Pinzel, Johann Georg

Pinzel, Johann Georg (Pinsel, Pincel, Pintsel) [Йоанн Георг Пінзель; Ioann Heorh Pinzel], b ? d ca 1761. Eighteenth-century sculptor; the leading representative of the so-called ‘Lviv school’ of the late-baroque and rococo sculpture. Almost nothing is known of Pinzel’s origins and personal life. In the mid 1740s he appeared in Buchach at the court of the starosta of Kaniv Mikołaj Bazyli Potocki and from that time he worked in Galicia, often in cooperation with the architect Bernard Meretyn. The most famous of his surviving works are the rococo stone statues of Saint Louis, Saint Athanasius, and Saint George on the façade of Saint George's Cathedral in Lviv (1759–61), the monuments of Saint John of Nepomuk and Saint Anna in Buchach, and the wood statues of the side altars in the Roman Catholic churches in Horodenka (1750s) and Monastyryska (1761). The stone carvings on the façade of the Buchach town hall, the figures and bas-reliefs in the Buchach Holy Protectress Church, and the sculpted church decorations in the Trinitarian Church in Lviv are attributed to him. He carved several crucifixions, the most interesting of which was in Saint Martin's Roman Catholic Church in Lviv. His work had a powerful influence on many 18-th century Galician sculptors and contributed to the establishment of the Galician tradition of rococo sculpture. The Pinzel Museum, a branch of the Lviv Art Gallery housing Pinzel’s sculptures, was opened in Lviv in 1996 in the former church of the Clarissines. In 2012 a large exhibition of Pinzel’s work took place at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hornung, Zbigniew. Majster Pinzel snycerz. Karta z dziejów lwowskiej rzeźby rokokowej (Wrocław 1976)
Ioann Heorh Pinzel: Peretvorennia. Skul'ptura (Kyiv 2007)
Ostrowski, Jan K. Johann Georg Pinsel: Un sculpteur baroque en Ukraine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris 2012)
Vozniak, Taras (ed.) L'viv epokhy Pinzelia 1720–1760 (Lviv 2013)

Marko Robert Stech

[This article was updated in 2014.]