ABSTRACT
Beginning with late eighteenth-century writings, commentators on Messerschmidt have sought to promote a connection between him and Franz Anton Mesmer. In order to understand what Messerschmidt may have known about Mesmer's ideas, one should characterize as precisely as possible the forms that Mesmer's thinking took in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Mesmer is remembered today principally as the theorist of animal magnetism, which posited the existence of an unseen magnetic fluid coursing through the universe, connecting the stars, the planets, all earthly matter, and the human body in a delicate equilibrium. De planetarum influxu laid the groundwork for Mesmer's Viennese practice and the ideas he subsequently propagated in Paris, Munich, and elsewhere. Messerschmidt decided that the sculptures would not illustrate Mesmerian practices directly, but instead be creative rethinkings of their elements. In other word, Mesmer's medical practices are evoked playfully.
