(Linz 1693–1757 Wels)
Saint Michael the Archangel,
oil on canvas, 129.5 x 81 cm, framed

In 1958, Eckhardt Knab, Vienna, Michelangelo Muraro, and Wilhelm Valentiner independently identified the present painting as an autograph work by Heindl. We are grateful to Dr. Georg Lechner, who has endorsed the traditional attribution of this composition to Heindl on the basis of a photograph.

The present painting, illustrating Saint Michael’s defeat of Lucifer, seems almost modern in its expressivity and served without doubt as a bozetto for an altarpiece, which, however, has not yet been identified. It therefore seems to have not been realized at all or has not survived. From 1719 on, Heindl was entrusted with the administration of the Kremsmünster freihaus, succeeding the painter Johann Cyprian Wimberger, whose dynamic brushwork had a considerable impact on Heindl’s expressive facial types. He left his employment in 1735, purchased a house, and established himself as a painter and innkeeper in Wels. The decoration of the church of the Canons Regular St. Nicholas in Passau (1717/18) already showed the young painter’s highly individual approach to Pozzo’s perspectival illusionism. From 1719 on, prelates and vicars in the western half of the Passau diocese (Upper Austria and the eastern part of Bavaria) had their churches and abbeys decorated with Heindl’s frescoes or commissioned from his workshop altarpieces or paintings for the Stations of the Cross. Compared to his religious oeuvre, the number of known profane subjects by this artist is minute. While working on the Calvary paintings near Lambach (1724), the master developed his idiosyncratic figure style, which is characterized by energetic crowd formations and unsteady outlines. His volatile forms are only balanced and held in check by his gently nuanced colours. His characteristic palette, ranging from a warm reddish brown to gold ochre and yellow, with economically placed accents in blue and softly glazed areas in pale pink and greyish violet, can also be observed in the present painting. In the 1730s, passionate movement in Heindl’s compositions increased, while the artist retained his delicate colour scheme. Such emotionally expressive works, also exemplified by the present painting and its almost modern intensity, were directly juxtaposed with intimate descriptions of nature (Chapel of the Guardian Angels in Spital am Pyhrn, 1734). That Heindl is known to have also worked as a painter of stage scenes (Kremsmünster, 1732) may well fit in with his great versatility, yet does not explain it. What is more important is the awareness that Heindl’s art reflects a development that started in the middle of the century (F. A. Maulbertsch) as a result of the departure from academic idealism à la Gran and which can be described as the genesis of monumental painting in Austria.