Wieskirche
A pilgrimage church in the middle of a meadow, built around a wooden figure of the scourged Christ that was said to have wept. Outside it is plain; inside everything is white, gold and light colours, with a painted ceiling that seems to open onto the sky. The Rococo in its most jubilant form.
Around 1730 the Premonstratensian canons of Steingaden Abbey had a figure of the scourged Christ carved to be carried in the Good Friday procession. The figure later ended up with a farming family on a farm in the meadow, die Wies, and in 1738 the farmer’s wife said she had seen tears in its eyes. Pilgrims began to flock there, and a small chapel was soon insufficient. The abbot commissioned Dominikus Zimmermann to build a pilgrimage church, which was erected around 1745–1754. His brother Johann Baptist Zimmermann, court painter in Munich, painted the ceiling frescoes and worked on the stucco. The church is built of stone and brick with rendered façades, and stucco, wood and paint were used to create a space meant to feel like a foretaste of heaven.
The nave is oval and surrounded by a ring of paired columns, forming a light-filled ambulatory along the outer walls. The windows vary in shape and are set at several levels, so light falls in from many directions. The ceiling is a shallow vault, and the fresco depicts Christ returning at the end of time, with the closed gate of Paradise and the empty throne of the Judge. The painting makes the vault appear to open onto the sky. The choir is long and narrow, with galleries and columns in red and blue tones, and the weeping figure of Christ stands there on the altar. The pulpit is one of the most ornate of the Rococo. Outside, the church is plain, with a tower and a residence for the abbot alongside.
When the Bavarian monasteries were secularised in 1803, the church was to be auctioned off and perhaps demolished, but protests from local farmers saved it. Dominikus Zimmermann himself lived in a house next to the church in his last years. In the 1980s an extensive restoration was carried out, since the stucco and frescoes had been damaged by damp and cracking. The Wieskirche became a World Heritage Site in 1983 and is still a living pilgrimage church. It is regarded as the culmination of South German Rococo, where architecture, painting and sculpture work together so closely that they cannot be separated. There is nothing comparable in Sweden, since the Lutheran churches were more restrained. Swedish Rococo instead became a secular art of palaces and manor houses, with garden pavilions such as the Chinese Pavilion as its closest relative.