La colección de vaciados de escultura que Antonio Rafael Mengs donó a Carlos III para la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando

Resumo

Anton Rafael Mengs, Court Painter of King Charles IIIrd., gifted the King the extensive plaster-cast collection that he had created throughout the years in Madrid, Rome and Florence. The Royal Academy of Arts of San Fernando, created short time before this, was in need of plaster-cast models that served as reference and inspiration for the Spanish artists. The repertoire of moulds and models belonging to Mengs arrived to Spain in a decisive moment for the develop of arts in our country. They played a major role for the apprenticeship of artists and became the main vehicle of transmission to establish the neo-classical taste that was achieving a great success in many places around Europe and for which the German painter was one of his most eminent theorist. Attending to Mengs, who shared the same aesthetic ideas as Winckelmann, there was only one possible way to achieve the perfection on arts. It was through the contemplation and imitation of the ancient art as the ancients knew how to make a selection of the most perfect parts. Casts of the most celebrated statues of the Antiquity, to the detriment of the originals, could summarize all the knowledge necessary for the young artists at the Royal Academy. The object of this work has been to achieve a complete study , that is to say a material analysis, creation, history, donation, dispatch to Madrid and fortune of the collection as well as to determine de different provenances of the pieces and the contacts the artist made to obtain them. As a result it has been possible to reconstruct and identify the whole collection, providing with a complete catalogue of all the pieces. Together with a number of monographic chapters devoted to specific sculptures when their importance and consequence required it.