St. Georg Monastery (Isny)
The St. Georg Monastery ( Isny Castle since 1806 ) is a former Benedictine abbey in Isny im Allgäu, founded in 1096 and existed as a small imperial abbey from 1782 until secularization .
In 1803, Count Otto von Quadt -Wikradt , who came from the Rhineland, took over the imperial abbey and the imperial city of Isny as compensation for the lost rule of Wikradt on the right bank of the Rhine . In 1806 the new Kingdom of Württemberg mediated the only three-year-old county of Isny. The former imperial abbey remained in the personal possession of the count family, who used the convent building as a castle and carefully rebuilt it.
In 1942 the castle was sold to the city of Stuttgart, which used it as a hospital and a nursing home. After the home was closed in 1996, the building became the property of a foundation owned by Isny citizens. The monastery church was given to the city as early as 1868 and thus became the parish church of St. George and James .
history
Monastery and town in the Middle Ages
The St. Georg monastery was founded in 1096 by the Counts of Altshausen-Veringen and elevated to the status of an abbey in the same year . In 1106 the foundation was confirmed by Pope Paschal II . Towards the end of the 12th century, a Benedictine convent was set up in Isny , but it was moved to Rohrdorf around 1189 .
In 1171, the monastery left the land bordering the monastery to the south and west of the land to the south and west of the monastery in a barter agreement to the guardian, the Count of Veringen, in order to found a town instead of the already large settlement in front of the monastery walls, which has now been expanded as a market settlement. Since then, the history of the monastery can no longer be separated from the history of the town of Isny . In 1281, at the instigation of his close confidante Heinrich von Isny , King Rudolf von Habsburg granted the town Lindau town charter .
A city fire in 1284 and the great plague epidemics of 1349 and 1350 were temporary setbacks for the city, but they almost meant the end of the abbey. The plague had wiped out the entire convent. The monastery survived only thanks to the new guardian, the Erbtruchsessen von Waldburg , who unceremoniously appointed the pastor of the town church as abbot. In 1365 the city was able to buy itself out of the heavily indebted chieftain and became imperial immediately.
Protestant City - Catholic Abbey
Like most imperial cities, Isny accepted the Reformation, initially influenced by Zwingli, in 1529 and joined the Schmalkaldic League . In the meantime, the abbey had been subjected to strict reform under Abbot Philipp von Stein (1501–1532) with the help of monks from Blaubeuren and Wiblingen . The enclosure was emphasized by a new curtain wall against the city. Under pressure from the townspeople, who also staged an iconoclasm in the monastery in 1534 , the convent stayed with the old religion thanks to the help of the Waldburg Truchessen and survived, albeit badly decimated. In 1548 only the abbot and three monks were left in the monastery. With the imperial city, which had meanwhile been battered by economic decline and weavers' revolts, the abbey agreed to leave the parish church of St. Nicholas as the Protestant town church.
For a short time, the abbey shared the lot with the city and was about to go bankrupt by 1607. Isny was the problem child of the Upper Swabian Benedictine Congregation , which is why the abbot von Weingarten wanted to dissolve Isny Abbey and run it as a priory . But since the appointed administrator, the prior Wolfgang Schmid, was able to reorganize the economy and discipline and from 1612 to 1617 rebuilt the convent complex, redesigned the late Gothic church and the Marienkapelle and equipped them with new altars, he was elected abbot in 1617. In 1631 he had to experience how everything was destroyed again in the great city fire.
The Thirty Years' War had been felt up to this point only with swipes and neighborhood names, but now prevented by crews, looting and contributions to the reconstruction of the city and monastery. The imperial city did not recover economically until its dissolution in 1803. The monastery, on the other hand, was plundered by the Swedes for the last time in 1646, and thanks to a number of economically wise abbots and the support of Weingarten Abbey, it was able to recover and achieve a previously unknown level of prosperity. This also made it possible for the abbey to acquire important sovereign rights from the Waldburg chiefs as early as 1675. By 1781 it could finally buy itself out and take its seat as the youngest imperial abbey in the Swabian Imperial Prelate College.
Secularization - conversion into a castle
When Count Otto von Quadt Wikradt took over the imperial abbey and the imperial city of Isny in 1803 , a net income of 19,000 guilders with debts of 114,000 guilders was calculated for the abbey. The imperial abbey still consisted of the abbot and 13 conventuals, its area comprised 80 fireplaces, so it was tiny compared to other imperial abbeys. In 1806 the new Kingdom of Württemberg mediated the three-year-old county of Isny. Neither the count nor the 1500 inhabitants of the practically bankrupt city were unhappy about this. The former imperial abbey remained in the personal property of the count. The family used the convent building as a mansion, as a castle. The Catholic parish, which now also included the few Catholic residents of the mostly Protestant town, was able to use the former monastery church. It was given to her in 1868 by the count's family. The interior was spared major interventions in the 19th century; corrections were made during the last extensive restoration in 1994–1996.
The fate of the former convent building is less fortunate. At the request of the city of Isny, the count's family sold the hardly changed building in 1942 to the city of Stuttgart , which wanted to use the so-called "castle" for the Hitler Youth for recreation and training. In 1944, the war situation was the reason to convert the building into an auxiliary hospital. It also served as a hospital after the war when it was rebuilt from 1953 to 1954 for further use as a geriatric clinic and nursing home . In 1996 the city of Stuttgart had to close the home. A private foundation took over the convent buildings, which had since been rebuilt several times, after the city refused to buy them. As far as possible, the buildings were restored.
In some rooms, the city of Isny operates a municipal art gallery as a tenant, with the possibility of visiting the former refectory . The “Städtische Galerie im Schloss” has also been located here since 2010. The official names show that the short period of use of the castle from 1803–1942 has replaced the long monastery period from 1096–1803 in the understanding of the city's residents.
Building history
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Destruction and rebuilding
The first monastery complex and the Romanesque church burned down in 1284. A basilica was probably rebuilt immediately after the fire and consecrated in 1288. In the first third of the 17th century, numerous rooms were rebuilt or rebuilt, but they were destroyed in the devastating city fire in 1631.
Abbot Dominikus Arzet (1650–1661) began to rebuild the burnt-down monastery after the Thirty Years' War. An inheritance of over 20,000 guilders in favor of the reconstruction favored the construction project. As early as 1645–1648, still during the war, the Marienkapelle , built in 1391, had been restored under its predecessor. Its vaulted choir had withstood the fire. In the tradition of medieval monasteries, it was built parallel to the collegiate church on the east wing and served the small convent as a provisional church service room. Abbot Dominikus began building the new Marstall in 1650 , and in 1653 the brewery, over which he set up three monk cells for the few remaining conventuals, followed by the double stable in 1654 and the long building in the building yard in 1655. The buildings were mostly reconstructions and, in the order in which they were placed, showed economic sense.
The Vorarlberg master builder Michael Beer (1605–1666) has also been involved since 1652 . He built the large new residence and church for Abbot Giel von Gielsberg in the neighboring prince abbey of Kempten and introduced himself to Abbot Dominikus with a project for the new church in Isny. The abbot did not consider the master builder until 1656–1657 for the “new building” and the partial reconstruction of the convent wing. The “New Building” was built as the eastern boundary of the cloister courtyard at a right angle to the south wing of the convent and along the city wall.
Baroque complex with rococo decorations
In November 1661, Father Theodorich Locher from Ochsenhausen was elected abbot. The construction team - builder Giulio Barbieri and his brothers Pietro and Domenico - had started work on the new church and the western abbey wing in the spring of 1661 in accordance with the contract of 1660. He obliged them to build “the kierch after the sighting”, to include the still standing masonry and to demolish and rebuild the tower. The previous building, a three-aisled basilica, significantly shorter than the present one, but according to building research the same width and in the same location, had had a transept and two choir towers since 1617. The clear cross-section of the basilica is now incorrectly described as a hall church from 1288. For a sacred space in the Lake Constance area in the 13th century, this is impossible to establish in terms of architectural history. At the time of the town fire, the monastery church had vaulted aisles, but the flat wooden ceiling in the main nave offered no resistance to the fire. The walls in the main nave area, which had been unprotected for 30 years at the time of the construction contract, could no longer be used for the new building. Therefore, from spring to late autumn 1661, the construction team Barbieri first demolished the pillars and nave walls that were no longer usable and built new pillar foundations for the free pillars of the hall church. The agreed new tower foundation was also built after the choir towers were demolished this year. As usual in the building trade, construction was carried out from the beginning of May to the end of October, but with a year-round break in 1663. In 1664, vaulting was possible. The monastery church was consecrated in August 1666. The builders had to have erected the abbey wing with the bay window beforehand, because Giulio Barbieri was already working in St. Gallen at that time . The new church tower had not yet grown beyond the height of the interior, it was only completed 35 years later.
We owe today's rococo interior to Abbot Basilius Sinner (1757–1777). Shortly after his inauguration, he hired the Wessobrunn plasterer Johann Georg Gigl (1710–1765) and the painter and fresco artist Johann Michael Holzhey (1729–1762) to redesign the interior of the church. Even earlier, the abbot had contracted his stepbrother, Matthäus Gigl, who was only 24 years old, to do stucco work in the abbey. The simultaneous new furnishing of the church with altars and pulpit by the Wurzach sculptor Johann Jakob Willibald Ruez (1728–1782) is of a similarly high quality as the Rococo room dress. This was completed in 1759. Even in the rich roco landscape of Upper Swabia there is little comparable.
See also
literature
- Rudolf Reinhardt: Imperial Abbey of St. Georg in Isny 1096-1802. Contributions to the history and art of the 900-year-old Benedictine monastery. Konrad, Weißenhorn 1996, ISBN 3-87437-386-X
- Martin Samland: The Chronicle of the Isny Monastery. Historiography and Reality. In: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 128th year 2010, pp. 13–42
- Hans Ulrich Rudolf (eds.), Berthold Büchele, Ursula Rückgauer: Places of rule and power - castles and palaces in the Ravensburg district . Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2013, ISBN 978-3-7995-0508-6 , pp. 231-233.
- Pius Bieri (2010): Former Isny Abbey, accessed on November 2, 2017
Web links
- Benedictine Abbey Isny in the database of monasteries in Baden-Württemberg of the Baden-Württemberg State Archives
- Kunsthalle Schloss Isny Website of the permanent exhibition
Remarks
- ↑ See Hans-Eugen Specker: The history of the imperial cities at a glance . In: Meinrad Schaab , Hansmartin Schwarzmaier (ed.) U. a .: Handbook of Baden-Württemberg History . Volume 2: The Territories in the Old Kingdom. Edited on behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-608-91466-8 , pp. 649-661, here p. 651; Karl Friedrich Eisele: Isny , ibid. Pp. 685-687.
- ^ Pius Bieri (2010): Former Reichsabtei Isny , accessed on November 2, 2017.
- ^ Pius Bieri (2010): Former Reichsabtei Isny , accessed on November 2, 2017.
Coordinates: 47 ° 41 ′ 38 " N , 10 ° 2 ′ 34.4" E