Editing Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (section)

==Maturity==
[[File:Character Study Strong Smell, circa 1770-1781 CE. From Austria, Pressburgh, now Slovakia, Bratislava. By Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.jpg|thumb|Character Study Strong Smell, circa 1770-1781 AD. From Austria, Pressburg, now Slovakia, Bratislava. By Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London]]
[[File:Messerschmidt Der Glaube BNM R8726.jpg|thumb|280px|left|''Der Glaube'', from a tomb monument]]

The Baroque period of his oeuvre ended in 1769 with a bust of the court physician [[Gerard van Swieten]], commissioned by the Empress. At the same time his first early [[Neoclassicism|Neo-Classic]] works appeared, made—characteristically—for the academy. To these and later works he applied many experiences gained in 1765 during a study trip to Rome. One of these early, severe heads from the years 1769–70, influenced by Roman republican portraits, represents the well-known doctor [[Franz Anton Mesmer]]. At about the same time, in 1770-72 Messerschmidt began to work on his so-called character heads, which were - as has been much later proposed (notably by [[Ernst Kris]]) - connected with certain [[paranoia|paranoid]] ideas and [[hallucination]]s from which, at the beginning of the seventies, the master supposedly began to suffer. Messerschmidt found himself increasingly at odds with his aspirations. His material situation worsened to such an extent, that in 1774, when he applied for the newly-vacant office of a leading professor at the academy, where he had been teaching since 1769, instead of getting it he was expelled from teaching. In a letter to the Empress, [[Wenzel Anton Graf Kaunitz|Count Kaunitz]] praised Messerschmidt's abilities, but suggested that the nature of his illness (referred to as a "confusion in the head") would make such an appointment detrimental to the institution.

It is later suggested he suffered from [[Crohn's disease]], chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract that may provoke pains severe enough to cause hallucinations.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.thecollector.com/franz-xaver-messerschmidt-heads/ | title=Faces of Madness: Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's Heads | date=February 2024 }}</ref>