Franz Anton Maulbertsch
1724–1796 · Holy Roman Empire · Rococo, Baroque
The story
Look up inside a Central European church of the mid-1700s and the swirling painted heaven overhead may well be his. Franz Anton Maulbertsch was the leading fresco painter of the Habsburg lands, filling ceilings and altarpieces across Austria, Hungary and Moravia with airy Rococo colour.
Born in 1724 on Lake Constance and trained at the Vienna Academy, he absorbed the Venetian tradition without ever going to Italy, studying the frescoes Sebastiano Ricci had left in the Schönbrunn Palace and following the example of Giambattista Tiepolo, the Venetian who was then working nearby in Würzburg. His paint is loose and flickering, his figures stretched and lit by sudden flashes of colour.
Most of his work was made for the Church, and much of it stays where he put it, high on the walls of the Michaelerkirche in Vienna, the pilgrimage church of Maria Treu, and cathedrals in Hungary. As taste shifted late in his life toward the cooler order of Neoclassicism, his flamboyant manner fell out of fashion. He died in Vienna in 1796.
