Alexander Macco

Alexander Macco (born March 29, 1767 in Creglingen ; † July 24, 1849 in Bamberg ) was a German history and portrait painter .

Live and act

Macco's birthplace in Creglingen

The son of the Prussian Chamber Councilor Johann Friedrich Macco (1730-1816) was supposed to start a technical training as a cadet in the engineering school in Mannheim in 1781 after his school education, which he had received from private tutors and the city pastor , but changed after seven days with the permission of his father to the local “Académie de peinture”, where he was introduced to the art of painting by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt . In his third year of training he was honored with a gold medal, which made Margrave Karl Alexander von Ansbach-Bayreuth aware of him and supported him with an annual pension for his further courses.

Thanks to this scholarship , Macco was able to move to Rome in 1784 , where he studied the art of the painter Raphael in the Vatican . It was here that his first major major work, “Adonis and Venus”, was written, which received an excellent review from the writer Karl Philipp Moritz , who was in Rome . Margrave Karl Alexander was also enthusiastic, bought this picture for his minister Ernst von Gemmingen-Hornberg and doubled the annual pension for Macco. The governor of Ansbach-Bayreuth at the time, Karl August von Hardenberg , wanted to recommend Macco as professor for the Berlin Academy of the Arts , but the turmoil surrounding the French Revolution , which was also affecting Germany, prevented such a change.

Macco did not return to Germany until 1798 through the mediation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , whom he had met in Italy, and after a brief activity in Weimar, received an appointment from Queen Luise von Mecklenburg-Strelitz to the Prussian court in Berlin. Several portraits of the queen were created here, whereby the "knee picture" painted in 1800 achieved particular fame due to its closeness to life and was later described in detail by his great-great-nephew Hermann Friedrich Macco . It was known at court that the queen had often and persistently sat as a model for him and treated Macco in the most amiable manner as one of her own kind. Whenever she had to skip an appointment due to urgent state business, she apologized to him, not without offering him another suitable appointment. In Berlin he was a member of the Freemason Lodge "Friedrich Wilhelm for Crowned Justice".

Although King Friedrich Wilhelm III. Having promised both an annual pension and a professorship, Macco did not last long in Berlin and stays in several cities in Germany, France and finally in Austria, where he settled in Vienna for a long time from 1801 to 1817. Several portraits of Archduke Karl von Österreich-Teschen and other commissions from various counts and princes were created here. In Vienna he also made the acquaintance of Ludwig van Beethoven , who asked him to design illustrations for his compositions.

From 1817 onwards there was another time of round trips, which also took him to Aachen in 1818 , where he painted a portrait of the Prussian Minister of War Hermann von Boyen at the Aachen Congress . After several stopovers, Macco stayed from 1825 on the Putney Hill country estate of his friend Ernst Friedrich Herbert zu Munster , who had been known since the Viennese days , where he created two life-size portraits of King George IV and one of Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex . But only two years later Macco returned to Germany, where he was accepted again in Weimar through the mediation of Goethe, who had been very close to him since Rome and to whom he had dedicated his picture of the " Charonsage " a year earlier , and was among the best scholars. His restlessness soon carried him on and it was not until the end of the 30s that he finally settled in Bamberg, where he finally died in 1849 at the age of 82, lonely and almost forgotten.

Alexander Macco was obviously never married, but his artistic activities were later continued by his great-great-nephew Georg Macco .

Works (selection)

Cephalus and Procris, 1793

• Adonis and Venus , history picture, before 1790
• Cephalus and Procris , history picture , ca.1793
• Friederike von Mecklenburg-Strelitz , portrait, 1798
• Knee picture of Queen Luise , portrait, 1800
• Hermann von Boyen , portrait, 1818
• Charonsage , history picture , 1824
• George IV portrait, 1825
• Augustus Frederick , Duke of Sussex, portrait, 1825

Literature and Sources

• Paul Glück: Alexander Macco and the Macco room in the Bamberg residence. In: Bamberg Yearbook. Vol. 9, 1936, ZDB -ID 544402-0 , pp. 16-20.
• Albrecht Macco: The painter Alexander Macco and his work in Austria. In: Chronicle of the Vienna Goethe Association. Vol. 43, 1938, ISSN  0257-2575 , pp. 15-20.
• Albrecht Macco: The painter Alexander Macco and the Goethe circle. In: Chronicle of the Vienna Goethe Association. Vol. 44, 1939, pp. 1-13.
• Hermann F. Macco : Queen Luise of Prussia. Painted after life by Alexander Macco. Sittenfeld, Berlin 1908.

Web links

Commons : Alexander Macco  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Vita Alexander Macco and description of the portrait of Queen Luise (PDF file; 1.6 MB)
• Partial estate in the Bavarian State Library