Balthasar Ferdinand Moll

Who was Balthasar Ferdinand Moll?

Balthasar Ferdinand Moll 4 January 1717 – Vienna 3 March 1785 was one of the most famous sculptors in Vienna during the height of the Baroque era

He came from a Tyrolean family of sculptors. His first training was from his father Nikolaus Moll. He went to the Vienna Academy in 1738, but his artistic inheritance is really from the great Viennese sculptor Georg Raphael Donner. He taught at the Vienna Academy from 1751 to 1754. One of his pupils at the Vienna Academy was Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. His later work possesses classical character.

In 1739 he decorated the pulpit of the Church of the Servites in Vienna with monumental figures, representing the virtues of Faith, Love and Hope. The statuettes in walnut and stained ivory, now on display in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, served as model for the pulpit, and show already his virtuosity. He made a funeral monument for general count Leopold Daun at the wall of the George chapel in the Augustinian church in Vienna.

He was used initially at the Viennese court for the design and manufacture of floats and showy sledges. He was soon to become the leading sculptor in the Late Baroque art of courtly representation.