Achilles core

Tomb of A. Kern for Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeld in the Bergkirche zu Laudenbach from 1659

Tomb of A. Kern for Field Marshal von Hatzfeld zu Laudenbach, status 2002

Achilles Kern (born November 6, 1607 in Forchtenberg ; † January 20, 1691 ibid) was a German sculptor . He preferred to work in alabaster , in the style of the Northern European Baroque .

Life and works

Achilles Kern belonged to the fourth generation of the Kern family of sculptors, proven in Forchtenberg in Hohenlohe , who had an alabaster fracture there. He was the son and pupil of Michael II. In 1626 he was named as his father's assistant in setting up the pulpit in the pilgrimage church in Dettelbach . From 1627 to 1630 he did not live in Forchtenberg, but was probably on a journey. On his return he is likely to have assisted his father in completing the tomb for Count Philipp Ernst zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg and his wife Anna-Maria (1629/30) in the Protestant town church in Langenburg .

After his father's death in 1649, he took over the Kern workshop. From 1652 to 1655 he was employed at the Catholic mountain church in Laudenbach (near Weikersheim , Main-Tauber-Kreis ), which was built from 1412, although he was a Protestant . a. with the stonemason-like creation of a new west gable in simple baroque forms.

His main works, which are clearly attributed to the archives, are the two tombs for the imperial field marshal Count Melchior von Hatzfeldt , who died in 1658 and who acquired possessions and lordships in Franconia , to which Laudenbach also belonged, and in Silesia , where he died, during the Thirty Years' War would have. Slightly different in the motifs of the reliefs and in terms of the material, both carry a reclining figure of the deceased in armor on the cover plate and are in the forms of Northern European Baroque. As the first of the two tombs, Kern created in 1659 the tomb for the mountain church of the Sorrowful Mother in Laudenbach, in which the heart of the deceased was buried, from alabaster of two different origins , then until 1663 the tomb for the Jakobskirche in Prausnitz (Silesia), made of alabaster and marble, today Prusice (Poland), which received the body of Hatzfeld.

With Achilles Kern's death in 1691, the Kern sculpture workshop also closed.

literature

• Josef Müller : Kern, Achilles . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 20 : Kaufmann – Knilling . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1927, p. 176 .
• Handbook of German Art Monuments, Baden-Württemberg I , edited by Dagmar Zimdars et al., Munich / Berlin 1993, pp. 95, 143, 456, 662, 815.
• Judith Breuer, Otto Wölbert, Gabriele Grassegger, Georg Schmid, Robert Vix: The tomb of Melchior von Hatzfeld in the mountain church in Laudenbach. Contributions to its cultural and art historical importance and its damage and restoration history. In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg . News bulletin of the Landesdenkmalamt 31, 2002, No. 4, pp. 207-237.