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 Billiard Room in the Moritzburg Palace, near Dresden, with decorative painting on leather, possibly by Giovanni Battista Grone, circa 1730 difficulties of such publications, reminded the readership that earlier only Louis XIV (1643-1715) had undertaken a similar challenge (though not as far-reaching as Heineken's), and finally he noted flatteringly: "The present collection enjoys the approval of Your Majesty; it is therefore without doubt that this and the following parts will be an eternal monument to the great and wise knowledge of Your Majesty, and of the powerful patronage Your Majesty has provided artists and art with."

1

* The dedication culminates with the sentence: "Does not all this prove that during the glorious governance of Your Majesty we are re-living the age of Emperor Augustus? The age that is famous for the flourishing state of the fine arts." In the Baroque age the holders of the throne were often compared to Emperor Augustus. For Saxony and Dresden, however, the analogy had special meaning: several contemporaries and subsequent analysts took Augustus III for a new Augustus, whose reign was rich with the promise of the flourishing and plenitude of the arts.

19 Such ideas inspired the king and his prime minister, Count Brühl (1700-1763), and the painters had to comply. This explains why Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770), Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich (1712-1774),

20 and Louis de Silvestre all painted pictures