From 19 July to twenty October 2024, the Sculpture Assortment and Museum of Byzantine Artwork (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) and the Bavarian Nationwide Museum, Munich, current “Golden Passion: Georg Petel and the enigma of his crucifixion group”
Supply: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin · Picture: Portrait of Georg Petel by Anthony van Dyck (element), 1628. Bavarian State Portray Collections.
The studio exhibition solves an thrilling puzzle within the work of the well-known Augsburg Baroque sculptor Georg Petel. It presents the spectacular reconstruction of his gilded crucifixion group from a crucifixus from the Bavarian Nationwide Museum in Munich – beforehand considered misplaced – and his virtuosically crafted shafts from the Bode Museum in Berlin.
From Georg Petel (1601/02-1634), the ingenious southern German Baroque sculptor, the Berlin Sculpture Assortment acquired two virtuously modelled figures of thieves forged in bronze in 1927. virtuously modelled and forged in bronze. They’re the 2 thieves Dismas and Gestas, who had been crucified along with Christ. Nonetheless, crucial a part of the ensemble – the Corpus Christi nailed to the cross – was lacking when it was bought. It was thought-about misplaced on the time. It was solely not too long ago {that a} bronze crucifix was surprisingly found within the depot of the Bavarian Nationwide Museum in Munich. which reveals quite a few analogies to the 2 Berlin thieves: The fabric, dimension, state of preservation of the hearth gilding and, final however not least, the the breathtaking depiction of the anatomy are so strikingly comparable, that the Munich statuette might lastly be recognized because the lacking centre of Petel’s crucifixion group. The attribution primarily based on art-historical stylistic criticism was substantiated by elaborate technical evaluation strategies (laptop tomography and alloy analyses), thus proving the creation of all three figures in a typical workshop context.
The choice was shortly made to current these new findings to most of the people in an exhibition -a co-operation between the Sculpture Assortment and the Museum of Byzantine Artwork with the Bavarian Nationwide Museum in Munich. The small, beautiful present presents the reunited sculpture ensemble of the internationally lively and well-connected baroque sculptor in its inventive context with over a dozen loans from Berlin, Brussels, Weilheim, Vienna and French non-public collections.
