Works of art by one of the most important Baroque painters of Central Europe – Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724 – 1796), have been attracting attention for more than a hundred years. He graduated from the Vienna Academy and was a member of the Academy from 1757. The painter Oskar Kokoschka compared his artistic impact, exceptionalism and eccentricity to the musical legacy of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Hundreds of publications have been devoted to the identification, description and interpretation of his sketches, oil paintings, and murals. These interpretive texts of his artistic visuality also demonstrate how many potential directions are offered by the study of Maulbertsch՚s artistic oeuvre. From formal analysis, to iconographic studies, to a study of the development of the author's handwriting, luminosity and colour, or the evolution and shift of late Baroque painting towards Classicism, to a broader illustration of the political and sociological developments in Central Europe in the second half of the 18th century.
