Hirsvogel Hall

Exterior view of the miller bird hall

The Hirsvogelsaal (actually Hirschvogelsaal) is an early Renaissance building in Hirschelgasse in Nuremberg . It is about a 1534 by Lienhard III. Hirschvogel , a long-distance dealer from Nuremberg, made the expansion of his Gothic house. The reason for the construction was his marriage to Sabine Welser from Augsburg .

history

A member of the Hirschvogel patrician family , Lienhard Hirschvogel, acquired a three-storey, Gothic property with a large garden in Hirschelgasse 21 in Nuremberg in 1531 and expanded it on the north side in 1534 on the occasion of his marriage to Sabine Welser from Augsburg and because of his diverse social ambitions a rectangular ballroom, the deer bird hall (dimensions 16 × 6.6 meters). Just 18 months after the marriage, Sabine Welser was sent back to her hometown by Lienhard Hirschvogel because her family did not pay the agreed dowry, whereupon the marriage was divorced again in 1539. Due to the scandalous divorce and the debts that went with it, Lienhard Hirsvogel had to leave his hometown. After the Hirschvogel became extinct in 1550, the entire property came to the Behaim in 1555, to the Rieter in 1570 and to the Fürer in 1731/32 . After frequent changes of ownership in the 19th century, the city of Nuremberg finally acquired the property for 300,000 marks. Before the destruction of the Hirsvogel Hall in the Second World War, the magnificent interior, consisting of carved wall paneling and the ceiling painting The Fall of the Phaeton , was relocated and could thus be saved. While the works of art could not be adequately exhibited in the Fembohaus after the war , they are now part of the Hirsvogel Hall, which was rebuilt in 2000 and named after the variant of the name that was also used earlier. The destroyed components, especially the stone work of the chimney, were modeled in a slightly simplified way. The twelve imperial busts of Roman emperors, although they were relocated during the war, are lost and must be considered lost. They were replaced in May 2009 by new creations by the Nuremberg sculptors Anke Oltscher and Olaf Bieber based on ancient models and Renaissance busts. The new hall was erected in the garden of the Tucherschloss (Hirschelgasse 9-11) , just under a hundred meters from the original location . When the hall was rebuilt, the arrangement of the room was rotated by 180 degrees, so that the lighting conditions are different today than planned by Flötner.

Artistic interior

Fall of the Phaeton - ceiling painting of the miller bird hall by Georg Pencz , consisting of 20 canvas paintings on stretcher frames

The hall was described by the art historian Fritz Traugott Schulz as "the strictest and most beautiful creation of the entire German early Renaissance". The richly carved wall paneling and the stone “chimney” (the term is misleading, because it was never a chimney, but the sculptural garden exit) are remarkable. These works, ascribed to the Nuremberg artist Peter Flötner , represent the earliest known wall decoration that was created north of the Alps in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Traugott Schulz sees the authorship of Flötner as proven due to the strong correspondence in structure, iconography and craftsmanship with the paneling of the Capella Malvezzi in Bologna, which certainly came from Flötner.

The entire interior - interrupted only by the fireplace and the four large hall windows in Florentine architectural style - is surrounded by wood paneling almost three meters high. The upper end of the paneling is a frieze band with acanthus leaves , lions' heads and palmettes . The axes of the paneling are structured on the south wall (today in the north) by columns, otherwise by pilasters . The pilasters show allegories on agriculture, handicrafts, hunting and war. There are also scenic representations in the pedestals. The pilasters on the front walls show astronomical and nautical instruments. Corresponding to the geometry of the columns, twelve wall attachments are arranged above the paneling: on a shared stylobate stand two fluted pillars with capitals that support a delicate entablature , creating a large picture frame. Above each there are two obelisks in the pillar axis. Between the obelisks were terracotta busts of the first twelve Roman emperors, which have been lost to this day. They were arranged in chronological order, starting with Julius Caesar and ending with Domitianus. The frames below contain oil paintings with scenic representations of the respective emperor.

The stone fireplace does not show the height structure of the wood paneling. On both sides of the man-high passage opening, on bas-relief-like pedestals - no longer ornamented today due to the reduced form restoration - stand two columns and on the outside a pilaster, which carry an architrave in the thickness and ornamentation of the frieze band. Above it rests an attachment field with a cut out semicircular bezel , which dramatically frames a large bird (the heraldic animal of the Hirschvogel family).

As Joachim Thiel has demonstrated, the entire structure is based on the golden ratio in all parts . The art historian Christa Schaper writes in her work about the Hirsvogel Hall: “The exquisite pilasters of the Hirsvogel Hall are to be counted among the most beautiful things that were created on this side of the Alps at the time of the early Renaissance.”

The ceiling painting by Dürer's pupil Georg Pencz is also remarkable . It is one of the earliest illusionist ceiling paintings north of the Alps. It consists of 20 canvas pictures on a stretcher frame. His pictorial theme, the fall of the Phaeton , which was popular with the patricians who were humanistically educated at the time , was intended to warn against arrogant self-overestimation.

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Hirsvogelsaal in front of the Tucherschloss

• Press release from the city of Nuremberg on the reconstruction of the Hirsvogel Hall (PDF file; 32 kB)
• Biography of Lienhard Hirschvogel
• Text panels in the Hirsvogelsaal

Individual evidence

1. ^ Fritz Traugott Schulz: The Hirschvogelsaal in Nuremberg (...) Su
2. ↑ Fritz Traugott Schulz, ibid. S. u.
3. ↑ Joachim Thiel: The Hirschvogelsaal (Hirsvogelsaal). Festival architecture of the 16th century , p. 86ff., S. u.
4. ↑ Christa Schaper: The Hirschvogel of Nuremberg and their trading house , s. u.
5. ↑ The ceiling painting by Georg Pencz in the Hirschvogelsaal in Nuremberg - With a history of the Hirsvogelsaal

literature

• Michael Diefenbacher : Hirsvogelsaal . In: Michael Diefenbacher, Rudolf Endres (Hrsg.): Stadtlexikon Nürnberg . 2nd, improved edition. W. Tümmels Verlag, Nuremberg 2000, ISBN 3-921590-69-8 ( online ).
• Christoph von Imhoff (Hrsg.): Famous Nuremberg from nine centuries . Hofmann, Nürnberg 1984, ISBN 3-87191-088-0 , (2nd supplemented and expanded edition. Ibid. 1989, ISBN 3-87191-088-0 ; also new edition: Edelmann GmbH Buchhandlung, October 2000).
• Fritz Traugott Schulz: The Hirschvogelsaal in Nuremberg. A treatise on building and art . Schrag, Leipzig 1905.
• Christa Schaper: The Hirschvogel of Nuremberg and her trading house , Nürnberger Forschungen Vol. 18. Nuremberg 1973.
• Joachim Thiel: The Hirschvogelsaal (Hirsvogelsaal). 16th century festival architecture . Self-published, Nuremberg et al. 1986.
• Nina C. Wiesner: The ceiling painting by Georg Pencz in the Hirschvogelsaal in Nuremberg . Olms, Hildesheim et al. 2004, ISBN 3-487-12532-3 , ( Studies on Art History 154), (At the same time: Würzburg, Univ., Diss., 2001).

See also

• Castles, palaces and mansions in the city of Nuremberg

Web links

• The Hirsvogel Hall

Coordinates: 49 ° 27 '28.5 "  N , 11 ° 5' 2.8"  E