Biography

German sculptor, ivory carver and painter. The youngest child of a butcher, he is thought to have trained in the workshop of the Schenck family in Konstanz, where marble and ivory sculptures were made. He is first documented in Mainz in 1669, when it was alleged that he was practicing as a sculptor without having served a guild apprenticeship. His first surviving work, the tomb of Philipp Erwin von Schönborn (1669; Geisenheim, nr Bingen am Rhein, Heiligenkreuzkirche), is a wall tomb, a white marble relief framed in black by the aedicula, showing Schönborn and his wife kneeling before Christ and the Virgin. In the tomb the Schenck influence is still recognizable, and also that of the Zürn family in the strong, sometimes expressive gestures.

Rauchmiller then developed beyond his models, imparting to his figures by sculptural means a differentiated sense of movement derived from the Italian Baroque rather than producing an assembly of separate shapes and parts.

He settled in Vienna in 1675. He was a highly talented artist at the transition from early to high Baroque; and had a major influence on Austrian sculpture around 1700.