Anton Raphael Mengs was born in Bohemia to illustrious painting stock. His father, Ismael Mengs, was court painter to Augustus II, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, and named his son after two painters: Raphael and Antonio Allegri, better known as Correggio. Under his father’s tyrannical tutelage, Mengs fils went on to serve as court painter to Augustus III, but far eclipsed Ismael’s renown, becoming director of the Vatican painting school in 1754 and undertaking major commissions in Italy and Spain, including the ceiling of the banqueting hall of the Royal Palace of Madrid. This exhibition at the Prado unites works in Spanish collections with some extraordinary international loans – most notably the fresco Jupiter and Ganymede from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, which Mengs, a neoclassicist, created to hoodwink the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann into thinking it was an antiquity (25 November–1 March 2026).
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