Ludwig Schwanthaler

Ludwig Michael Schwanthaler, later ennobled as Ritter von Schwanthaler (26 August 1802 – 14 November 1848), was a German sculptor who taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.

Schwanthaler was born in Munich.

His family had been sculptors in Tyrol and Innviertel for three centuries; young Ludwig received his earliest lessons from his father, Franz Schwanthaler (1762–1820), and the father had been instructed by the grandfather. The last to bear the name was Xaver, who worked in his cousin Ludwig's studio and survived till 1854. For successive generations the family lived by the carving of busts and sepulchral monuments, and from the condition of craftsmen rose to that of artists.

From the Munich Gymnasium Schwanthaler passed as a student to the Munich Academy; at first he purposed to be a painter, but afterwards reverted to the sculptural arts of his ancestors. His talents received timely encouragement by a commission for an elaborate silver service for the king's table. Peter von Cornelius also befriended him; the great painter was occupied on designs for the decoration in fresco of the newly erected Glyptothek, and at his suggestion Schwanthaler was employed on the sculpture within the halls.

Thus arose between painting, sculpture, and architecture that union and mutual support which characterized the revival of the arts in Bavaria. Schwanthaler in 1826 went as a pensioner of the king to Rome, where he carried out a number of commissions, and on a second visit in 1832 Bertel Thorvaldsen gave him kindly help. His skill was so developed that on his return he was able to meet the extraordinary demand for sculpture occasioned by King Ludwig's passion for building new palaces, churches, galleries,and museums, and he became the fellow-worker of the architects Leo von Klenze, Friedrich von Gartner and Joseph Daniel Ohlmüller, and of the painters Cornelius, Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld and Karl Hess.

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