These porcelain miniatures were very much the only sphere in which sculpture in Germany proved to be of momentous significance. The sculptors dissipated their energies often enough in work of a decorative nature, as needed for buildings and parks. Therefore, sculpture asserted itself best in the places where a great deal of building was taking place.

 

The Prussian sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764-1850) was the son of a poor tailor. His first tutor was the not exceptionally gifted sculptor at the Court of Frederick the Great, Johann Peter Anton Tassaert (1729-1788), who would love to have paired off Schadow with his daughter, but Schadow moved to Vienna with another girl whose father not only approved of this insult but even gave him money for a trip to Italy. The stay in Rome, which lasted three years, left clear traces in Schadow’s style. In 1788 Schadow returned to Berlin and succeeded Tassaert as sculptor to the Court and Secretary of the Academy. Tassaert’s busts and statues, for example of General Seidlitz (1721-1773) and James Keith (1696-1758), show him to be the heir of Dutch realism. It was not until he had worked in Paris for a fairly long time that Frederick the Great summoned him to Berlin as Director of the Academy. In his career spanning fifty years he created more than two hundred works as varied in style as they were in subject matter.

 

Schadow’s first bigger work was the Mausoleum (1790) of Alexander von der Mark (1779-1789), who died as a child. In the Dorotheenkirche in Berlin, an allegorical composition incorporating the spirit of the Rococo age revealed his own natural emotions. This Alexander was an illegitimate son of the Frederick William II and his mistress the Countess Wilhelmine von Lichtenau (1753-1820), who was captured in the portrait Wilhelmine Enke, later von Lichtenbusch (1776) by the painter Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721-1782), the portrait painter of Frederick the Great.

 

Later Schadow veered more towards neoclassicism and created statues of Frederick the Great in Stettin, General von Blücher (1742-1819) in Rostock, and of Martin Luther (1483-1546) in Wittenberg. Amongst his portrait statues were depictions of Frederick the Great playing the flute, and the double portrait of Crown Princesses Louise and her sister (The Crown Princesses Louise and Friederike of Prussia). His busts, numbering over a hundred, include seventeen colossal heads in the “Valhalla” near Regensburg: to original dimensions he modelled busts of the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who was horrified by this unreasonable suggestion), Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), and the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). His work also included religious monuments and memorials.

 

Schadow’s Quadriga on top of the Brandenburg Gate and the allegorical frieze on the façade of the Royal Mint in Berlin were amongst the most beautiful studies modelled after classical art. As Director of the Berlin Academy, Schadow exerted a strong influence, although he was gradually pushed into the background by the Romanticists. He wrote a whole series of essays, about such subjects as the national physiognomy and similar themes. In addition, he created caricatures, lithographs and etchings.

 

Franz Xavier Messerschmidt (1736-1783) was another outstanding artist of the late Baroque and Early Classical periods. What distinguishes him from numerous other talented south German sculptors around the middle to the end of the 18th century is probably to do with his mental illness which started in the 1770s. Several of his self-portraits from this time came across almost as caricatures. Messerschmidt received his initial training from two uncles before he began an apprenticeship in 1746 with the late Baroque sculptor Johann Baptist Straub (1704-1784) in Munich. In 1755, he finally arrived at the Academy in Vienna, which for the next twenty years was to be his home. More or less appointed by Empress Maria Theresia (1717-1780) to be her Court Sculptor, he created magnificent, larger-than-life statues of her and her husband Franz I of Lorraine (1708-1765), which may be regarded as typical examples of Messerschmidt’s late Baroque style.