Franz Xaver Messerschmidt and His Bizarre Character Heads

The so-called character heads created by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt are not only a bizarre collection of sculptures but also a unique portrayal of insanity. Join us as we take a closer look at these crazy masterpieces.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was a German-Austrian Late Baroque sculptor. The artist’s most famous works are his character heads or, rather, busts with crazy facial expressions. They were to represent the full range of human expressions, which he reckoned to be 64.

Messerschmidt created the character heads between 1770 and his death in 1783. Their titles are quite disturbing—such as A Hypocrite and a Slanderer and The Ultimate Simpleton—but they were not given by the artist. They were assigned to the works after a large number of them were exhibited in Vienna in 1793. But you must admit, they are pretty accurate.

Why did Messerschmidt create those bizarre sculptures? In 1781, Friedrich Nicolai, a German author and a leading figure in the German Enlightenment, visited the sculptor at his studio in Pressburg. He recorded and subsequently published his encounter with the artist. From the 1770s, Messerschmidt was thought to have psychological problems, lost his position at the university, and decided to return to Wiesensteig, his native Bavarian town.

It appears that for many years, Messerschmidt had been suffering from an undiagnosed digestive ailment, probably Crohn’s disease, which caused him considerable discomfort. Messerschmidt didn’t want to think about the pain, so he applied a series of pinches to his right lower rib. He then observed his various facial expressions in the mirror and decided to portray them in marble and bronze. According to Nicolai, Messerschmidt quickly came up with an idea to depict 64 “canonical grimaces” of the human face using himself as a template.

The heads became popular when the exhibition catalog The Peculiar Life History of F. X. Messerschmidt, Royal and Imperial Sculpture Teacher was published anonymously in 1794. Later, they were displayed as curiosities at the Prater, an amusement park in Vienna. Their wax and plaster copies were even available for purchase!

Centuries after creation, they still amaze with their variety and naturalism. To modern eyes, they look like faces teens Snapchat to their friends—but Messerschmidt wasn’t trying to pioneer the sculptural selfie. He was trying to protect himself from ghosts. The psychoanalyst Ernst Kris wrote two treatises on Messerschmidt, concluding that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.