Simon Swiss

Wooden crucifix by Simon Schweizer on the altar of the Balingen town church. In the background the epitaph of Magdalena von Tegernau, by the same artist

Simon Schweizer (born 16th century; died after 1623) was a late Renaissance sculptor who can be traced back to Balingen between 1593 and 1623 . Important epitaphs were created in the Balingen sculpture workshop around 1600 . Most of the time he worked in Balingen and the surrounding area. The literature refers to him as the author of an altar of the castle church Haigerloch (1593) that was lost due to the Baroque transformation, but certainly as the creator of the magnificent pulpit cover of the Nürtingen town church (around 1620; since 1759 on the east wall of the north aisle of the town church Neuffen). Also Pfullingen is probably the Holzepitaph of 1611 and 1614 deceased couple John and Agnes Maier from the local town church St. Martin to its sphere of influence.

meaning

Epitaph of Caspar Murschel in the town church of Balingen (1595)

The Lautlingen pastor and art historian Albert Pfeffer, who discovered the sculptor on the occasion of the renovation of the Balingen town church in 1912/13, compares him to the recognized representatives of the Swabian late Renaissance such as Schlör , Kern , Baumhauer and Jelin . Presumably he learned and worked at Jelin in Tübingen. The work of Schweizer has not been thoroughly researched.

The three-dimensional elaboration of his figures on epitaphs is unusual and otherwise rare.

Life and Proven Works

Church book entries provide information about the family situation of Simon Schweizer in Balingen as the husband of Agatha and father of six children, born between 1601 and 1613. He was also affected by the great city fire in 1607.

The oldest verifiable work is the monumental epitaph for Hans Christoph Scheer von Schwarzenberg (died 1592) at the parish church in Hausen am Tann , which shows the knight in full size. The wooden epitaph of Mayor Caspar Murschel in the town church of Balingen is both dated (1595) and signed, so that its attribution appears beyond doubt. The artist's monogram can be found there on the stone epitaph of Magdalena von Tegernau (1605). In the cemetery church , the stone epitaph of Maria Magdalena von Tierberg (1597), who was just six months old, is one of his works, while the tomb of Tobias Pfeffer (1627) on the southern outer wall is initially an attribution.

Schweizer created several crucifixes . The limewood crucifix (1605), which is now kept in the sacristy of the Balingen town church and comes from the cemetery church, was shown at the state exhibition “The Renaissance in the German Southwest. Between the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War ”1986 shown. The Church of St. Ulrich in Geislingen (1600) and the town church of Balingen have large crucifixes from the Schweizer workshop. The crucifix of the Laurentiuskirche in Nürtingen can be clearly identified in the Nürtingen non-fiction book 1622/23 as a work by Schweizer.

The sculpture of Johannes d. Täufers from the cemetery church, a late work, is now kept in the Balingen Local History Museum.

literature

• Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe (ed.): Simon Schweitzer (artist biographies), in: The Renaissance in the German Southwest, Heidelberg 1986, p. 946 (see also p. 562f) (with a reference to Helmut Hell, research on the southern Swabian sculpture of the time of the Counter Reformation, o. O. (mach.), 1948)
• Heidrun Bucher-Schlichtenberger: Traces of Artists in Balingen , in: City Administration Balingen: 750 Years City of Balingen 1255-2005, 2005, pp. 454f
• Eugen Gröner: New findings about the Balingen sculptor Simon Schweitzer, in: Heimatblätter für Balingen (=> Heimatkundliche Blätter for Zollernalb) vol. 32 (1985) No. 2, p. 487f
• Eugen Gröner: Meister Simon Schweitzer , in: Heimatblätter für Balingen (=> Heimatkundliche Blätter for Zollernalb) Jg. 33 (1986) No. 9, p. 561f
• Albert Pfeffer: Master Simon Schweizer: A Balingen Sculptor in the Age of the Renaissance, Balingen 1914, 6 pp.
• Fritz Scheerer: Simon Schweizer, in: Heimatblätter für Balingen (=> Heimatkundliche Blätter for Zollernalb) Jg. 31 (1984) No. 6, p. 453f

Web links

Commons : Simon Schweizer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files