Just like stains, some ghosts can prove more stubborn to remove than others. Whereas a quick splash of Holy Water and prayer might suffice to see off most spooks, others require rather more obscure methods of banishment. Yet for sheer oddness, the efforts of German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) take some beating. A talented sculptor, Messerschmidt graduated from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1755, going on to make busts and statues for the Austrian Imperial Court, including Empress Maria Theresa. In the early 1770s, Messerschmidt began the works for which he is today most renowned, the , or ‘character heads’, a series of 64 amazingly detailed bronze and marble busts of disembodied faces adopting various grotesque expressions and grimaces. However, Messerschmidt now began to suffer from what was vaguely termed “confusion” in his own head, and in 1774 was turned down for a senior professorship at his old in spite of his obvious talent. Disillusioned, Messerschmidt fled Vienna and settled in Pressburg (now Bratislava) in Slovakia. Here, he continued both his work on the and his unstoppable descent into madness.
