As natural as if it was living – The Meissen Porcelain Menagerie

The menagerie of predominantly life-size porcelain animal sculptures is one of the outstanding pioneering achievements of the Meissen porcelain manufactory and one of the absolute highlights and visitors’ favourites of the Dresden Porcelain Collection. They continue to amaze us to this day, and not just because of their mastery of the medium’s technical demands. Even contemporaries admired Johann Joachim Kaendler’s special talent for capturing the particular qualities and characters of animals and for making them come alive with a remarkable sense of movement in the ultimately hard and rigid material of porcelain. During the lecture, we will learn what these unique sculptures can tell us about the perception of animals at a time when natural scientists and philosophers discussed whether animals possessed consciousness like humans or even souls.