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The beauty, creativity, and technical virtuosity of German and Bohemia sculpture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will surprise many readers of Marjorie Trusted's latest book.Scholarly research has long favored the sculpture of France, Italy, and the Low Countries to the virtual exclusion of the contributions of artists active in many other lands.Although there are excellent specialized studies in German and Czech, the field is scarcely addressed in English-language scholarship beyond the occasional reference to the Asam brothers.Trusted, the distinguished former curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has authored a wonderful overview.In her introduction, Trusted argues that a new style of sculpture emerged around 1600 in response to the Catholic reformation and the renewed stress on the roles of religious images.The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) and other conflicts, both political and confessional, served as the historical backdrop well into the eighteenth century.She defines her book as a "relatively concise introduction" (29).As such, it was necessary to select which artists and which centers of production to stress.The author devotes most of her insightful discussions for late seventeenth-and eighteenth-century works.She poses the question of why has this material not been well studied.In response, she contrasts the staunchly Catholic character of much of the sculpture with the subsequent rise of classicism.In the nineteenth and even into the twentieth centuries, "such emotive, melodramatic sculptures are seen as stylistically outlandish after the purity of the neo-classical style that held sway from the nineteenth century onwards" (28).The taint of German nationalism especially during the Nazi era further discouraged scholarly attention.Chapter 1 (Sculpture in South Germany 1600-40: Antecedents and International Currents) focuses on the rise of dynamic new sculpture in Augsburg and Munich around 1600.Hans Degler erected three monumental polychromed wooden altarpieces (1604-7) and Hans Reichle added the lifesize bronze Crucifixion group (1605) inside the Benedictine monastery of Sts.Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg.Trusted points out how the former recalls the celebrated late Gothic tradition of large carved altarpieces by Tilman Riemenschneider, among others, and the latter was directly inspired by the crucified Christ (1595) by Giambologna in St. Michael's, the Jesuit church in Munich.Yet, I would add, that the theatricality and emotional power of these works dramatically transcends their precedents.How was this renewal related to the post-Tridentine Catholic confessional engagement even in a bi-confessional town like Augsburg with its Protestant majority?Hubert Gerhard's
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