Buzási Enikő szerk.: In Europe' Princely Courts, Ádám Mányoki, Actors and venues of a portraitist's career (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2003/1)
Harald Marx: "THE LUCKY STAR OF PAINTING HAS RISEN" Painting and Art Patronage in Dresden under Augustus the Strong and Augustus III
The artists recorded, glorified, and embellished the life of the monarch and his court with their works. They saw and interpreted the world through the eyes and will of their clients. When dealing with Baroque art, it is therefore imperative to examine the interplay between the assigned task and artistic merit. In other words, we should investigate why we are fascinated by a kind of painting whose contents are conceptually alien to us and several centuries distant in time. In answering this question, several viewpoints must be considered: first, the ornamental function of painting, that is, its formal appeal; second, its encoded contents of truth, its representation of the envisioned life, and the human content concealed within. In addition, the exaltation of the ruler expressed in art can be objectified in beautiful and convincing pictorial form, so that we accept the picture as showing reality, even when actual historical facts belie what the generally admired painting reveals. Art creates its own pictorial world which cannot be understood without the empathy of the viewer; in the Baroque, this pictorial world often referred to the prince as the ideal, the wise, the just and the strong. The works created by court painters conveyed not only demagogic messages but also hopes. In actual fact, however, it was only in the artists' paintings that Dresden was the place "where the earthly gods found asylum." Only after 1715 - when Louis de Silvestre was called to Dresden to be the Premier Peintre du Roi - did portraits, allegories and representations of events begin to provide a clearer picture of Augustus the Strong and his court. Silvestre's virtuosic painting determined the art type for several decades, 15 while Heinrich Christoph Fehling, who died in 1725, ensured the continuation of Dresden's 17 th-century traditions. Ádám Mányoki arrived in Dresden in 1713, and Ismael Mengs (1688-1764) in 1714: the former as a noted portraitist alongside Silvestre, the latter primarily as a painter of enamels and miniatures. In addition to the amazing growth in portraiture and miniature painting, these years - the 1720s - saw the first great commissions of monumental paintings, too. 16 The series of outstanding works in decorative painting that had begun went on until the second half of the century. The names of Louis de Silvestre, Alessandro Mauro, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, Giovanni Battista Grone, Stefano Torelli (1712-1780), Franz Karl Palko (1724-1767), 17 Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724-1796), Johann Benjamin Müller (1719-prior to 1789) and Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-1799) should all be mentioned here. Church commissions, frequently important factors for artists and for art in general in Catholic countries, played Johann Alexander Thiele: Procession to the carnival carousel in the courtyard of the Zwinger on 17 February 1722, before 1725 Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister
