The Character Heads
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736 to 1783) · 1770 to 1783
A row of bald metal heads grimace at you from their plinths. One screws its eyes shut and purses its lips until the whole face folds into wrinkles; another yawns so wide the jaw seems dislocated; another has a beak-like mouth pulled into a sneer. They are the so-called character heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, and nothing else in eighteenth century sculpture looks like them. The Belvedere owns the largest group in the world, and they are displayed together so that the effect is of a silent, contorted chorus.
Messerschmidt was one of the most successful court sculptors in Vienna, maker of grand portraits of Empress Maria Theresa. Around seventeen seventy his behaviour became erratic, he was denied a professorship at the academy on the grounds of his mental state, and he withdrew to Pressburg, now Bratislava, where he made these heads in private. Look closely at the surface: the alloy of lead and tin was cast and then chased with a fine chisel, so that every crease of skin and every strand of eyebrow is sharp. The features are Messerschmidt's own. A visitor who called on him described how he would pinch himself in front of a mirror and copy the expression.
The sculptor said he was fighting off a spirit of proportion that tormented him at night, and that the grimaces were a way of driving it away. After his death the heads were sold as a job lot and given jokey titles in the nineteenth century, such as The Yawner and The Vexed Man. Whether they are madness, a scientific study of expression, or a private joke, they anticipate modern art by more than a century, and they are the most photographed sculptures in the building.
Did You Know? Messerschmidt claimed the heads were a defence against a demon, the spirit of proportion, that pinched him at night in punishment for his skill.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.