Volume VIII: The Age of Louis XIV by Will Durant

Author:Will Durant
Language: eng
Format: epub

III. THE ARTS IN GERMANY

Moreover, and contrary to all reasonable expectations, this age was one of the most productive in German architecture. It saw the first flowering of German baroque, which gave a new front of charm and gaiety to Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Dresden, Bayreuth, Würzburg, and Vienna. It was the time of builders like Johann Fischer von Erlach, Jakob Prandtauer, Johann and Kilian and Cristoph Dientzenhofer, and Andreas Schlüter, whose names would be as well known to English-speaking peoples as those of Wren and Inigo Jones, were it not for the prison of frontiers and the babel of tongues. Some of their work, however, was destroyed in the invasions of Germany by French armies (1689), and some in the Second World War.12 History is a race between art and war.

Some lovely churches rose amid the poverty and desolation. We should dishonor our record if we found no line for Johann Dientzenhofer’s cathedral at Fulda or his abbey church at Banz, or for the work of Christoph and Kilian Dientzenhofer on the churches of St. Nicholas and St. John in Prague. In 1663 the Italian architect Agostino Barelli began the Nymphenburg Palace outside Munich, and Joseph Effner completed its interior in a successful merger of classic pilasters and baroque decoration. Ornament was the besetting temptation of baroque; it went to excess in the Festsaal, or Festival Salon, of the Schloss Berlin, and in the pavilion of the Zwinger Palace built at Dresden by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann for Augustus the Strong; here baroque passed into a pretty rococo rather befitting a boudoir interior than a palace front. This was mostly destroyed in the Second World War; so were the Schloss Charlottenburg and the Schloss Berlin, the royal palace begun by Andreas Schlüter in 1698.

Schlüter was the outstanding German sculptor of the age. All Germany was thrilled by his equestrian statue of the Great Elector, Der Grosse Kurfürst, which withstood all the bombs of war, and now rides the Charlottenburg plaza outside Berlin. At Königsberg Schlüter set up an equally imposing figure of Frederick I, just made King of Prussia. Julius Glessker carved a quietly mourning Head of Mary for a Crucifixion group in the cathedral at Bamberg. The wood carvers showed their skill in the magnificent choir stalls of the Klosterkirche in Silesia, but they went to excess in the extravagantly carved furniture demanded by patrons who had more pride than taste.

German painting begot no masterpieces in this period, unless we count as such a charming Young Man with a Gray Hat by Christoph Paradiso.13 The tapestries designed for the Würzburg Palace by Rudolf Byss are among the finest; and Paul Decker’s engravings in copper were near the top of their kind. The little town of Warmbrunn—the Warm Springs of Silesia—was famous for its cut glass; Dresden made “Dresden china” fashionable; Augustus the Strong was also le roi de faïence; and at Meissen, suitable clays having been found nearby, he established (1709) the kilns that produced the first hard porcelain in Europe.

But

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