Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736 - 1783) was a German sculptor most famous for his 'character heads,' a collection of busts of faces contorted in extreme facial expressions.

In 1770 Messerschmidt began to work on his so-called character heads, obviously connected with certain paranoid ideas and hallucinations from which, at the beginning of the seventies, the master began to suffer.

(via Athanasius Kircher Society)