Bavaria's Baroque and Rococo Churches

Bavaria has Europe's richest collection of late Baroque and Rococo architecture. The best known is the Wieskirche, a pilgrimage church standing in a meadow, built in 1745–1754 by the Zimmermann brothers, which is white, gold and filled with light inside and has been a World Heritage Site since 1983. Among the other great works are Balthasar Neumann's Vierzehnheiligen, the abbey church at Ottobeuren, the Würzburg Residence with Tiepolo's ceiling fresco above the staircase, and François de Cuvilliés's Amalienburg and Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich. Outside they are often plain. Inside, stucco, frescoes and light dissolve the walls so that architecture, sculpture and painting can no longer be told apart.

Facts

Why Bavaria?

After the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648, Catholic southern Germany was rebuilt. The Church wished to display its victory after the Reformation, and the monasteries were wealthy. Princes and prince-bishops competed to build residences, and pilgrimages to holy sites drew great crowds. By the mid-18th century this had culminated in an architecture in which the interior of the church was meant to feel like a foretaste of heaven.

The style drew heavily on Italy and France: the movement and illusionistic painting of the Baroque from Rome, the light ornament and rocaille of the Rococo from Paris. In Bavaria, however, these were combined with a local craft tradition of stuccoists, painters and joiners, often in families that worked together for generations. The weight of the Baroque and the lightness of the Rococo therefore meet in the same room. The difference between the styles is explained under Baroque and Rococo.

The Munich court: the Amalienburg and Cuvilliés

François de Cuvilliés came to the Elector's court in Munich as a court dwarf, trained in Paris and became one of Europe's foremost Rococo architects. His Amalienburg in the Nymphenburg park, built in 1734–1739, is a single-storey hunting lodge with a simple façade. At its centre lies the circular Hall of Mirrors, where mirrors and windows alternate and silver stucco on a pale blue ground climbs up into the ceiling with plants, birds and musical instruments. The stucco was made by Johann Baptist Zimmermann. The room also appears in the design section among the interiors.

Cuvilliés also designed the court theatre at the Residence, the Cuvilliés Theatre, built in 1751–1753, an auditorium in red, gold and ivory where Mozart's Idomeneo had its premiere in 1781. The interior was dismantled and saved during the war and reassembled in 1958. The architect is described on the page about Cuvilliés.

Würzburg: Neumann's staircase and Tiepolo's ceiling

Balthasar Neumann began as a bell founder and became the great master builder of southern German Baroque. In 1720 the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg commissioned him to build a palace, and the Residence was completed in 1744. The stairwell, about 30 metres long and 18 metres wide, is covered by a single vault without supporting columns. Many believed it would collapse.

In 1751–1753 the Venetian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his sons painted the vault with the four continents, a fresco of about 600 square metres. As you climb the staircase, the image opens up step by step. During the bombing of 1945 large parts of the palace burned, but the vault held and the frescoes were saved.

The pilgrimage churches: Vierzehnheiligen and the Wieskirche

Vierzehnheiligen in Franconia, the pilgrimage church of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, was designed by Neumann and built in 1743–1772. Construction had already begun to a different plan, and Neumann shifted the church's centre so that the spot where the saints, according to legend, had appeared ended up in the middle of the nave. There the altar of mercy stands beneath a large oval. The space is a sequence of interlocking ellipses and circles, and the vaults follow them rather than the walls, so that the boundaries dissolve.

The Wieskirche stands alone in a meadow near Steingaden. It was built around a wooden figure of the Scourged Christ, which a farmer's wife claimed in 1738 to have seen weeping. The pilgrims became so numerous that the monks of Steingaden had Dominikus Zimmermann build a pilgrimage church, and his brother Johann Baptist painted the ceiling. The nave is oval and surrounded by paired columns, light falls in from many directions, and the sky of the fresco seems to open above the visitor. When the monasteries were secularised in 1803 the church was to be sold, but the local farmers protested and saved it.

The abbey church at Ottobeuren and how to tell the difference

The Benedictine abbey at Ottobeuren, founded in 764, celebrated its thousandth anniversary with one of the greatest Rococo churches. Johann Michael Fischer took over the plans in 1748, and the church was consecrated in 1766. It is about 90 metres long, with two tall towers and a curved façade, and inside Johann Michael Feichtmayr's stucco frames Johann Jakob Zeiller's frescoes.

Baroque or Rococo? The façades are often Baroque, symmetrical and heavy, with towers and curved central sections. Inside, the ornament reveals the Rococo: rocaille, the asymmetrical shell and wave forms, frames frescoes and creeps out over columns and vaults, and the colours are white, gold and light pastels rather than the dark marble of the Baroque. The rooms are often oval and bright, and the boundary between what is painted and what is built disappears.

Sweden has nothing comparable, since the Lutheran churches were restrained. Swedish Rococo became secular, in palaces and pleasure pavilions such as the Chinese Pavilion. All the Bavarian buildings are on the map below, and the Baroque in general is described in the guide to Baroque architecture. You can meet Rococo in painting in the art section's guide What is Rococo?

What to look for

Exercise

What is typical of a Bavarian Rococo church?