Vierzehnheiligen

The pilgrimage church of the Fourteen Holy Helpers is one of the great interiors of southern German Rococo. From the outside it looks like a Baroque church, but inside, interlocking oval spaces form a light, white and gold-gleaming interior, with an altar of grace in the middle of the nave.

According to legend, the Fourteen Holy Helpers, saints invoked in various kinds of need, appeared to a shepherd here in the 15th century. The new church was designed by Balthasar Neumann, who also designed the Residence in Würzburg. When construction had already begun to a different plan, he moved the centre of the church so that the site of the apparition ended up in the middle of the nave, beneath a large oval.

Neumann arranged the space as a sequence of ellipses and circles, and the vaults follow them rather than the walls. The result is a space in which boundaries dissolve and light pours in from many directions. The stucco and altars were made by Johann Michael Feichtmayr and Johann Georg Übelhör. Vierzehnheiligen is one of the most accomplished examples of how Rococo united architecture, sculpture and painting into a single whole.

• Rococo
• Balthasar Neumann