Ganymed (Zurich)
Ganymed is the name of a sculpture on the "Bürkliterrasse", on the side of the Bürkliplatz in Zurich facing Lake Zurich . It forms the central eye-catcher of the square, which was completed in 1887, with the alpine panorama towering on the horizon . The sculpture was designed by the artist Hermann Hubacher as the "Abduction to Olympus " and unveiled in 1952 by the city of Zurich. It is owned by the city of Zurich's art collection.
The work shows the shepherd boy Ganymede , who stands opposite the seated eagle ( God the Father Zeus ) to be kidnapped by him into heaven and there to serve as cupbearer and bed companion.
history
The initiative and the commission for the design of the figure came from the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin , who wrote to Hubacher at the end of January 1942: “I'm coming back to an old idea: to donate a figure to the city of Zurich […]. It would have to be a male figure (Zurich already has a lot of females) and of a strict form in such a way that the law of the building comes through, disciplined beauty! The architectural version should also be very specific. " 1942 was also the year in which the impunity for homosexuality was introduced in Switzerland. Wölfflin had recognized that the male ideal of beauty was clearly underrepresented in the cityscape compared to female representations. Even at the beginning of the 21st century, that has still not changed.
Wölfflin donated the work to the city of Zurich, which inaugurated it in a ceremony on June 20, 1952.
description
Ganymede and the eagle face each other as larger-than-life bronze sculptures . Ganymede stretches his right arm vertically towards the sky away from the bird while it tries to make contact with the young man. In contrast to the traditional legend in which Ganymede was kidnapped, the pictorial representations of earlier works are different, from the struggling toddler Rembrandt to the full-blown young man at Briton Rivière (1840–1920), who sank Ganymede in a dream and lifts Ganymede up from the eagle wrapped in ribbons leaves. Hubacher interprets the imminent translocation quite differently, namely illustrated by the hand stretched out towards heaven that Ganymede himself asks Zeus to bring him up. Karl Meier writes about this in the magazine Der Kreis : “How wonderful, how unspeakably beautiful is this gesture that points upwards! How lovable and close to nature is this boy from our landscape. How lively in the broadest sense this sculpture has become! "
The beginning of Goethe's quotation from his hymn Ganymede is chiseled on the plinth , which reads: "As in the morning glow - you glow around me - spring, beloved!" The bronze is both signed by Hubacher and intended for the donor Wölfflin.
interpretation
Ganymede from the mythological world of legends is considered a male ideal of beauty. According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , this is an early memorial to same-sex love. In the homosexual movement of that time, the scene magazine Der Kreis celebrated the new sculpture with the words "[refute] the work of art in the most beautiful way the assertion of the inferiority of our inclination and becomes the fighting weapon against prejudice and ignorance".
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Heinrich Wölfflin: Autobiography, diaries and letters. Schwabe, Basel 1984, p. 477.
- ↑ a b Denis Martin: Zurich - the capital of gays and lesbians. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 15, 2002.
- ↑ Christoph Doswald : ‹Nudity is out of place›. Interview in the Tages-Anzeiger , July 12, 2016.
- ^ A b c Karl Meier : Ganymed and the eagle. In: Der Kreis , No. 9/1952, p. 14.
- ^ Ganymede , Wikisource
Coordinates: 47 ° 21 '58 " N , 8 ° 32' 28" E ; CH1903: six hundred eighty-three thousand two hundred eighty-five / 246713