Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus

Raphael Morghen|Anton Raphael Mengs

1784 · Engraving · Drawings and Prints

One of the most significant commissions of the eighteenth century was the Parnassus painted by Mengs in 1761 for the Villa Albani, Rome, and hailed as a manifesto of the new style of Neoclassicism. The carefully differentiated Muses, accompanied by their mother, Mnemosyne, derive from ancient sculpture, while the setting, a small grove of laurels in which the Muses are grouped around their leader, harks back to Raphael's fresco in the Vatican. Morghen was one of the most admired of the technically accomplished printmakers whose reproductions of famous paintings were enormously prized at the end of the eighteenth century.

Artist

Raphael Morghen|Anton Raphael Mengs

Date

1784

Medium

Engraving

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928