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The Berliner Bildhauerschule / Berlin School of Sculpting

For more than one century, from around 1820 to 1920, the Berliner Bildhauerschule was giving directions to the style and the development of the art of sculpting in Europe and overseas. Its adherents became above all famous for their big sculptural works by   public contract, their memorials, monumental arcitectural sculptures, and sculptures for tombs. 

Andreas Schlüter (1660-1714) can be seen as the intellectual father of the Berliner Bildhauerschule. He was called to Berlin as court sculptor already in 1694 where he shaped the course of art under the comission of the king from 1699 onwards. The Berliner Bildhauerschule finally won international renown with Gottfried Schadow (1764-1850). His work had been influenced by Antonio Canovas’ early classicism in Rome as well as Winckelmann’s image of the ancient world in Greece. His art blossomed under the promotion of King Friedrich Wilhelm II. Schadow’s most important pupil was Christian Daniel Rauch (1777-1857) who himself was strongly influenced by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Bertel Thorvaldsen. Humbold became Rauch’s mentor, whereas Rauch cultivated a close and long lasting friendship with Thorvaldsen. He also was the proclaimed favourite of the succeeding King Friedrich Wilhelm III. That is why Schadow, who had taken note of Rauch in his early time in Berlin and had smoothed the way for him as a sculptor, fell behind. Albert Wolff (1814-1892) and Reinhold Begas (1831-1911) belonged to Rauch’s   absolutely style-influencing school which significantly shaped art in Berlin well into the times of the Wilhelminian style / Gründerzeit. While Wolff maintained and taught Rauch’s contemporal portrait character and measured realism paired with the classic style, Begas, who had been especially impressed by Bernini’s works while in Rome, became the main representative of the Wilhelminian neo-baroque / WilhelminischerNeubarock. Fritz Schaper (1841-1919), who had been Albert Wolff’s pupil, was again more rooted in Rauch’s tradition of a noble image of humanity coined by German idealism. Amongst the pupils of the latter are such artistic genii as Peter Breuer, Emil and Robert Cauer, Hans Hubert Dietsch, Gustav Eberlein, Max Esser, Reinhold Felderhoff, Else Fürst, Edmund Gomansky, Gerhard Janensch, Paul Leibküchler, Ferdinand Lepcke, Wolfgang Schaper, Ernst Seger, Ernst Waegener oder Cuno von Uechtritz.

The Galerie Kunst+ collects and documents increasingly rare models from the small-scale sculptural work of the epoch. Amongst them are portrait busts, statuettes, insignia and medallions, allegorical figures, genre figures, realistic depictions of the world of industrial labour around 1900, and artistic contributions to tenderings for memorials. To make these works of art accessible to the interested public, authorised bronze casts in limited edition have been produced. They are cast in the millenia-old, very elaborate, and technically sophisticated lost-wax process and are traditionally chiselled and patinated by hand. This technique was readopted at the end of the 19^th century. It complied with contemporal requirements of style for a faithful rendering of a living texture. By tying in with the outstanding accomplishments of the bronze cast in the ancient world and the renewal of its hey-day in the renaissance, this method reached a very high importance. Today these bronze sculptures again stand out for their excellent artistic design and their high aesthetic quality.  

“The Golden Proportion” in the Analysis of J. W. Goethe’s “Altar des Guten Glücks” 

 






Three-dimensionally, the sphere results from the area diagonal of the circumscribing cube in which the sculpture is situated; whereas the cube’s side on which the sphere lies results from the doubling of the sphere’s golden section.

Of more interest is that 1.618 is the actual “golden number” and also nondimensional. But if it is measured it in cm, it has the exact magnitude of the cube which virtually encloses the sculpture.

Goethe’s monument was erected in 1777 and the metre as measuring unit was only introduced in 1791 after the French Revolution.
Antonia Santarelli                                                                                                 To the German Version