ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the writer whose ideas form the bedrock upon which all Messerschmidt studies rest. This is Friedrich Nicolai, Berlin-based critic, editor, and publisher who understood himself as a popularizer of the Enlightenment to the German people. Nicolai's 1785 account of an interview with Messerschmidt, which the writer claimed to have recorded after a visit with him that took place across several days in 1781, is by far the most influential single text on the sculptor ever written. All subsequent writers have relied on Nicolai, often heavily, lifting entire passages from his text and assuming that he is an accurate recorder of Messerschmidt's intentions. To read Nicolai as a straightforward communicator of the artist's intentions leads the viewer of Messerschmidt's sculptures down a false interpretive path. Indeed that is largely what has happened in the art-historical literature since Ilg brought this text into the Messerschmidt literature.
