One Fine Show: “Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, More Than Character Heads” at the Belvedere in Vienna

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

One of the worst Instagram posts in recent years was, of course, made by Mark Zuckerberg himself. In it, he debuted a sculpture of his wife and exhorted us all to “bring back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.” Zuck’s sweaty attempts to seem human are, at this point, rather charming, but the artwork in question was so banal that anyone who saw the photo became more interested in the living woman standing beside her gift as she sips coffee in her bathrobe. The mug hides her face, which is perhaps content, perhaps embarrassed, but definitely not proud.

The character heads of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) have also been mysterious to scholars, though only partially because of the subtlety of the expressions depicted. More curious is why the in-demand artisan made them, a question probed by the new exhibition “Franz Xaver Messerschmidt: More Than Character Heads,” which opened recently at the Belvedere in Vienna and seeks to place his strange and appealing busts in the context of both his other work and that of 18th-century and late-Enlightenment contemporaries working on facial expression and physiognomy—the new idea of trying to capture character rather than portrait likeness.

If you’re new to the body of work, you might not need “more than” the Character Heads, which are at the center of the exhibition. Starting in the 1770s, Messerschmidt began to make these without commission or sitters, working outside his healthy career capturing Austria’s elite in Baroque, Zuckerbergian pomp. His character heads show intense and universal emotions, a recognition perhaps of the growing power of the fickle bourgeoisie.

The Belvedere boasts a collection of 16 character heads, the largest held by any single institution. It’s hard to talk about specific ones because these came to the Belvedere from Messerschmidt’s private collection after his death, so they don’t have individual titles (all are just “Charakterköpfe”). In this show, the trio of bald men feels exemplary. Through the use of little more than jowls, Messerschmidt conjures a baffled joy, pure anguish and leering sadism, all across the same face. His court sculpture of Maria Theresia als Königin von Ungarn (1764-1766), queen of Hungary, relegates all this talent for folds to her dress. Her face is placid and inscrutable.

Who else wanted to work in this mode at this time? The portraitist Joseph Ducreux (1735-1802), who came to Vienna to do a portrait of Marie Antoinette, and perhaps William Hogarth (1697-1764), who similarly used humor and melodrama to mine larger themes.

Then there was Messerschmidt’s close friend, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), whose pseudoscientific theories about the “animal magnetism” that bedevils humans laid the groundwork for the field of psychology. Some think the character heads represent Mesmer’s theories. Others think that they may have emerged because he was passed over for a promotion at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The chronology does fit, but do the angst-ridden want to study angst? Whatever their origins, these works represent major leaps forward in the field of sculptural technology. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, may want to consider hiring an art advisor who lives in the 21st Century.

“Franz Xaver Messerschmidt: More Than Character Heads” is on view at the Belvedere in Vienna through April 6, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• Dutch Golden Age Treasures from Thomas Kaplan’s Leiden Collection Take Center Stage in West Palm Beach

• At SLAM, Anselm Kiefer’s Material Transformations

• One Fine Show: “The Stars We Do Not See, Australian Indigenous Art” at the National Gallery of Art

• In Rotterdam, Mandy El-Sayegh Offers Up an Assault on the Senses

• Samuel Sarmiento’s Ceramics Channel Universal Memory in His U.S. Debut