DESTROYED WORKS OF ART...
Hermann Graser Natural Stone Works, Bamberg
our thousands of such youths just as beautiful as this Antonius. But for now, the gods have given just one man the power and skill to liberate one of these youths from the mountain – and now he stands in all his beauty before you!“ I have never again heard any comparably moving definition of the art of sculpture, such a wonderful description of the metamorphosis of the dead, stone, cold, white material into an animated, great spirit! I recalled this over and again as I visited quarries in Saxony and Silesia, where they are now breaking up huge, heavy stones, from which the palace façades are being created. We give you an impression of this with the picture on page 41. In the days of Andreas Schlüter over 300 years ago, the sculpting team‘s journeymen laboriously chiselled out the rough contours of the sculpture by hand. As it was then, this remains today the most time-consuming stage on the stone‘s way to becoming a work of art, and later you see nothing of it. It is only through the enormously increased productivity of computer-controlled saws, robots, deburring metal brushes and other technical aids extending all the way to pneumatic chisels that it is possible to remove the large quantities of stone, which used to hide the work of art and that now through this processing crumble away as dust and waste. Then comes the stone sculptor and gives the blank its individual touch, which then makes it into a great work of art that we will enjoy seeing later on the palace façades.
Hermann Graser Natural Stone Works, Bamberg
Pneumatically assisted precision two-handed work by the sculptor
Applying fluting to the stone is still a completely manual job.
Hofman Natural Stone, Werbach-Gamburg
32 The Berliner Schloss Post