Balthasar Permoser

Balthasar Permoser (13 August 1651 – 18 February 1732) was among the leading sculptors of his generation,[1] whose evolving working styles spanned the late Baroque and early Rococo.

He was trained first in Salzburg, in the workshop of Wolf Weißenkirchner the Younger and in Vienna, where he learned the art of ivory carving, before he left in 1675 on a trip to Florence to work for Giovanni Battista Foggini, in whose studio he remained fourteen years, maturing his style.

[citation needed] In 1697, on the way to Italy once more, Permoser remained almost a year in his old haunts during which he sculpted the atlantes for the west doorway of the Hofstallung in Salzburg.

[citation needed] In 1710, Permoser returned to Dresden to collaborate with the architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann on the Zwinger palace, built 1710–28 for Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, where he provided full-blown Roman Baroque sculptural details; for the Wallpavillon he provided six of the twelve festive, flexing, grimacing atlantes for which he is most remembered.

[citation needed] Permoser's most famous independent, free-standing sculpture is an over-lifesize marble Apotheosis of Prince Eugene (1718–21; Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna), where the main figure, depicted with the attributes of Hercules, and secondary figures of Fame and a fallen Turk are linked in a tour-de-force of complicated Berninian diagonals that did not satisfy Prince Eugene of Savoy's classicizing taste.