 Ludwig was the third son of the distinguished jurist, Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. His nephew, the neo-classical painter, Anselm Feuerbach, was the son of Ludwig’s older brother, also called Anselm, himself a classical archaeologist and aesthetician “in the spirit of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and  Johann Joachim   Winckelmann”.[2]  Ludwig’s father, who studied philosophy and law at Jena in the 1790s with the Kantians, Karl Reinhold and Gottlieb Hufeland, respectively, belonged to a group of distinguished northern German scholars called to Bavaria during the period of administrative reform under Maximilian Montgelas, and charged with the task of modernizing the legal and educational institutions of what became in 1806 the modern kingdom of Bavaria. Other members of this group of Nordlichter or “northern lights” included F.I. Niethammer, F.H. Jacobi (the godfather of Ludwig’s younger brother, Friedrich), and Friedrich Thiersch (the tutor of Ludwig’s two oldest brothers, who has sometimes been called “the Humboldt of Bavaria”). P.J.A. Feuerbach was knighted in recognition of his achievement in modernizing the Bavarian penal code, though his political influence was dramatically curtailed as a result of outspoken national-liberal criticisms of Napoleon expressed in pamphlets he published in 1813 and 1814.