Balthasar Permoser

Who was Balthasar Permoser?

Balthasar Permoser was among the leading sculptors of his generation, whose evolving working styles spanned the late Baroque and early Rococo.

Permoser was born in Kammer bei Waging, Salzburg, today a part of the Bavarian town of Traunstein. 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.