The Baroque: monasteries, palaces and frescoes
After the victory over the Ottomans in 1683 Austria was rebuilt in the Baroque. Fischer von Erlach and Hildebrandt designed churches and palaces in Vienna, the monasteries along the Danube received golden libraries, and Paul Troger and Franz Anton Maulbertsch painted heavens in the vaults of the ceilings.
The Baroque reached Austria via Salzburg, where as early as 1614 the archbishops had Italian architects begin a new cathedral. In Vienna the great building boom had to wait until the Ottoman siege had been repulsed in 1683. Thereafter the emperor, the church and the nobility wanted to display the victory and the triumph of the Catholic faith, and over half a century palaces, churches and monasteries were built at an unparalleled pace.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, who had trained in Rome, designed the Karlskirche with its two columns modelled on Trajan’s Column, Schönbrunn Palace and the state hall of the court library. Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt built the Belvedere for Prince Eugene of Savoy, the general who had defeated the Ottomans. In the countryside the monasteries of Melk, St Florian, Göttweig and Altenburg were rebuilt as palace-like complexes.
Painting was above all ceiling painting. Johann Michael Rottmayr, Daniel Gran and Paul Troger filled domes and library ceilings with heavenly scenes in which saints and allegories float in bright light. In Maria Theresa’s time Franz Anton Maulbertsch painted in light, almost flickering colours that carried the Baroque towards its end. The sculptor Georg Raphael Donner gave sculpture a new classical calm, and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt made his enigmatic character heads.