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- Time
- Salzburg/Austria, around 1700
- Material
- carved lime wood
- Height
- ca. 35½ in
provenance: collection of Nikolaus Harnoncourt
cf.: H. Decker: Meinrad Guggenbichler, Vienna 1949, e.g. fig. 24 a. 85.
It is a particular pleasure for us to present these museum-quality Baroque sculptures of the best provenance – from the collection of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Collecting first-class European art was a shared passion of the maestro and his wife, the violinist Alice Harnoncourt. The carved sculptures shown here, depicting St. Florian and St. George, were probably created by one of the greatest masters of Baroque sculpture, Meinrad Guggenbichler (1649-1723).
Born in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, Meinrad Guggenbichler received his training in Dillingen, Bavaria, and worked in Upper Austria and Salzburg starting around 1670. As a monastic sculptor, his primary residence was at Mondsee Abbey. Guggenbichler‘s magnificent altars (Salzburg Collegiate Church, Mondsee Basilica, Michaelbeuern Benedictine Abbey, St. Wolfgang‘s Pilgrimage Church, etc.) significantly influenced the art of Austrian woodcarving around 1700. Sculptures by the master can be found in the collections of the Salzburg Cathedral Museum, the Belvedere in Vienna, the Bavarian National Museum and the Upper Austrian State Museum, among others.
The present pair of museum-quality sculptures shows a close relationship to the representations of the same knightly saints created by Guggenbichler in 1682-88 for the high altar of the Irrsdorf succursal church (Straßwalchen, Salzburg). Similar parallels can also be seen in Guggenbichler‘s Saint Florian in the Salzburg succursal church of Kirchberg near Eugendorf (1707) as well as the Saints Florian and George in the parish church of Schleedorf (Salzburg, 1699-1701).