Anton Raphael Mengs

Anton Raphael Mengs was named to be a painter before he could hold a brush. His father Ismael, a court painter in Dresden, gave him the names of two masters he was meant to rival, Antonio Correggio and Raphael, and drove him through a punishing childhood, copying the old masters in Rome for hours on end.

In Rome as a young man he became close to Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar whose writings on Greek art launched the fashion for the antique. For Winckelmann's patron, Cardinal Alessandro Albani, Mengs painted the ceiling in 1761 that made his name across Europe: Parnassus, in the Villa Albani, showing Apollo among the muses in clear, cool, sculptural forms modelled on ancient statues rather than the swirling Baroque then in favour. It became a founding image of Neoclassicism.

He spent his best years as first painter to Charles III of Spain in Madrid, decorating the royal palace, and died back in Rome in 1779, worn out at 51. In his own lifetime many called him the finest painter in Europe, a reputation that fell steeply within a few decades of his death.