Speyer Cathedral
The imperial cathedral at Speyer was, when completed, one of the largest churches in the world and the burial church of the German emperors. It was given an early vaulted nave with groin vaults, a bold Romanesque achievement. With four towers and two domes it displays the weight and order of the Romanesque.
The Emperor Conrad II, the first of the Salian rulers, began construction around 1030. The church was to be his dynasty’s burial church and to show that the German monarchy stood on a par with the papacy. The crypt was consecrated in 1041 and the whole cathedral in 1061. Only a few decades later Henry IV had it rebuilt from around 1080: the walls were raised, the nave was given groin vaults instead of a flat timber ceiling, and the exterior received its dwarf gallery. Vaulting such a wide and tall nave was daring for its time. The cathedral is built of red and yellow sandstone from the region. The work required enormous resources and master builders able to solve new structural problems, and several of them went on to other great building projects in Europe.
The cathedral is a basilica with a transept, a choir with an apse and a westwork. Beneath the choir and transept lies a vast hall crypt with groin vaults on sturdy columns with cushion capitals, one of the largest of its kind. In the nave the piers alternate between stronger and slenderer, since every other pier carries the vaults; this gives a clear rhythm of bays. Four towers and two domes, over the crossing and the westwork, give the building its silhouette. The dwarf gallery runs around almost the entire church as a row of small arches and columns beneath the eaves. In front of the choir lies the imperial tomb, where eight German emperors and kings rest, among them Conrad II, Henry III, Henry IV and Henry V.
The cathedral has burned several times. The worst was in 1689, when French troops set fire to the town during the War of the Palatine Succession; the imperial tombs were plundered and the western part of the nave collapsed. The church was rebuilt in the 18th century, and in the 1850s it received a new westwork in the Neo-Romanesque style. In the 19th century the interior was painted with large pictorial cycles, most of which were removed in a restoration in the 1950s and 60s to recover the church’s Romanesque austerity. The cathedral became a World Heritage Site in 1981, one of the first in Germany. It is significant for Sweden: master builders from the Rhineland and Lombardy carried its formal language on to Lund Cathedral, whose apse and dwarf gallery clearly follow the model of Speyer.