SPÄTBAROCK IN SÜDDEUTSCHLAND III: The Abbey Church of Neresheim

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The Benedictine Abbey at Neresheim is located in the eastern foothills of the Schwabian Alps. Beginning in the late 17th century, the monastery underwent a series of reforms, renovations and renewals of its purpose, its personnel, and its built environment. After much internal debate, in 1745, the decision was taken to build a new abbey church instead of rebuilding the old Romanesque church, which had been superficially updated to the Baroque style in the late 17th century. Abbot Amandus Fischer (1711-29) had brought in architect Dominikus Zimmermann to rebuild and redecorate the abbey’s Festsaal, which was carried out in 1719-20 in the high Rococo style.

Seeking stylistic continuity with his predecessor’s building program, Abbot Aurelius Braisch (1739-55) commissioned architect and building engineer Johann Balthasar Neumann to rebuild the abbey church in 1747. Neumann, the most sought-after architect in central Europe at the time, had designed the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen and the Prince-Bishop’s Residenz at Würzburg, which were admired for their formal invention, sumptuous materials and lightness of touch. Neumann’s plan called for a conventional basilica consisting of nave, crossing and choir which were articulated as a series of oval-shaped bays surmounted with shallow domes.

The groundstone of the new church was laid in 1750, but Neumann’s premature death in 1753 necessitated the finding of new builders willing to carry out his plans. Subsequent architects altered or abandoned the original design, particularly the construction and profile of the the domes, which slowed progress. The finished church, consecrated in 1792, should be attributed to Neumann with reservations or characterized as the work of disparate hands.

The domes were frescoed by Austrian painter Martin Knoller over the six summers of 1770-75. Seven scenes from the Life of Christ are depicted, including Christ among the Doctors, the Last Supper and the Ascension.

Johann Nepomuk Holzhey of Ottobeuren built the last of the great South-German, Baroque organs at Neresheim over the years 1792 bis 1797.

In 1802, the monastery was suppressed and secularized. Due to the disruptions caused by the Napoleonic invasion, custodianship over the abbey’s assets and property was granted to the Princely House of Thurn und Taxis for the years 1803-06. Afterwards, the Bavarian state assumed ownership. Both the abbey and the principality of Thurn und Taxis were annexed by the kingdom of Württemberg in 1810.

With the generous support of the house of Thurn und Taxis, the monastery at Neresheim was able to reopen in 1919, seeded by Benedictine establishments in Austria and Czechoslovakia. The abbey was church was restored in 1990 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

SPÄTBAROCK IN SÜDDEUTSCHLAND I: The Asamkirche

Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirin Asam, St John Nepomuk, 1733-46, Munich

Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirin Asam, St John Nepomuk, 1733-46, Munich

Cosmas Damian amd Egid Quirin Asam, St John Nepomuk, 1733-46, Munich

Cosmas Damian Asam, Apotheosis of St John Nepomuk, St John, 1740, Munich, St John Nepomuk

Cosmas Damian amd Egid Quirin Asam, St John Nepomuk, 1733-46, Munich

Egid Quirin Asam, Plan and Elevation, St John Nepomuk, 1733-46, Munich

Crypt, Munich, St John Nepomuk, 1733-46, MunichSt John Nepomuk

KLEIN ABER FEIN: ST JOHN NEPOMUK (ASAMKIRCHE), 1733 – 1746, MUNICH.

Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirin Asam were born in Mannheim in 1686 and 1692. Their father, the fresco painter Hans Georg Asam, determined that both sons would be artists and, in 1711, and sent them to study art in Rome at the Accademia di San Luca, where Cosmas was trained in fresco painting and Egid in stucco work, sculpture and altar decoration. Cosmas won the first prize in painting two years later. Although they were not trained as such, both Asams considered themselves architects— Cosmas signed his ceiling fresco at Weltenburg pictor et architectus and Egid designed the Asamkirche. Upon their return to Germany, they mobilized the skills and the connections to church officials they had acquired in Rome to secure a succession of major church rebuilding and decorating commissions, including the the abbey church at Ingolstadt and the cathedral of Freising.

By the mid 1720s, the Asams had gained enough fame as master craftsmen and had made a large enough fortune in doing so to cause them to fear for their salvation. To atone for any sins of pride and avarice that their work as artists may have engendered, they decided to employ the same skills to cure them by designing, financing and constructing a Votivskirche. The votive church, built on a lot adjacent to Egid’s house in Munich’s Sendlingerstraße, was dedicated, appositely, to St John Nepomuk, a confessor saint who associated with the sacrament of confession which is followed by penance. The confessional-penitential theme is strongly felt in the layout of the church’s interior, which has four confessionals in a church of only 12 rows of pews.

Because the church was a gift to God, there were no limits to its decoration, embellishment and ornamentation. There were, however, spatial limits: the lot measures only 20x x 12m—meant that the decorative programs the brothers had developed for large churches either had to be scaled or compressed. For the architecture, they drew on their knowledge of intimately-sized churches on cramped lots by Bernini and Borromini where monumental effects were preserved by scaling down moldings, columns, and domes. In terms of decoration, the Asams compressed the entire gamut of baroque motifs, forms, effects, and materials into the small space: the plan composed of over-lapping ovals, the undulating walls and flared mouldings, an illusionistic ceiling painting the fictive architecture of which carries on from the actual one below, twisted columns polychrome marble, stucco arabesques that blur hounaries, a rippling façade, intarsiated marble revetement, and so on. The result is a density of opulence and decoration that makes even the most richly-elaborated of the contemporary large church interiors seem restrained.

The Asamkirche was originally conceived of as a private chapel attached to the large Asamhaus next door, for use by the brothers alone (Egid went so far as to pierce one the walls in the house so he could see the altar from his bed). However, the burgers of Munich and the church objected to the foundation on many grounds and threatened to hold up the works until the brothers agreed that the church would be open to the public. Cosmas died before the consecration took place in 1746 and Egid lived only 4 years later so the Asamkirche was as much a gift to the city of Munich as it was to God.

SPÄTBAROCK IN SÜDDEUTSCHLAND SERIES:

1. KLEIN ABER FEIN: ASAMKIRCHE