The frescoes of Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724-1796) are the culminating achievement of 18th-century Austrian fresco painting. His highly personal interpretation of the rococo gradually gave way to a more rational, classicizing approach.

Franz Anton Maulbertsch was born in Langenargen on Lake Constance on June 8, 1724, the son of a painter. He studied in Vienna with Peter van Roy and in 1741 enrolled at the academy, where he received the painting prize in 1750. Maulbertsch became a member of the academy in 1759 and a professor there in 1770, for which occasion he produced his Allegory of the Destiny of Art.

Although Maulbertsch produced easel paintings of great beauty (Holy Kindred, St. Narcissus, Self-portrait), he is chiefly and justly famous for his frescoes. In Vienna and other cities of Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary he created scores of vibrantly dramatic and brilliantly colored frescoes filled with an intense and highly personal religious feeling, beginning...