans Rudolf Füßli, a member of the famous Swiss family of artists and writers, criticized Maulbertsch and his contemporaries. He attributes what he believes to have been a decline of history painting (the painting of significant human action, including religious subjects) in Vienna to the fault of instruction in the academy of art, and thus says that it was good that Maulbertsch had never become director there. Füßli writes: "But Maulbertsch, an original strangeling, who at the time began to set the tone in the great field of historical painting, regardless of his valuable qualities as an artist, would have been more damaging than useful to young academicians, if he had assumed direction over them; because it is far more risky to allow beginning artists to stray completely from the circle of fundamental rules than to burden them with too great an amount of rules."[6]

Taste had changed since Maulbertsch had set the tone at the academy, which Füßli also had attended and where he had worked as librarian. Instead of writing more fully about Maulbertsch, Füßli published favorable biographies of Hubert Maurer, Heinrich Friedrich Fuger, and Franz Caucig, all of whom are now regarded as exemplars of classicism in Vienna.[7] According to the lights of classicist precepts, which established a canon based on ancient Greek and Roman art and thus advanced aesthetic doctrine based on emulation of the antique, the antecedent period of eighteenth-century art could not be appreciated. Consequently Maulbertsch could at best be considered a talented eccentric who had strayed from the rules of art.

Füßli's opinions are, to be sure, an expression of a distinctive taste of his time, but the norms that he and other like-minded writers promoted helped to determine the shaping of the canon of the history of art as it was subsequently written. Füßli's description of Maulbertsch as a strangeling has had many echoes in the last two centuries. Furthermore, in spite of Maulbertsch's supposed originality, he was not celebrated during the early nineteenth century, when it might have been thought that this quality would have appealed to tendencies that are identified with "romanticism." Even though some nineteenth-century lexica repeated earlier commentary on the painter, and he is occasionally mentioned in local literature,[8] Maulbertsch and other artists of his milieu were not incorporated into the canon of art history as it evolved during the nineteenth century. The development of art historical literature and institutions during an era of growing nationalism, in which many European nation-states were born, may also have played a role in this process of exclusion, because Maulbertsch is hard to claim for any nationalist cause: he was born in Germany, and later painted works for churches there, but lived in Vienna, and provided paintings for places throughout the multinational realms of the Habsburgs.[9]

In any case, Maulbertsch and his contemporaries remained of little interest to scholarship until the end of the nineteenth century. They were then briefly mentioned, for example by Albert Ilg, who has been called the "father of Austrian baroque research."[10] Ilg said that Maulbertsch was especially skillful (tüchtig) in history painting, and most inventive in his (oil) sketches, but too sweet and delicate in his coloring.[11]

It was not until Austrian scholars and critics had their eyes opened by impressionist painting and, significantly, became associated with early twentieth-century expressionism that there was a greater appreciation of Austrian baroque painting, the stylistic phenomenon with which Maulbertsch came to be identified. Later, Maulbertsch himself was deemed to be a forerunner of expressionism.[12] Tellingly, one of the first major essays on Austrian ceiling painting was published by Hans Tietze:[13] Tietze was portrayed together with Erika Tietze-Conrat in a work painted by Oskar Kokoschka in his expressionist mode (New York, Museum of Modern Art). The famed Viennese professor Max Dvořák, who had also written about El Greco, and evidently also was responding to painting of his own time, penned the first major modern art historical Essay to make strong positive comments about Maulbertsch.[14]

Dvořák treated Maulbertsch as the culminating artist in a survey of ceiling painting in Vienna. Paintings like Maulbertsch's early ceiling fresco in the Piarist church in Vienna are deemed products of his inexhaustible power of imagination, which make him a high point of the great idealistic art of fantasy. While his expressive means are gained from his contemporaries, in Maulbertsch these take on "an individual stamp of unprecedented power and originality. Movements in his paintings increase into a hurricane, colors and light effects into real orgies, and forms are united into unimagined possibilities; his earthly-heavenly compositions are bound by the power of individual invention into new unities."[15]

This view of Maulbertsch helped shape opinions formed between the two world wars; Kokoschka's own statements about Maulbertsch were informed by circles around Dvořák. Kokoschka says that while El Greco never appealed to him, Maulbertsch, who was original and bound to popular culture, showed him the true way to art. In his youth Kokoschka came to admire the "extremist," "revolutionary fresco painter of the Baroque, Maulbertsch." Kokoschka spoke further of this "illusionist's magic color, born in the master's unbound imagination" and remarked that he "soon became aware of and was caught by the Austrian Baroque artist's indocility to the classicist Italian conventions of harmony." However, Kokoschka realized that these qualities lacked appeal to his own twentieth-century contemporaries.[16]

Kokoschka may have been correct in this last observation. Maulbertsch was mentioned in some studies and surveys of the interwar period, such as that by Adolf Feulner, where he is called the greatest fresco painter of Austria,[17] and he was the subject of an important essay by Otto Benesch.[18] F. M. Haberditzl prepared a comprehensive monograph on him, but for a variety of reasons Haberditzl's book did not appear until 1977.[19] Hence not until 1960 was the first monograph on Maulbertsch published, a fundamental work by Klára Garas.[20] Significantly, the slightly revised and shortened monograph on Maulbertsch by Garas that appeared in 1974 bears a preface by Kokoschka.[21]

Garas's books represent a turn in studies of Maulbertsch, and more generally of the art of his time in Central Europe. As Garas noted in a 1979 review, more had been published in the field of Austrian, or, as she corrects herself, Central European baroque art (meaning that of the later seventeenth and earlier and mid-eighteenth century) in the preceding decade than in the preceding 150 years altogether.[22] The 250th anniversary of Maulbertsch's birth in 1974 was commemorated by a series of major exhibitions in Austria and Hungary that brought more attention to the painter.[23] Since 1974 three exhibitions in his birthplace of Langenargen on Lake Constance have been devoted to Maulbertsch and the art of his time in Swabia, Vienna, and Hungary, all with extensive catalogs containing numerous scholarly essays;[24] a show of drawings was to be seen in Salzburg;[25] another summary exhibition has been held in Vienna, with a catalog containing a compilation of documents;[26] and his works have been included in many other exhibitions. Over a hundred essays, books, and reviews have been written on the artist in the past three decades alone. Maulbertsch has thus become a familiar phenomenon in the artistic terrain of Central Europe, where he is often regarded as the outstanding painter of his time.

In contrast, Maulbertsch has not obtained a comparable place in the larger canon of European art. It is probably safe to say that he remains largely unknown even to many professional art historians outside Central Europe. Although paintings by him are scattered throughout the world, they are unstudied in France, unknown in Italy, and not given attention elsewhere in Western Europe.[27] Some paintings and drawings are owned by American museums, where they have occasionally been included in exhibitions, yet only a handful of scholarly articles on Maulbertsch, none of them concentrating on his wall paintings, have appeared in English.[28] Although Maulbertsch has been handled positively in a few English-language works on art of his period in Central Europe,[29] he is treated in a very cursory fashion in more general surveys.

Moreover, not only the same images, but many of the same ideas regularly reappear in publications: if he is mentioned at all, Maulbertsch is often characterized as a personal example of baroque hyperbole or as an emotional artist.[30] For instance, a recent book on the baroque describes Maulbertsch's ceilings in the Piarist church as less intellectual in comparison with the famous ceiling by Andrea Pozzo in Sant'Ignazio, Rome; Maulbertsch's paintings are said to "focus on extreme emotions." The image of Maulbertsch the strangeling also remains current: further discussion of his work in the same book is limited to a frequently reproduced image of a painting of an unidentified saint (Vienna, Österreichische Galerie). This is called a "strange painting," "an extreme instance of the eccentricity of baroque vision, which delights in strange angles of approach, as if to suggest that oddity is a kind of norm."[31]

The present book aims to make the apparently strange seem familiar. It argues that while Maulbertsch's art reveals outstanding, even personal, qualities, he may be regarded as more than an eccentric. Maulbertsch's work is rooted in the historical situation and artistic practices of his time in Central Europe, but he is also of greater interest than as a local phenomenon. His work evinces many tendencies that are far from being strange, regressive, or retardataire: it engages with many intellectual and aesthetic issues of his day. Thus this book attempts not only to recover Maulbertsch for the European art historical canon, but also to call for reconsideration of the visual aspects of culture in Central Europe in the age of the Enlightenment.

Furthermore, although Maulbertsch's art was forged in the contexts and crises of the eighteenth century, it also illuminates problems that have continued to be posed to painters since then. While Maulbertsch has been seen as a painter of what art historians used to call the baroque or rococo, and considered to be one of the last great mural painters of the ancien régime, several aspects of his art anticipate issues that attend modernist painting, as it is usually understood. Kokoschka once asked if Maulbertsch had anything to say to the twentieth century:[32] this book answers that Maulbertsch is not only of historical interest; some of the concerns engaged by his art may also still have something to say to the twentieth-first century as well.

Why, then, if it can be claimed that Maulbertsch is such a significant art historical figure, who also still has something to say to the present time, has he not gained broader attention? In the first place, some reasons for his exclusion from the art historical canon result from aesthetic prejudices and historical preconceptions. Outside of art history as it is written in Central Europe Maulbertsch may seem an uncanonical eccentric because his paintings cannot easily be accommodated to normal art historical criteria or historical paradigms; he does not fit easily into many of the usual categories.

Maulbertsch was a mural painter at a time of transition to easel painting. Color is a key element in his art during a period in which color was not appreciated by some major writers on art. He worked in a time of transition for artistic styles; even his latest works do not fit the norm of neoclassicism, as represented in painting by his younger contemporary Jacques-Louis David. In contrast with intellectual and social developments associated with the Enlightenment and revolution in France, in the Habsburg realms humanism was suppressed, Enlightenment delayed, revolution opposed, and Jacobinism (sympathy with the French Revolution) crushed.[33] Maulbertsch painted many works with religious themes during a time in which secular subjects were becoming more popular. He continued to work for monarchs and for religious orders at a time when they were being overthrown or eliminated. While in revolutionary France images of the Virgin were being destroyed, and churches converted into temples of reason, he painted a Marian cycle in a cathedral in Hungary, and showed critics of religion, probably philosophes, being fought and driven down in a fresco painted on the ceiling of a monastic library in Prague.

Neglect of Maulbertsch also has much to do with the peculiar perimeters of the geography of art. In general, art in Central Europe between the time of Albrecht Dürer and that of romanticism is not much studied outside the region.[34] The course of art history is cast in a trajectory that leads from French art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to modernism in Europe and America. Only a few examples of artistic production in other countries, for instance in eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century England, in eighteenth-century Rome or Venice, and in twentieth-century Russia or Germany, get much recognition. Most accounts allow little place for supposedly peripheral phenomena like Maulbertsch.

With Maulbertsch the problem of location is even more acute than it is with many other painters, such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Tiepolo's frescoes are also strewn about the Veneto), to whose art his own has often been compared.[35] Many of Maulbertsch's important works are located in sites that are far from major centers. They can be reached only with difficulty, and some even now only by private transport. Major paintings by Maulbertsch are found in small churches in provincial Hungary, rural Slovakia, and the Austrian countryside. Other frescoes are found in small towns or minor cities in Moravia that also lie off the beaten track. Moreover, many of these places were not accessible except to the most intrepid or determined traveler for half a century, until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989.

In contrast with painting in these parts of Central Europe, German palaces and pilgrimage churches of what is called the rococo (the ornamental style of the eighteenth century) have received some sporadic attention, and the frescoes of Tiepolo in Würzburg are well known. However, these eighteenth-century works do not provide the best comparisons for Maulbertsch.[36] His paintings are usually not subordinated to a decorative ensemble that includes stucco and other media, as they define the German rococo (including paintings by the Tiepolos at Würzburg). In several cases Maulbertsch's frescoes cover an entire church, creating ensembles made purely out of paint. In the parish church in Sümeg, Hungary (Figure 2 and Plate 2), even the altarpieces, including their fictive frames, are painted in fresco. There is also a problem of chronology here: Tiepolo's frescoes in Würzburg were painted during the 1750s, when Maulbertsch was just beginning to work in the medium; most of Maulbertsch's major paintings were executed later than the well-known German paintings of the rococo with which he is supposedly comparable. Among German painters Januarius Zick—sometimes called the last important fresco painter of southern German rococo—is the only artist who is fairly comparable for the time and place in which he worked.

Maulbertsch's paintings possess qualities of execution, including freedom of handling, broad brushwork, bright contrasting color, and extraordinary light effects that despite the superficial similarities they reveal with the works of these artists, not only differ from those of Tiepolo, as will be further discussed in Chapter 4, but also from those of his German contemporaries. In these regards he can be better compared to several other Austrian painters of his time, as has been often remarked.[37] Such features are, however, more pronounced in Maulbertsch's painting than they are in those of other Austrian artists of the period. While standing for the tradition of Austrian—better said, of Central European painting—Maulbertsch has thus rightly been regarded as its paramount personality.[38]

Yet the very celebration of Maulbertsch's color suggests another reason why there have been problems for the reception of his art. Color has often been regarded as a secondary quality in perception. It has been disparaged as arbitrary, unreal, and superficial, and as incapable of contributing to beauty. A very recent critique has even labeled this misapprehension of color chromophobia.[39]

Whether or not this is so, it is true that drawing is associated in the literature of art with thought, while color, and the emotions it provokes, often leaves words impotent to explain.[40] Art historians are used to talking about texts, narratives, signs, symbols, and subjects, but do not have an easy time describing color, or qualities of execution, that are essential to considerations of an artist like Maulbertsch. In comparison with other topics, a limited literature and a relatively poor vocabulary exist for discussions of color. Hence, though color theory, colorism, and color effects have increasingly been studied, the discussion of such topics remains comparatively limited.[41]

Besides these issues, relating the experience of Maulbertsch's frescoes faces another large problem. Pictures like those in the Piarist church have been described as seeming to coalesce out of light and color, as if produced from a stream of color loosened from their surroundings.[42] (See Plate 1.) This perception of color depends on the light in which the paintings are seen. Yet this experience is as difficult to comprehend as it is to communicate. It is often not easy to find a correct vantage point from which to view such works, and even harder to attempt to re-create or simulate the viewing experience involved in looking at a large expanse of paint: to do so one also often needs to move to take in the whole, and lighting conditions may change radically as one does. In any event, the experience can only be reproduced with great difficulty, because ceiling paintings have to be studied in situ; their experience cannot be easily simulated in a book, lecture hall, or classroom. The small compass of a book such as this can but scarcely evoke what is to be seen.

Photographic reproductions present further problems, whatever the technique used. This issue is a common problem in art history, although recent discussions seem to have obscured more than illuminated it.[43] Large questions are involved in photographing paintings on ceilings and walls: one way of taking pictures of frescoes is to control light artificially, or to use spotlights, but this may create results contrary to the experience that one has at the actual location under normal conditions. Remarkable differences may be seen in illustrations of paintings illuminated in artificial light versus those in natural light: a comparison of the huge differences in color, tone, and hue, not to mention overall effect, between different reproductions of the same ceiling taken with windows blacked out, and the church illuminated with spotlights, with those seen illuminated wholly or largely by natural light demonstrates the point.[44]

Questions of medium and condition also arise. Maulbertsch's wall paintings are usually done in varieties of fresco, but one of his earliest works was in marouflage, that is, oil painting on canvas attached to a ceiling (Figure 3). His wall and ceiling paintings employ a variety of techniques, including gilding, mentioned in his contracts and correspondence, and are still visible on paintings' surfaces. Most often they are executed in what contemporaries called Kalkmalerei, to be discussed further below, employing pigments in a lime and water solution, as well as various other forms of painting a secco, on a dried surface. Studies of these issues have, however, not been based on a broad sample of the artist's own work, and some important data have not yet been published.[45] Restorations have been made of some of his easel and wall paintings, but care needs to be taken with them in any event.[46] Hence, while some of his frescoes, as for example his masterwork at Kroměříž (Plate 3), seem to be in excellent condition, others have been restored; in some other instances, portions executed in secco (in such instances, probably with size or tempera) have either discolored, or dropped off, as has gold leaf, and this is visible even to the unaided eye. One result of the problems posed by accessibility, lighting conditions, and state of preservation seems to be that oil sketches and easel paintings have received a perhaps disproportionate amount of attention in the literature on the artist. Maulbertsch's oil sketches and smaller pictures may be seen more easily in museums. However, it must be emphasized that while he did altarpieces too, Maulbertsch was first and foremost a painter of ceilings and walls. Like other artists of his mâtier, he would prepare sketches and altarpieces during the winter time, and in the warmer months of the year, when the climate allowed for their execution, he would go on campaigns to complete the wall paintings for which he had contracted.[47]

Hence, while the concept of the oil sketch as an autonomous work of art (Plate 4) has become current and has been related to the work of the Austrian painter,[48] and some of Maulbertsch's oil sketches were made as such, emphasis on the oil sketch as an independent work of art is somewhat misleading, since the oil sketches that Maulbertsch and other artists of his time did are most often related to larger works (Figure 4). Although they may also have been sold as independent works, oil sketches were primarily integral to an artist's working procedure and related to larger projects.[49] An oil sketch could represent a preliminary idea for part or all of a composition (called a bozzetto), be presented for approval to a patron (a modello), or serve as a record in the artist's workshop (a ricordo). Oil sketches could also serve several of these functions at different times.

Even though Maulbertsch's oil sketches are remarkable works in themselves, have long rightly gained praise, and do reveal his stylistic qualities, this book will therefore treat them, and his still less abundant drawings,[50] as revealing, but subsidiary. Some problems of attribution are thereby avoided.[51] More important, contemporary documents indicate that Maulbertsch called himself a painter of histories and frescoes; his smaller oil paintings, or drawings, were not what he would have regarded as his major efforts, nor should we consider them as such.[52] To reiterate: oil sketches possess qualities that are also seen in frescoes—more correctly wall paintings, as will be discussed further below—and frescoes remain his most important works, from the point of view of the time spent on them, their size, the pay Maulbertsch earned, and the prestige he gained. Even if oil sketches may reveal important aspects of Maulbertsch's art, they were preliminary to his larger projects, and in any case their qualities are writ large, as it were, in frescoes and altarpieces. Maulbertsch also frequently changed his ideas as he worked, and numerous pentimenti and much overpainting are seen in his finished easel and mural paintings.[53] Concentration on oil sketches does not speak for all the similar traits to be found in Maulbertsch's art, and begs the knotty question of how Maulbertsch's paintings were executed, anyway, even though many interpretations of his art have hinged on them. For all of these reasons frescoes—rather than oil sketches, or drawings, which moreover raise larger problems of attribution—are placed at the center of this book.[54]

Whatever its problems have been, the reception of Maulbertsch nevertheless opens up avenues for renewed consideration of his work. First, later reactions to his works represent responses to certain elements that do seem to be observable in Maulbertsch's paintings. Second, some of these may be related to and indeed stem from roots that were laid in the artistic theory, criticism, and practice of Maulbertsch's own time. Third, if taken in this way, as a guide to historical understanding, and then to Maulbertsch's relation to subsequent art, the later reception of his painting helps not only to situate the artist in relation to contemporaneous questions, but also to reorientate a view of the artist both in regard to his own time and in regard to his place in the history of art.

Two notions that appear in the literature on Maulbertsch inform the themes of this book. The first is a term that appears in various contexts in Maulbertsch criticism: "painterly." Feulner for instance speaks of Maulbertsch's brilliant boldness of painterly expression (des malerischen Ausdruckes).[55] Hempel calls Maulbertsch "the most painterly of all Viennese painters."[56] This term derives from the language of formalist art history of the earlier twentieth century, made familiar in the work of Heinrich Wölfflin,[57] meaning in general free application of paint, or of the color carried by paint.

Hempel also tried to relate this critical assessment to the artist's historical context. He argued that Maulbertsch "was not an isolated artistic phenomenon; on the contrary his art represents only the finest flower of a universal painterly culture and could strike a responsive chord in many people."[58] This usage of the term is not entirely inappropriate or anachronistic, because the very qualities of paint handling, color, and composition that numerous scholars have noticed in Maulbertsch's work, and that are expressed by the term "painterly," have been singled out since Maulbertsch's own time, when his works called forth the first reactions from contemporary observers. Even the word "painterly" (malerisch), albeit not employed in exactly the same sense, can be found in eighteenth-century responses to Maulbertsch.

A further association of the notion of painterly is the way in which light is communicated by paint. Kokoschka's reaction to Maulbertsch comes to mind here. Kokoschka said that in his early youth in the Piarist church in Vienna, the luminosity of Maulbertsch's frescoes became a startling visual experience (zum bestürzenden Seherlebnis) to which he owed his point of view (Blickrichtung), his artistic conviction of the primacy of the light-filled spiritual in art (des lichtvoll Geistigen in der bildenden Kunst). Kokoschka's emphasis on "the inner fire of the colors of the painter of luminosity,"[59] his reaction to Maulbertsch's light as spiritual or intellectual, brings up another notion: "enlightenment."

More than metaphor is intended here. This book will explicate the meaning of "painterly enlightenment" in various ways, in the first instance in reference to the historical movement(s) of the Enlightenment(s) of the eighteenth century. Maulbertsch's relation to the Enlightenment has been a subject discussed by several art historians, and will be considered here; the idea that his painting itself may express enlightenment has also been advanced,[60] and that issue will also be addressed here. But the notion of "painterly Enlightenment"—that is, the relation of Maulbertsch's manner of painting to the questions of his age as dealt with in Enlightenment thought—has not been comprehensively explicated. This book will examine some of the meanings of "painterly Enlightenment" as a historical phenomenon expressed in and through Maulbertsch's art.

There is of course much more to say about Maulbertsch and his art, but in introducing this "original strangeling," these themes help to orient an interpretation to certain salient aspects of his work and its reception. First, however, it is necessary to review, in brief outline, how Maulbertsch developed as a painter and what his development might have to do with some central artistic issues related to various concerns of eighteenth-century art and society. Maulbertsch was born in 1724 in Langenargen on Lake Constance, the son of an obscure local painter, from whom he probably received his first, basic training. He came from an area known for its splendid ensembles of church decoration: sites such as Salem, Birnau, and even Weingarten are not far from his birthplace, and it is possible that they, or ensembles like them, as well as works by even more local artists, may have informed his early artistic experiences.[61] Since, however the Habsburgs held sway over territories extending through the Tyrol and Vorarlberg into parts of Swabia, and beyond, Vienna was both the center of power as well of culture for a broad region, and moreover Count Montfort, a local lord, had important relatives (including the Schönborns) in Vienna. In any event, Maulbertsch was to be found in Vienna by 1739; he was to reside there for the rest of his life.

In 1739 Maulbertsch was enrolled in the Vienna academy of art, then under the direction of Jakob van Schuppen (1670-1751), and he was living with the painter Peter Van Royen (or Van Roy; c. 1706-45). Presumably Maulbertsch was apprenticed to Van Royen; probably more important, he was a student at the academy until 1745, when it was closed, and then again when, after it was reopened, in 1749-50. Little is known, however, about his work until the later 1740s, or for that matter much else concerning his artistic activity until the 1750s.

Maulbertsch's first signed and documented paintings, datable from the later 1740s, are pictures with religious subjects. These early easel paintings are, however, hard to distinguish from the works of other artists who had been trained at the Vienna academy.[62] He is first notable on the public scene in 1750, when he won a prize at the academy for a painting of an allegory. If the painting that has recently been identified with this prize-winning work is correctly attributed, it nevertheless displays only a few elements that can be regarded as distinctive signs of what is known from his later style.[63]

Maulbertsch's earliest paintings closely resemble those of many other artists of his generation who were associated with the Vienna academy.[64] In the 1740s and 1750s aspiring painters in Vienna would have operated in an environment informed by the leading Viennese artists of the time, including Daniel Gran (1694-1757) (see Figure 30 in Chapter 2) and, for Maulbertsch particularly, Paul Troger (1698-1762; Figure 5) and Joseph Ignaz Mildorfer (1719-75; Figure 6), both of whom were professors at the academy in the 1750s. In addition to what he might have learned from them, Maulbertsch studied prints, notably by Rembrandt, as has long been suggested.[65] It has also long been suggested that he was influenced by Italian masters of the settecento; for knowledge of Italian painting he would not have had to travel to Italy, since many Italian paintings adorned churches and palaces in Vienna itself.[66] Venetian painting was particularly popular in Vienna, as it had become elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire.[67]

How painters were trained in mid-eighteenth-century Vienna is in any case still not a well-investigated topic. Beyond inferences from prize-winning works, something of what and how students learned in the academy can be reconstructed from some of their drawings and from inferences from the works of those artists who were their professors. Instruction probably followed a standard procedure of making copies from other artists' works, and then drawing from the model, which was proposed in treatises that were respected in Vienna.[68] Drawings that were probably done at the academy in the period 1739-45 by Maulbertsch's contemporaries, notably Kaspar Franz Sambach (1713-95)[69] are executed in pen, with only the outlines of forms indicated, sometimes discontinuously; interior modeling is lacking (Figure 7). This manner may be associated with Troger's draftsmanship, itself informed by that painter's experience with Italian art.[70] Troger's drawings are probably also the source of a more graphic mode, in which a web of hatching and cross-hatching covers the figures, that is also found in the early drawings of another pupil at the academy in Maulbertsch's time, Johann Lukas Kracker (1719-79).[71] Troger's drawings were in any case readily accessible and were frequently copied by the younger generation of artists.[72]

Significantly, Viennese academic drawings of this sort display a vastly different mode of approaching the model than that which is associated with life drawing in contemporary France,[73] or for that matter with several contemporary Viennese sculptors. They also contrast with drawings from the life by Jakob Matthias Schmutzer (1733-1811), Maulbertsch's future father-in-law and director at the later Vienna academy, after it had been amalgamated in 1772 with the school for engravers Schmutzer had established in Vienna. Drawings from the model by Schmutzer, themselves derived from the practices of French draftsmanship, are done in chalk, and display an accurate mastery of anatomy, and in this they resemble studies from the life by professors of sculpture at the Vienna academy (Figure 8).[74] Yet such drawings stand in notable contrast with Troger's figure drawings, and thus presumably with what he would have taught (Figure 9).

Indeed, sheets by Troger of the 1740s (like Figure 9) are often drawn both with pen and with brush and wash on colored paper; rather than achieving a sculptural solidity of form, they produce strong contrasts of light and color, and are therefore closer to the effects desired in painting, for which they may often be preliminary designs. These drawings elongate bodies and distort the anatomy of their forms.[75] The approximation to painting again legitimates the appellation "painterly" for them. It is important to consider this sort of drawing as a possible source or model for Maulbertsch's draftsmanship, especially in the light of critiques of his drawing that were later made, for this was a standard in the milieu in which Maulbertsch matured as an artist. It seems reasonable to assume that Maulbertsch's drawing was later criticized not because he lacked basic skill in this medium, but because of the application of different criteria for draftsmanship.

In contrast with the classically inspired norms that came into favor in the later eighteenth century, the Trogeresque manner of draftsmanship can well be described as anticlassical; the term Antiklassik has in fact been used to designate the sort of painting that was represented by masters such as Troger, Mildorfer, and Michelangelo Unterberger (1695-1758) in mid-eighteenth-century Vienna.[76] Painting in this vein presents figures shown in bold contrapposto, strong foreshortening, and startling points of view. Such pictures often have bright accents of light and off-center compositions. Mildorfer's paintings in particular have been seen as possessing an expressive painterly style characterized by broad handling of the brush and bright colors.[77] This painting style effected a change in taste that influenced the formation of painters who studied at the Vienna academy in the 1740s and 1750s.[78]

Similar elements appear in Maulbertsch's earlier works, both in his drawings and in his oil paintings, and especially in the frescoes of the early 1750s that do reveal his distinctive touch. Comparison of forms in Maulbertsch's early ceiling paintings in Kirchstetten (Figure 3) and Ebenfurth (Figure 10 and Plate 5) of the first years of the 1750s to Troger's drawings of the 1740s (Figure 9) reveals many similarities. Among them are the approach to light, the anatomical distortions of figures, who are disproportionately tall and thin, and the elongation of arms and legs to the extent of anatomical impossibility to create emphases.

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