Balthasar Ferdinand Moll
Balthasar Ferdinand Moll (Innsbruck, Tirol 4 January 1717 – Vienna 3 March 1785) was one of the most famous
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He came from a Tyrolean family of sculptors. His first training was from his father Nikolaus Moll. He went to the Vienna Academy in 1738, but his artistic inheritance is really from the great Viennese sculptor Georg Raphael Donner (1693–1741). He taught at the Vienna Academy from 1751 to 1754. One of his pupils at the Vienna Academy was Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783). His later work possesses classical character.
In 1739 he decorated the pulpit of the Church of the Servites in Vienna with monumental figures, representing the virtues of Faith, Love and Hope. The statuettes in walnut and stained ivory, now on display in the
He was used initially at the Viennese court for the design and manufacture of floats and showy sledges. He was soon to become the leading sculptor in the Late Baroque art of courtly representation.
His work in Vienna includes about twenty tombs of the Habsburg imperial family in the
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He also worked on the sarcophagi of emperor Karl VI (with the famous skull with the crown of the Holy Roman Empire), his wife the empress Elisabeth Christine, and emperor Joseph I.
He decorated numerous Austrian churches, palaces and castles with statues, bas-reliefs and crucifixes. He also participated at the decoration with statues of the Triumphal Arch for Emperor Leopold II at Innsbruck.
He produced the 1781 equestrian statues of that emperor Franz II that stands in the
References
- Benezit E. – Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs; Librairie Gründ, Paris, 1976; ISBN 2-7000-0155-9(in French)
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