Great Hall (Old Town Hall Nuremberg)

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South facade of the Old Town Hall with the Great Hall on the upper floor

The Great Hall is a multi-storey hall building with a Gothic core on the south side of the building complex of the old Nuremberg city hall , which contains the great city hall hall on the upper floor. The hall building from the 14th century was followed by two annex buildings along the town hall courtyard to the north, of which the one with the council chamber on the east side was preserved.

History of the building

14th Century

The first Gothic hall building was the oldest part between 1332 and 1340 according to the plans of the Nuremberg city architect Philipp Groß .

From the Dürer period to the Second World War

At the beginning of the 16th century, the Nuremberg town hall was extensively renovated. In this context, the council decided to design and paint the large hall according to drafts and under the direction of Albrecht Dürer . The work began in 1521 and ended in 1528/30. The room painting (triumphal procession of Emperor Maximilian) was the largest mural in Europe at the time and was only surpassed by the Sistine Chapel , which was started ten years later .

In 1613 the painting was revised. Already after less than a hundred years the painting was obviously in great need of renovation, it was "shot down and sooty that you can hardly see more, much less read the scripts". It is assumed that in connection with the painting of the hall, it was used to make the Room came. The extent of the change is unclear due to the lack of documentation from that time and is controversial in specialist circles.

Juvenell's painting from the early 17th century shows a long hall with a rectangular floor plan, which is vaulted with a richly ornamented and gilded coffered barrel . The hall is illuminated by three arched windows at one of the head sides of the hall, a large round window in the lunette and 10 Gothic lancet windows in the south side of the hall.

Destruction in 1945 and reconstruction

In 1944/45, after bomb hits during the air raids on Nuremberg, the entire town hall complex burned down, except for the surrounding walls. It was not until 1956 to 1962 that the old town hall was rebuilt on this ruin under the direction of Harald Clauss. The original plan to expand the Great Hall as a meeting room for the city council was rejected in 1962/63. In place of the medieval sales vault under the hall, a restaurant, the "council chambers", was built. In summer 1978, on the 450th anniversary of Albrecht Dürer's death, an exhibition on the history of the Old Town Hall took place. The inside of the old town hall was restored between 1982 and 1985, including the wall cladding and the coffered wooden barrel ceiling. It is still unfinished today.

  • Great hall, interior view, painting by Paul Juvenell, 1622

  • Large hall after the restoration in 1904, photo Schmidt, 1907

Painting

On the occasion of the extensive redesign of the town hall hall from 1520 to 1522 in the Renaissance style , a picture program for the wall painting was developed jointly by Albrecht Dürer and the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer . It contained the “Triumphal Chariot of Emperor Maximilian I” and the “Defamation of Apelles” with allegorical figures of the cardinal virtues on the closed north wall.

Dürer: Maximilian I's triumphal chariot, woodcut, detail

In 1522 Dürer self-published the triumphal procession as an eight-part woodcut in the format 2.28 × 45 cm. By the end of the 16th century, the triumphal procession appeared in seven editions.

The painting was applied to the smoothed plaster using a mixed technique with oil paints and tempera , so that the background and color pigments - unlike the conventional fresco technique - do not mix.

The south wall, interrupted by Gothic pointed arched windows, received medallion-like round pictures with scenic depictions from antiquity and various portraits. The narrow west wall was decorated with a scenic depiction of the Last Judgment .

In 1904/05 the town hall hall was photographed for the first time by Ferdinand Schmidt after renewed renovation. These black and white photos were the only known documents of the original painting until the 1980s. With the total destruction in World War II, Dürer's painting was initially considered lost.

In 1943/44 a photo documentation with color slides was produced, which was created at the request of Adolf Hitler as part of the 1943–1945 "Guide order for color photographs of ceiling and wall paintings in historical buildings in Greater Germany". This documentation got lost in the chaos of war and was thought to be lost until the 1980s. Since the restoration had no basis due to the lack of documentation of the destroyed state and the overall impression of the hall should be restored atmospherically, the painter Michael Mathias Prechtl was commissioned with a design for a contemporary painting. After a long controversial and bitter discussion, Prechtl withdrew his design in 1988, the walls remained white: local politics decided to take a 'pause for thought'. After a video installation in the summer of the Dürer anniversary year 2012, in which both an animation based on the photo documentation from 1944, which has since been recovered, as well as the projection of the Prechtl design on the still white wall, a new discussion arose since September 2012 the restoration of the painting.

Political and historical importance

The peace meal of Count Palatine Karl Gustav in the Nuremberg City Hall on September 25, 1649

From April 1649 to July 1650 the Nuremberg Execution Day or Peace Execution Congress took place in Nuremberg . The emperor's ambassadors negotiated there with the delegations from Sweden , France and Spain as well as numerous representatives of the imperial estates , i.e. the bishops, princes, counts and cities of the Holy Roman Empire, which at the time was territorially today's Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria and northern Italy included. The delegations negotiated the questions that had remained open at the end of the Thirty Years' War through the Peace of Westphalia in Osnabrück and Munster . The negotiations were held in the Great Hall. As part of this congress, a great peace meal was held on September 25, 1649 on the occasion of the signing of the Interim Recess . The host was Karl Gustav von Pfalz-Zweibrücken , who had been generalissimo of the Swedish troops in Germany since 1647 and who became King of Sweden in 1654 as Karl X Gustav . This event is shown in the famous painting "The Great Banquet" by Joachim von Sandrart , often reproduced in the form of engravings . The peace recession determined the political peace order in Central Europe for over 130 years after the end of the devastating Thirty Years War. This makes the hall an authentic place in the history of European peace. Multilateral peace negotiations comparable in length and scope did not take place again until 1815 with the Congress of Vienna and in the 1980s with the CSCE .

literature

  • Ernst Mummenhoff: The town hall in Nuremberg . With illustrations based on old originals, measurements, etc. as well as based on A. von Esswein's designs by Heinrich Wallraff. Edited by the Association for the History of the City of Nuremberg . Schrag, Nuremberg 1891.
  • Matthias Mende: The old Nuremberg town hall. Building history and equipment of the large hall and the council chamber . Vol. 1: Nürnberg: Stadtgeschichtliche Museen 1979. Exhibition catalogs of the Stadtgeschichtliche Museen Nürnberg.
  • Christian Brick: Reconstruction and repainting of the old Nuremberg town hall. A documentation. Berlin, 1991. (Download 85.2 MB)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Council resolution of April 8, 1613 / s. a. Mummenhoff p. 116
  2. ^ Mende: The old Nuremberg town hall. Vol. I., p. 70.
  3. ↑ Dürer's triumphal procession - A multimedia journey through time in the town hall hall August 3 to 12, 2012. p. 4.