Pygmalion in Bavaria

“This is an extraordinary book. Extraordinary is Hertel's command of eighteenth-century aesthetic art theory, extraordinary her command of Bavarian Rococo art, especially the art of Ignaz Günther, and extraordinary the depth of her understanding of the religious culture of eighteenth-century Bavaria. Pygmalion in Bavaria may seem to be a book for a small number of specialists. But the spell of Ignaz Günther's art should ensure that this unusually engaging text will find the readers that it deserves and will help secure, in the English-speaking world, Günther's place among the major artists of the eighteenth century.”

—Karsten Harries, Yale University

“Now at last Christiane Hertel, professor at Bryn Mawr, will introduce Günther in English to future generations with a thoughtful book that goes well beyond the conventional monograph to probe the Bavarian Rococo, for example as a religious combination of the visionary with a personally subjective totality, ‘commemorative in a quasi-Lutheran sense.’ Such piety distances Ignaz Günther from modern taste, so here Hertel fills a real need to reconstitute his aesthetic ambitions, while subtly suggesting that his works may lie open to theological questioning in their own era.”

—Larry Silver Historians of Netherlandish Art Newsletter