Combat Between Horseman and Footsoldier

Balthasar Permoser · n.d.

Medium

Brush and white gouache and brown wash over red chalk and traces of graphite on brown tinted laid paper, laid down on card

Original size

24.1 × 19.5 cm (9 1/2 × 7 11/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

Combat Between Horseman and Footsoldier crackles with kinetic energy, its tangle of figures and weapons conveying the chaos of battle with rare immediacy for a work executed entirely on paper. Balthasar Permoser is best known as one of the great German Baroque sculptors — his dramatic, contorted figures defined the visual language of the Dresden court — but this drawing reveals a more intimate side of his artistic practice. Working in a richly layered technique, Permoser built up the composition using red chalk as a foundation, then deepened the shadows with brown wash and lifted the highlights with white gouache, all on a warm brown-tinted laid paper that functions almost like a mid-tone. The result is a drawing that thinks in three dimensions, which makes sense given that Permoser spent his career translating movement and tension into stone and wood. As a sculptor who trained in Florence and Rome during the height of the Baroque period, Permoser absorbed the influence of Bernini and brought that dramatic sensibility back north to Dresden, where it shaped an entire generation of Central European decorative art. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Permoser's layered tonal drama onto canvas, preserving the charged atmosphere and sculptural weight that make this small drawing punch well above its size.