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Christiane Hertel, Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011). Pp. 270. $99.95.
Ignaz Günther is a sculptor well known in his native Germany, but entirely unfamiliar outside of it. His elegant rococo compositions grace the interiors of several important Bavarian ecclesiastical spaces, and a few have found their way to American and British museums. In general, though, his name remains little known; therefore, Christiane Hertel's book is a most welcome addition to the critical literature on eighteenth-century art. Incredibly, this is the first English-language study on Bavarian rococo art of any kind since Karsten Harries's The Bavarian Rococo Church, published nearly three decades ago. Hertel's book is no introductory monograph, however. It is a wide-ranging, ambitious, and intricately argued investigation of Günther's work which posits commonalities between religious art and the widespread retheorization of sculpture that took place in late eighteenthcentury philosophy. As such, it is a novel and surprising text quite without parallel in the critical literature.
Hertel's intent is less historical or biographical than it is theoretical, and her book contributes as much to the study of eighteenth-century art theory as it does to that of art itself. She employs a comparative method that alternates works by Günther with lengthy explorations of diverse texts, including works by such prominent thinkers as Winckelmann, Lessing, Hegel, Rousseau, Kant, and Herder, as well as more obscure personages like the historian Lorenz Westenrieder (1748- 1829). Hertel is particularly interested in passages...