PROBABLY GERMAN, SECOND HALF 17TH CENTURY

The Southwestern German and Alpine workshops have excelled, since the Middle Ages, in carving small religious and secular figures, often contrasting the intensely-detailed carving with lustrous polished surfaces. The dense grain of these woods, boxwood and pear being the most desirable, allowed for this technical tour-de-force carving, such as in the present figure’s hair and the tendrils hanging from the left side of his face, which fall free from the face and are both gorgeous and incredibly fragile. Additionally, the polished surfaces are deceptively simple as they reveal a full understanding of the complex anatomy of the underlying endoskeleton. This figure, large and powerfully emotive, is a very handsome example of this tradition.

And while it relates to many of the figures produced by the Schwanthaler dynasty of wood carvers, who worked from the Baroque to the Biedermeier, specifically Johann Franz Schwanthaler (1683–1762), this figure has no obvious attributes that can specifically link the present figure to their workshops.