Identifier: appreciationofsc00stur (find matches)
Title: Appreciation of sculpture; a handbook by Russell Sturgis ...
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Sturgis, Russell
Subjects: Sculpture
Publisher: The Baker
Contributing Library: Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO

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was designed by Visconti, andthere are two admirable symbolical statuesby James Pradier, with the seated one ofMoliere by Bernard Gabriel Seurre. Thisis the finest of the wall fountains of moderntimes, and is almost a perfect type of whatwe should be aiming at for the adornmentof our American cities. As yet no one hasfound a way to appropriate the little pieceof ground necessary for the basin and thearchitectural mass, nor the blank wallagainst which it is to be set up. In Vienna the monument to the EmpressMaria Theresia (Plate LIX), the work ofKaspar Zumbusch and Karl, Freiherr vonHasenauer, was not completed until 1888,and yet is far more like the art of thelanguid and indifferent age which came toan end about 1850, than is the monumentjust described, which dates from 1845.There are four equestrian statues of four ofthe military chiefs of the reign, and be-tween them four standing figures of thestatesmen of the time, Kaunitz, the famousChancellor, in the middle of our picture,(19^)
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Plate LIX.—MONUMENT TO THE EMPRESS MARIA THERESIA, QUEEN OF HUN-GARY AND BOHEMIA, IN VIENNA, AUSTRIA. THE SCULPTURE liY G, C.ZUMBUSCH (B. 1830), I Recent Art, Part III, Monumental Effect with the collar of the Order of the GoldenFleece on his breast and dressed in hisofficial robes of ceremony. These figuresare all above life-size, and the seatedstatue of the Empress is colossal. Thereare, moreover, four groups, not in relief,but rather in the form of statues relievedagainst the background formed by thepedestal, and these again are portrait fig-ures of the military and civil celebritieswho served the empress. Moreover, thepedestal itself is not ill designed, a goodorder, well proportioned, and the manage-ment of the niches between the coupledcolumns more than usually successful; andyet the whole thing is uninteresting in avery surprising w^ay, and it is worth anyones time and efibrt to discover the reasonfor this comparative failure. As we lookat the single statue of Kaunitz it will

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