BY BALTHASAR PERMOSER (1651-1732), CIRCA 1685 The two figures formerly from a group of the Four Seasons; Bacchus raising a tray of grapes in his left hand and resting his right on a tree stump; Ceres raising a bunch of wheat in her right hand and holding a swag of cloth in her left; each depicted standing on an ornately carved triangular gilt-wood pedestal indistinctly stamped to the underside 'ZOLLAMT WIEN Zoifeig...fager (?) T-52 1'. Worming, repairs and minor shrinkage cracks; the upper section of Bacchus's grape vine carved from a separate piece of wood. 67 1/2 in. (171.5 cm.) high, each (2)
Possibly lent by Giuseppe Vanni in 1706 to an exhibition of sculpture in Florentine private collections catalogued as Una statua die Cerere, Una Statua d'un Bacco. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 'Barockplastik in Norddeutscland', 16 Sep. - 6 Nov. 1977, nos. 181 and 182.
Literature
J. Rasmussen ed., exhibition catalogue, Barockplastik in Norddeutscland, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 16 Sep. - 6 Nov. 1977, nos. 181 and 182. S. Asche, Balthasar Permoser Leben und Werk, Berlin, 1978, p. 148, pls. 76-82.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: S. Asche, Balthasar Permoser und die Barokskulptur des Dresdner Zwingers, Frankfurt am Main, 1966. F. Haskel and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique - The lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, 1981, pp. 301-3, no. 75. B. Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, New Haven and London, 1991, II, pl. 35.
Provenance
Possibly the Giuseppe Vanni collection, circa 1700. Private collection, Berlin, before 1966. Munich, Weinmüller, 100. Auction 16 May - 3 Jun 1966, lots 35a and b. Private collection, Hanover.
Notes
THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
Balthasar Permoser was born in 1651 in Kammer, near Otting, Bavaria. From around 1665 he is known to have worked in Salzburg and in 1671 he moved to Vienna, where he trained in the art of ivory carving. In the hope of expanding his range of artistic skills he moved to Rome in the early 1670s and then to Florence in 1677 where he entered the workshops of Giovanni Battista Foggini and the court of the grand dukes of Tuscany.
During his time in Italy, Permoser was exposed to the masterpieces of past ages, and it was with the influence of these that he was able to develop his highly personal interpretation of baroque monumentality. Consider for example his earliest documented Italian works, the 1675-7 stone herms in the garden of the Palazzo del Grillo, Rome (Asche, op. cit., pls. 13-5). These two basket-bearing herms of a faun and a satyr are rich in the vocabulary of the baroque style, but with a clear debt to antique prototypes for the satyr, and Jacopo Sansovino's Bacchus for the faun (see Haskel and Penny, loc. cit. and Boucher, loc. cit. for the two sources, respectively). He was, however, to find great inspiration in the works of later artists, especially Gianlorenzo Bernini, reflected in Permoser's St. Kajetan in San Gaetano, Florence representing a restrained, yet highly expressive, tribute to Bernini's Longinus in St. Peter's, Rome (Asche, op. cit., pls. 9 and 10 respectively). Although by the late 1680s, Permoser had achieved fame in Italy as a sculptor of large scale monuments, he constantly maintained his passion for small-scale sculpture and, among others, created two exceptional ivory carvings of Endymion and Silene (1680) in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick, and a Deposition (1685) in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, both influenced by Foggini and Bernini respectively (Asche, op. cit., 1966, pls. 14 and 15).
In 1690 Permoser finally accepted an invitation to enter the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden, and apart from a short spell in Berlin, he remained there until his death. Crowning his works from this latter period, and despite many being destroyed during the Seven Years War, is his sculptural masterpiece, the Pavilion of the Zwingers, which, along with the architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, Permoser executed between 1712-1718 resulting in one of finest achievements of European baroque art.
The present figures of Bacchus and Ceres have been attributed to Permoser since they emerged from obscurity in 1966 and, since then, Professor Sigfried Asche, an established authority on the artist, has argued convincingly in favour the attribution and a date of circa 1685. This attribution and dating was reconfirmed in 1977 when they were exhibited in the Barockplastik in Norddeutscland exhibition, Hamburg. In each instance the attribution is based on stylistic comparisons to other works from Permoser's oeuvre. Consider, for example, the anatomical similarities that exist with the group of ivory Four Seasons (1676-8) in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, which show a similar rendition of musculature, the similar placing of the left arm and the upturned head of Summer, as well as the slightly off- balance footing of Bacchus (Asche, op. cit., 1966, pl. 13). Indeed, it is the figure of Bacchus, taken directly from Jacopo Sansovino (Boucher, loc. cit), that would continue to recur within Permoser's oeuvre; consider the closeness of Sansovino's version and the present lot with the comparable ivory (1695) in Harewood House, Leeds, or the wood version (1690-3) inspired by Michelangelo in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Köln (Asche, op. cit., 1978, pls. 93a and 96 respectively).
The interchangeable figure of Summer/Ceres also recurs within Permoser's oeuvre. Consider, for example, the compositional form of the ivory Eve (1688) in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, with the similar lock of hair falling over her right shoulder and the modest placing of the left hand over her genitals (ibid, pl. 19). Her facial features are also extremely close to the monumental figure of Abundance (1703-4) in Freiberg, and his ostentatious figure of Ceres (1715) in the Zwinger (ibid, pls. 151 and 232 respectively).
The very close relationship the present lot has to all the earlier works of art is a fair indication that Permoser conceived the pair during the earlier part of his career, but whether carved before or after his return to Germany is a matter of debate. What one can be certain of is that the less fussy treatment of the drapery and attributes, and the more mannered anatomical details of the present lot is much closer in style to the works from his Italian period. Indeed, with his latter works Permoser had largely abandoned any sense of restraint and opted for much bolder, ostentatious contours and very Bernini-esque forms of drapery that certainly post-date the present lot.
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