GUGGENBICHLER, Johann Meinrad

Swiss sculptor, active in Austria. One of the foremost Baroque artists producing carved wood altars in the alpine area of Upper Austria, he was the son of Georg Guggenbichler, who worked for Einsiedeln Monastery as a sculptor and master builder. Meinrad Guggenbichler’s works suggest that his travels as a young journeyman included areas of northern Italy. By 1670 he was working as an assistant to a woodcarver at the monastery of St Florian, near Linz, in Upper Austria. The greatest impact on the young artist came, however, from the local wood carving traditions of the Innviertel and the Salzburg Flachgau areas, where he had relations, a style reflected in such early works as the high altar (1675) in Strasswalchen Parish Church (extant, but no longer in original setting).

In 1679 he settled at Mondsee, to the east of Salzburg, where he worked principally for the monastery, creating polychromed wood sculpture. His first works for Mondsee’s monastery church are four carved wood altars: the Holy Ghost altar (1679-81), the Speisealtar (Corpus Christi altar; 1682-84), the Poor Souls altar (1682-84) and the Plague altar (1686). His sculptures at Mondsee of St Benedict and St Bernard in particular show the influence of works by Thomas Schwanthaler, the region’s leading sculptor during this period.

The first completely satisfactory integration of the architectural, sculptural and painted elements of an altarpiece in Guggenbichler’s oeuvre is the one he produced in 1690-91 for Michaelbeuern Monastery Church, Salzburg, which may also have been designed as well as carved by him.

At the end of the 1690s Guggenbichler received a number of commissions for parish churches in which, drawing on the Gothic tradition of the carved altarpiece, he used scenes with groups in high relief as the central feature of each altarpiece.

Guggenbichler’s last works include the altar to St Sebastian (1714) at the collegiate church at Mondsee, the altar to St Leonhard (1716) at Irrsdorf Pilgrimage Church-where his figure of St Sebastian is strikingly androgynous-the altar to Our Lady (1717) at Palting Parish Church and the four statues (1721-22) carved for the collegiate church, Salzburg.

Guggenbichler’s workshop maintained a large output, and the many repetitions by assistants of favourite themes often fall below the high standard of those made by Guggenbichler himself.