After his stay in Rome, he began to develop the classical style. This shows the smooth surfaces and the stronger attention to human forms. At the end of the 1760s, Messerschmidt found himself at the climax of his career: he was a member of Viennese Academy, where he taught until the beginning of the 1770s. Messerschmidt then returned to the place of his birth, Weissenberg, and moved eventually to Pressburg, known today as Bratislava. His brother was already working there as a sculptor. It was here that he created his series of about seventy busts which he himself called “heads” or “headpieces”, and which show the human countenance in all possible conditions and contortions, sometimes as grotesque grimaces. Some were in fact influenced by the physiognomic studies of the doctor Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who formulated the theory of animal magnetism, but essentially they originated from his own delusions. It was believed that Messerschmidt thought he could use these heads to keep the demons away from himself.

 

The extremely versatile and gifted Egid Quirin Asam (1692-1750) worked successfully as an architect, sculptor, plaster artist and occasional painter. He belonged to the Asam family, who we can thank for some of the finest masterpieces of South German Baroque. Established by Hans Georg Asam (1649-1741), a monastery painter from Benediktbeuren, this artistic dynasty included Asam’s wife Maria Theresia, their sons Cosmas Damian (who in addition to his work as an architect was primarily a painter), and Egid Quirin and his daughter Maria Salome. It was assumed that he accompanied his brother Cosmas Damian to Rome in the period between 1711 and 1713. There the two brothers came under the influence of the Roman Baroque style, in particular the fusion of sculpture, painting and architecture as seen in the work of Bernini, which was also in tune with their own artistic ideas.

 

Egid Quirin’s personal mastery stands out in the Monastery Church of Rohr, where his theatrical, larger-than-life groups of figures, such as the Annunciation scene, attracts attention. The first great masterpiece of all the Asam siblings, however, was the Monastery Church in Weltenburg (1721). Here the brothers succeeded in realising the idea of Baroque at its most beautiful, uniting architecture, spatial structure, sculpture, painting and the conveying of light, which was why it was difficult to separate the individual contributions made by the Asams.