The Pygmalion Impulse in Historic Preservation: The Dresden Zwinger
Among Dresden's landmarks, the Zwinger by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann and Balthasar Permoser (1709-1728) offers a uniquely complex opportunity to study the Pygmalion impulse, focus of much recent scholarly attention, in the context of historic preservation where it has not been examined. First f...
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| Published in: | Oxford art journal 2011-06, Vol.34 (2), p.203-226 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Among Dresden's landmarks, the Zwinger by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann and Balthasar Permoser (1709-1728) offers a uniquely complex opportunity to study the Pygmalion impulse, focus of much recent scholarly attention, in the context of historic preservation where it has not been examined. First formulated in the eighteenth-century aesthetic writings of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Pygmalion impulse may be traced in the debates, practices and publications related to the Zwinger's history of destructions, restorations and reconstructions, following the destructions in the Seven Years War and World War II and German Reunification in 1990. Invocations of Pygmalion's creative and re-creative identification with sculpture and sculpturally perceived architecture fold in subjects as diverse as the overlapping private and public spheres of viewing art, an ethics of living up to a sculptural model or failing to do so, tactile memory, modern intervention, and art's therapeutic power. This essay uses recent scholarship on sculptural imagination and historic preservation to interpret the Pygmalion impulse in the Zwinger and its rich documentary evidence from the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries in Dresden's archives, libraries and museums. |
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| ISSN: | 0142-6540 1741-7287 |