liverodland:Face your fears: The possessed character faces of Franz Messerschmidt. Austrian sculptor
liverodland:Face your fears: The possessed character faces of Franz Messerschmidt. Austrian sculptor Messerschmidt created what he called head pieces between 1770 and his death in 1783. Their distracting, if amusing, titles—such as A Hypocrite and a Slanderer, Just rescued from drowning, The vexed man and The Difficult Secret were all based on Franz himself and the spirits that haunted him. These extremely life-like sculptures were to represent the full range of human expressions, which he reckoned to be 64. They may also have been designed to protect him against menacing spirits—specifically, the “Spirit of Proportion"—that “so frightened and plagued him at night.“ Messerschmidt went on to explain his interest in necromancy and the arcane, and how this also inspired his character heads. Messerschmidt was a keen disciple of Hermes Trismegistus and abided by his teachings regarding the pursuit of “universal balance”: a forerunner to the principles of the Golden ratio. As a result, Messerschmidt claimed that his character heads had aroused the anger of “the Spirit of Proportion”, an ancient being who safe-guarded this knowledge. The spirit visited him at night, and forced him to endure humiliating tortures. One of Messerschmidt’s most famous heads (The Beaked) was apparently inspired by one of these encounters.The titles, with descriptive text, were printed in the exhibition catalogue The Peculiar Life History of F. X. Messerschmidt, Royal and Imperial Sculpture Teacher. -- source link