1. 1700 1750 1800 Continual warfare and political instability mark the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in central Europe. Throughout the period, the power of the Habsburg empire grows in Austria and Hungary but wanes in Germany, where Prussian and Saxon leaders wield increasing influence. When they are not actively engaged in warfare, however, the many wealthy noblemen competing for power in the region are happy to support the arts. Scores of artists are employed in Vienna, the Habsburg capital, but many more work in other burgeoning cities, such as Dresden, Munich, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, and Bratislava. The rift between Catholics and Protestants continues to cause conflict, and dynastic struggles among ambitious princes engender continual violence. Despite these upheavals, however, the arts develop with unprecedented vigor. A distinctive and long-lived Baroque style is forged in Austria, and throughout the German-speaking countries, literature and music flourish along with architecture, painting, and industry. 1710 At Dresden, the capital of Saxony, construction begins on the Zwinger, an ornate setting for the court festivities of the bold elector Frederick Augustus, who also rules as Augustus the Strong, king of Poland, from 1697. The architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann conceives the structure as a courtyard of vast dimensions surrounded by pavilions of fanciful form; one is equipped as a nymphaeum with a waterfall, and another recalls a triumphal arch with an open three- bayed arcade on the ground floor and an enclosed space above. Balthasar Permoser (1651–1732) creates a rich and fanciful program of sculptural ornament, including heavy garlands, lively atlas figures, and a host of animated personifications. The ornately decorated staircases, galleries, and walkways laid throughout the Zwinger provide a sumptuous background for the movements of Frederick Augustus' courtiers, both when they parade in state and when they stand as spectators for each other. 1714 The war hero Prince Eugene of Savoy begins construction on the first of two palaces at the Belvedere, his beautiful summer property near Vienna. Because the Habsburgs had rewarded him generously for his military successes, he can afford to build both residences with remarkable speed: the first, the Lower Belvedere, is completed in three years, and the second, the Upper Belvedere, in two (1721–22). The architect Lukas von Hildebrandt fills both with spectacular rooms, ceremonial stairways, and daring sculptural details; he also employs numerous Italian painters to decorate the ceilings, including Martino Altomonte, Marcantonio Chiarini, Gaetano Fanti, and Carlo Innocenzo Carloni. Later, Prince Eugene's heirs sell the Belvedere to the Habsburgs, who convert it into a public picture gallery, the world's first, in 1776. 1715 In Vienna, work begins on the Karlskirche, the fulfillment of a vow made by the emperor Charles IV and the culmination of the prolific career of the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723). Three years before, in 1712, Fischer von Erlach had compiled an illustrated treatise on architectural history, describing not only exemplary buildings in Italy, where he had trained with Gian Lorenzo Bernini, but also reconstructions of legendary ancient monuments and imaginative views of Far Eastern buildings. In his design for the Karlskirche, he draws on his vast erudition by integrating features borrowed from eclectic sources: the facade, for example, has a pediment and columns like a classical temple, as well as a dome set on a high drum in the manner of Michelangelo, but of an oval plan reminiscent of Borromini's architecture. In front of the church, he places two free- standing columns adorned with spiraling figural friezes, elements that allude simultaneously to the Pillars of Hercules, the Temple of Solomon, and the monuments of the Roman emperors Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. 1734 Belgian-born architect Jean François Cuvilliés, the Elder (1695–1768) designs the Amalienburg Pavilion, a delicate little building meant for resting in the gardens of the Nymphenburg Palace near Munich, a residence of the electors of Bavaria. Cuvilliés had studied in Paris and brought the newest trends in Rococo design to Munich. The interior of the Amalienburg, one of his most accomplished buildings, is reminiscent of a jewel box, painted in pastel colors and adorned with mirrors, porcelain, and crystal chandeliers. 1748 Giuseppe and Carlo Galli Bibiena of Bologna complete the Margrave's Opera House (Markgräfliches Opernhaus) in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth for the Markgräfin Willhelmine, sister of Frederick II of Prussia. The theater allows for extravagant performances both on the stage and in the auditorium: the latter is equipped with three tiers of boxes meant for audiences of glittering courtiers, and the former is graced with ingenious sets whose deep perspectives, designed by the Galli Bibiena, seem continuous with the spectators' space. Opera, a new art form in the eighteenth century, realized an integration of all the arts in lavish spectacles and so fulfilled an aspiration felt throughout the Baroque period. The opera house at Bayreuth, embellished with gilding and lit with hundreds of candles, is meant for an aristocratic audience and closed to those outside the court, but its example impresses the nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner, who builds his own more democratic Festival Theater nearby in 1872. 1754 The architect Dominikus Zimmermann (1685–1766), and his brother, the painter and stucco master Johann Baptist Zimmermann (1680–1758), complete Die Wies, a delightful church in southern Germany. The walls are pierced with large windows that admit bright sunlight, and the interior is encrusted with stucco ornament as delicate as molded sugar. Frescoed on the ceiling is a Rococo translation of a dire and venerable theme, the Last Judgment: here, Christ sits on a rainbow above figures in courtly poses and pastel draperies. Die Wies becomes a popular destination for eighteenth- century pilgrims and offers them a vision of paradise full of grace and light. 1754 Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) moves to Dresden, where he forms a negative judgment of contemporary art and a notion that conscientious imitation of classical Greek models may redeem it. The following year, he publishes an impassioned and influential treatise entitled "Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture," and leaves Germany for Rome, where he continues to promote the Neoclassical revival and writes a magisterial history of ancient art, the first to classify antiquities by style and period. 1755 The great subversive wit and writer Voltaire (1694–1778) flees France and goes to Geneva, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been living since 1712. Switzerland, weak and impoverished throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nevertheless supplies mercenaries to the other European powers and offers refuge for free-thinkers persecuted elsewhere. 1770 The Swiss painter and draftsman Henri Fuseli (1741– 1825) goes to Rome and joins an expanding circle of artists working in the Neoclassical mode. Although he draws works of ancient statuary and studies other monuments of classical antiquity, Fuseli soon distinguishes himself for painting scenes that bring to life irrational fears and nightmarish apparitions. 1772 The German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832) publishes an essay on German architecture. Although his education predisposes him to admire all things classical, Goethe expresses admiration for Gothic buildings, in his day regarded as emblems of superstition and barbarism. Throughout his career as a novelist, essayist, scientist, and playwright, Goethe finds a way both to embrace time-honored forms and to challenge received ideas. In addition to works of classical drama and tales in the spirit of Sturm und Drang, Goethe writes inspired essays on art. Beginning in 1776, he assists Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar in the creation of a pleasure park at Weimar, complete with architectural follies of Gothic and classical design. 1794 The German sculptor Johann Heinrich Dannecker (1758–1841) makes a stucco bust of his long-time friend, the author Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), whose writings blend the classical tradition with the passionate stirrings of early Romanticism. Dannecker represents Schiller accordingly as a young man with Apollonian features, bare shoulders, long locks of hair, and an expression both noble and brooding. 1798 In Munich, Alois Senefelder (1771– 1834) invents lithography, a printmaking technique in which impressions are made from a stone inked in a greasy medium. Although Senefelder developed the process to reduce the costs of printing music, he soon recognizes its potential for the graphic arts. In the nineteenth century, lithography is used widely by commercial printers as well as by artists, including Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Francisco Goya, and Adolph Menzel. Central Europe and Germany – 1700-1800

2. Gaetano Fanti Gaetano Fanti (1687 - 1759) was an Italian fresco painter. In 1715 Fanti was appointed by Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna. Together with figure painters such as Johann Michael Rottmayr, Paul Troger and Bartolomeo Altomonte he was involved in major frescoes. He is particularly noted for his work in Austria, including at the Karlskirche, the Melk Abbey, the Belvedere Palace and the Klosterneuburg Monastery. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (20 July 1656 – 5 April 1723) was an Austrian architect, sculptor, and architectural historian whose Baroque architecture profoundly influenced and shaped the tastes of the Habsburg Empire. His influential book A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture (1721) was one of the first and most popular comparative studies of world architecture. His major works include Schönbrunn Palace, Karlskirche, and the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and Schloss Klessheim, Holy Trinity Church, and the Collegiate Church in Salzburg. Fischer's expertise in town planning made itself felt in designs he executed for the Archbishop of Salzburg. Particularly accomplished are two churches, the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (1694–1702) and the (1696–1707), whose highly pitched domes and towers, convex facades, and dynamic forms irrevocably changed the outline of Salzburg. The archbishop's country seat, Schloss Klessheim (1700–09), was also designed by him. Fischer's visit to Dalmatia brought back to Western Europe the influence of the classical Diocletian's Palace and provided Europe with one of the first professional architectural glimpses of this notable Roman monument. After Joseph I's death in 1711, Fischer von Erlach was rarely entrusted with new commissions, as the more pleasing and less demanding designs of his rival Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt proved more popular with the young monarch Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor and his court. He found an opportunity to draw some of the finest architectural reconstructions of the buildings of Antiquity, which were published in his groundbreaking Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture in 1721. He was also made responsible for various administrative tasks, which would take a large portion of his energy and time. Clam-Gallas Palace in Prague, commenced in 1713, was one of his last designs for a stately town residence. The structure, much imitated by later architects, highlights Fischer's enthusiasm for Palladian facades, which became ever more pronounced during the last period of his work. But it is Karlskirche in Vienna, started in 1715, that most fully illustrates his late synthetic style. In this structure, completed by his son Joseph Emanuel, Fischer's ambition was to harmonize the principal elements and ideas that underlie the most significant churches in the history of Western architecture: the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the Pantheon and Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Dome des Invalides in Paris and Saint Paul's Cathedral in London. Dominikus Zimmermann Dominikus Zimmermann was born in Gaispoint near Wessobrunn in 1685 and became a Baumeister (Architect) and a stuccoist. His older brother Johann Baptist Zimmermann was an architect and a frescoist. Working together they produced masterpieces such as the church at Steinhausen. Dominikus Zimmermann descended from a family of artists and craftsmen belonging to the so-called Wessobrunner School, worked first as a stuccoist and later as a master builder and architect. Henri Fuseli (P264) Fuseli was born in Zürich, Switzerland, the second of 18 children. His father was Johann Caspar Füssli, a painter of portraits and landscapes, and author of Lives of the Helvetic Painters. He intended Henry for the church, and sent him to the Caroline college of Zurich, where he received an excellent classical education. One of his schoolmates there was Johann Kaspar Lavater, with whom he became close friends.[1] After taking orders in 1761 Fuseli was forced to leave the country as a result of having helped Lavater to expose an unjust magistrate, whose powerful family sought revenge. He travelled through Germany, and then, in 1765, visited England, where he supported himself for some time by miscellaneous writing. Eventually, he became acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds, to whom he showed his drawings. Following Reynolds' advice, he decided to devote himself entirely to art. In 1770 he made an art-pilgrimage to Italy, where he remained until 1778, changing his name from Füssli to the more Italian-sounding Fuseli.[1] Early in 1779 he returned to Britain, taking in Zürich on his way. In London he found a commission awaiting him from Alderman Boydell, who was then setting up his Shakespeare Gallery. Fuseli painted a number of pieces for Boydell, and published an English edition of Lavater's work on physiognomy. He also gave William Cowper some valuable assistance in preparing a translation of Homer. In 1788 Fuseli married Sophia Rawlins (originally one of his models), and he soon after became an associate of the Royal Academy.[1] The early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose portrait he had painted, planned a trip with him to Paris, and pursued him determinedly, but after Sophia's intervention the Fuselis' door was closed to her forever. Fuseli later said "I hate clever women. They are only troublesome".[2] In 1790 he became a full Academician, presenting Thor battering the Midgard Serpent as his diploma work.[3] In 1799 Fuseli was appointed professor of painting to the Academy. Four years later he was chosen as Keeper, and resigned his professorship, but resumed it in 1810, continuing to hold both offices until his death.[1] As Keeper, he was succeeded by Henry Thomson. In 1799 Fuseli exhibited a series of paintings from subjects furnished by the works of John Milton, with a view to forming a Milton gallery comparable to Boydell's Shakespeare gallery. There were 47 Milton paintings, many of them very large, completed at intervals over nine years. The exhibition proved a commercial failure and closed in 1800. In 1805 he brought out an edition of Pilkington's Lives of the Painters, which did little for his reputation.[1] Antonio Canova, when on his visit to England, was much taken with Fuseli's works, and on returning to Rome in 1817 caused him to be elected a member of the first class in the Academy of St Luke.[1] Johann Heinrich Dannecker Johann Heinrich von Dannecker (October 16, 1758 - December 8, 1841) was a German sculptor. He was entered in the military school at the age of thirteen, but from 1772 to 1780 he was educated as a sculptor. In his eighteenth year he carried off the prize at the Concours with his model of Milo of Crotona. On this the duke made him sculptor to the palace (1780), and for some time he was employed on child-angels and caryatids for the decoration of the reception rooms. After finishing the academy in 1780, he travelled to Paris, Rome, Bologna and Mantua and returned to Stuttgart in 1790, where he worked as a professor at the Hohe Karlsschule until 1794. Apart from some short trips he never left Stuttgart again. His works now showed the double influence of his admiration for Antonio Canova and his study of the antique. The first was a girl lamenting her dead bird, which pretty leitmotif (theme) was much admired. Afterwards, Sappho, in marble for the Lustschloss, and two offering-bearers for the Jagdschloss; Hector, not in marble; the complaint of Ceres, from Schiller's poem; a statue of Christ; Psyche; kneeling water-nymph; Love, a favourite he had to repeat. In 1804, he did the initial draft of "Ariadne on the Panther", which he finished from 1810 to 1824, generally regarded as his masterpiece and one of the most important sculptures of the 19th century. After the death of his schooltime friend Friedrich Schiller, Dannecker created a bust of him, which was copied by his sculptor friend Reinhold Begas for the monumental Schiller statue erected on Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt. In 1823 and 1824 he created a bust of John the Baptist. Lucas von Hildebrandt Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt was born on 14 November 1668 in Genoa (Italy). Hildebrandt was the son of an Italian mother and a German father. Hildebrandt studied under C. Fontana in Rome, and he studied civil and military engineering under Prince Eugene of Savoy also in Rome, and military engineering in Piedmont. Hildebrandt became the favourite architect of Prince Eugène. In 1696, Hildebrandt established himself thereafter in the Austrian capital, Vienna, where he worked for such noble families as the Dauns, Harrachs, Schönborns, and Starhembergs, and also Prince Eugene himself. In 1700, Hildebrandt became Hofburg court engineer, in 1711, head of the Court dept. of building, and in 1723, Hildebrandt became Hofburg Court architect. At the Hofburg, however, Hildebrandt could not assert himself against the rivalry of the two Fischer von Erlachs (father Johann Bernhard and son Joseph Emanuel) and worked mainly for aristocrats. Unlike the monumental works of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Hildebrandt's works seem more committed at a personal level and include more decorative elements. This helped his popularity spread to the middle class. Hildebrandt united Italian and French elements and shaped the development of the baroque style in south Germany and Austria. From 1713 to 1716, he was employed by the wealthy and powerful Kinsky family of Austria, building their residence, the Palais Kinsky, in Vienna. From 1723 on, he was inspector- general of the imperial buildings. His two best known works, the Upper Belvedere (1721–1722) and the Lower Belvedere (1714–1716), were both commissioned by Prince Eugene of Savoy. Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt died on 16 November 1745 in Vienna.

3. Balthasar Permoser (P316) Balthasar Permoser (13 August 1651 – 18 February 1732) was among the leading sculptors of his generation, 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. Called to Dresden in 1689 by Johann Georg III, Elector of Saxony, he executed two monumental garden sculptures of Hercules. In 1697, on the way to Italy once more, he remained almost a year in his old haunts during which he sculpted the atlantes for the west doorway of the Hofstallung in Salzburg. In the years 1704–1710 he worked at the Schloß Charlottenburg near Berlin. Then he 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. For the Zwinger he also provided the sculptures for the Nymphenbad fountain. He died in Dresden. His 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. His two polychromed wood figures of St Augustine and St Ambrose, made for the high altar of the Dresden Hofkirche (1725), are in the Stadtmuseum, Bautzen, while the sculptural pulpit he carved for the chapel of Augustus was relocated in the Hofkirche, begun in 1738. Marcantonio Chiarini Marcantonio Chiarini (c. 1652–1730) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque period. Chiarini was employed by the architect Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt in the fresco decoration of the upper and lower Belvedere palaces near Vienna, work shared with Martino Altomonte, Gaetano Fanti, and Carlo Carlone. Carlo Innocenzo Carlone (P238) He was a native of Scaria, near Como, in Lombardy, and the son of a sculptor. He preferred painting. He studied at Venice and at Rome, with Francesco Trevisani until he was 23 years of age, when he visited Germany, where he has left works in oil and in fresco at Ludwigsburg, Passau, Linz, Breslau, Prague, and Vienna. He painted large decorative fresco cycles for palaces in Vienna, Prague and Southern Germany. For example, Carlone is known for painting the ceiling images in the Upper Belvedere of the Belvedere palace complex. His The Glorification of Saints Felix and Adauctus (1759–1761) was commissioned for the cupola of the church of San Felice del Benaco on Lake Garda. He died at Como. As an engraver he has left us the following plates, mostly from his own compositions : Conception of the Virgin. The Holy Family, with St. John kissing the Foot of Jesus. St Charles Borromeo meeting the Plague-stricken. The Death of a Saint. Allegorical subject of Opulence, for a ceiling. Figure with a Crown, Another subject for a ceiling. Group of Children with a Basket of Flowers. François Cuvilliés Cuvilliés was so diminutive in stature that it was as a court dwarf he first came to the notice of the currently exiled Max Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, who detected the young dwarf's aptitude and had him tutored in mathematics, then underwrote his further education with Joseph Effner and sent him to Paris, 1720–24, where he trained in the atelier of Jean-François Blondel, On his return to Munich he was appointed court architect, at first in conjunction with Effner. At the Elector's death in 1726, for a time Cuvilliés worked at Schloss Brühl for the new Elector's brother, Clemens August of Bavaria. He provided designs for the chapel at Brūhl, (1730–40) and the hunting lodge Falkenlust (1729–40) but as Charles Albert's interests shifted to Munich, he also returned to Munich. There his fame was established by the decors of the Reiche Zimmer in the Munich Residenz, which had been damaged by a fire, 14 December 1729. His masterpiece is the Amalienburg in the park at Nymphenburg, built 1734-39, with silvered or gilded naturalist Rococo decorations set off by coloured grounds. As the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica commented, "his style, while essentially thin, is often painfully elaborate and bizarre. He designed mirrors and consoles, balustrades for staircases, ceilings and fireplaces, and in furniture, beds and commodes especially". The Residenztheater, or "Cuvilliés Theatre" (1751–1755) designed and constructed for Elector Max III Joseph by Cuvilliées; though the theatre was bombed during World War II, the carved and gilded boxes had been dismantled and stored for security. Afterwards the Residenztheatre was meticulously recreated in the 1950s. He wrote several treatises on artistic and decorative subjects, which were edited by his son, François de Cuvilliés the Younger, who succeeded his father at the court of Munich. From 1738 he embarked on his lifelong series of suites of engravings of wall-panelling, cornices, furniture and wrought-iron work, which were then published in Munich and distributed in Paris and doubtless elsewhere; they served to disseminate the Rococo throughout Europe. Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (May 3, 1662 - January 17, 1736) was a German master builder who helped to rebuild Dresden after the fire of 1685. Pöppelmann was born in Herford. As court architect for the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, Augustus II the Strong, he designed the grandiose Zwinger palace in Dresden. He was also in charge of major works at Dresden Castle, Pillnitz Castle and he designed the Vineyard Church (Weinbergkirche) in Pillnitz. Pöppelmann developed an urban plan for a portion of the city of Warsaw, Poland, which was only partially realized, including the Saxon Axis and other important streetscapes. He died in Dresden in 1736.