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Ian Wardropper: My name is Ian Wardropper. I’m chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I’d like to introduce you to a new acquisition in my department. It is a striking image of a balding, blocky man. He sinks his chin into his chest, and the wrinkles there are realistically detailed, but at the same time very abstract, a series of concentric circles. His eyes are vacant and they’re looking away from us, they’re downcast. So as we try to come to terms with him, we move around him, lowering our head perhaps to look up into his eyes. He’s introspective, he’s brooding. And we move around to the side and see that this is a very simple, blunt, almost brutal image of a rectangular head that’s leaning forward, tipped forward on a socle that evolves or morphs into his shoulders. It’s a startlingly different object in the context of late-eighteenth-century art, in the gallery where we find it in the Museum. Why did it come about? Why is it so different? It’s made by an Austrian sculptor named Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, who in the 1760s was the leading sculptor at the imperial court. He made florid, baroque sculptures of the emperor, of the empress, and many figures at court, and had great success. But by the end of the decade of the 1760s, he had made a trip to Italy, where he was very impressed by the Neoclassical movement, by ancient sculptures, |
