page_title: Livio Mehus
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Livio Mehus / Work
context_page_description: Lieven Mehus or Livio Mehus was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and engraver of the Baroque period, who trained and worked in Italy. He was mainly active in Florence where he was court painter of Prince Mattias de' Medici. During his lifetime he enjoyed a high reputation for his allegorical and mythological scenes, landscapes, religious works and portraits.
context_section_description: A majority of Mehus' works representing battles and landscapes are in private collections while various altarpieces and canvases with religious and mythological subjects are on display in churches and museums.  He is also known for a few self-portraits and the portrait of the blind sculptor Giovanni Francesco Gonnelli, called the Ciego de Gambazo, demonstrates his strengths as a portrait painter and the portrait of Gambazo anticipates the best of what Giacomo Ceruti produced a generation later.
  Livio Mehus was also sought out as a figure painter and painted the staffage in the landscapes of Crescenzio Onofri, a pupil of Gaspard Dughet. An example is the Landscape with gulf and port (Italian House of Representatives in Rome).
  His best-known works are the pair of Genius of painting (Museo del Prado, Madrid) and Genius of sculpture (Palazzo Pitti, Florence) both painted c. 1650. The pair of paintings demonstrate his notions of excellence in art.  When the Genius of painting was acquired by the Prado in 2000, it was attributed to Velazquez. In the first work, the youthful genius of painting is depicted making a copy of the now destroyed Martyrdom of Saint Peter by Titian. The child is thus learning his craft from Titian, in Mehus' time regarded as the epitome of the Venetian school of colourists. In the Genius of sculpture, the genius of sculpture is drawing a classical statue, thus extolling the primacy of ancient sculpture and the skill of drawing. In both works Mehus included a portrait of himself looking straight at the viewer, clearly associating himself with the qualities he most admired in art.
  Mehus was also known as a landscape painter.  His landscapes often include mythological or genre scenes.  Examples are the Wrestlers in a Landscape and the Huntresses Resting (both in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
caption: The apple of discord thrown among the gods
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