Liebfrauenkirche (Freistadt)
The listed Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady in Freistadt in Upper Austria's Mühlviertel is outside the city wall in front of the Böhmertor and was first mentioned in 1345. The Hussites burned the church down in 1422, after which the church was rebuilt in Gothic style. The wave of baroqueization in Freistadt did not affect this church, so the church has remained almost unchanged since the 15th century and has been preserved as a real jewel from the Gothic period to this day.
The Liebfrauenkirche is also the namesake of the nearby Frauenteich next to the Böhmertor.
history
The Liebfrauenkirche was mentioned for the first time in a document in 1345 and was originally a hospital church of the nearby infirmary. The church stands outside the city wall in front of the Böhmertor on Schmiedgasse. In 1361 the first church building fell victim to a fire and was replaced by a new church. The Hussites, who had besieged Free City in vain, burned them down again. The stone-built part of the Gothic church was preserved and was used in the reconstruction after the end of the Hussite Wars (1436).
This is the only way to explain some of the peculiarities of the nave : The construction of a three-aisled basilica with tall, slender columns and a higher and wider central nave was adopted from the old church , but without the light arcade . Instead, you can still see narrow windows from the outside between the pent roof of the side aisles and the roof of the central nave, reminiscent of narrow loopholes. Since one apparently wanted to use the existing walls, one could neither decide on a pure basilica nor on a hall church. The result was a mixture with a vault in the side aisles , which rises quite steeply to the shield wall of the central nave, which is at least unusual. The two side aisles close at the east end over the side altar with a gallery or a canopy and should have been connected with a similar canopy in the central nave, as the stumps in the central nave prove. It was never carried out like that, so that the case arises that the northern gallery can be reached via a staircase, but the southern gallery has no access at all and is therefore inaccessible.
The construction time itself is not entirely clear. On one of the buttresses on the south side of the east choir is the number 1447, above the south portal is the year 1482 on the fresco Coronation of Mary. This suggests that the east choir was built first and that the renovation of the nave was later on. This new building was only carried out very sparingly because the city council was thinking of having the east choir of the parish church of St. Catherine redesigned, which happened between 1483 and 1501. After the two great city fires (1507 and 1516), from which it was spared, the church served as the main church, as the city parish church was completely damaged.
From 1608 to 1624 the church served the numerous Protestants from Freetown as a church, but had to be returned to the Catholics in the course of the successful Counter-Reformation . Even in the baroque period, the structure of the church remained untouched except for a baroque gable, which was later removed, so that not too many changes were made during the regotization around 1890.
The church has not changed since then, it has been regularly renovated. There are no regular services in this church today.
City cemetery 1345–1855
In 1557 the city council decided to enlarge the cemetery around the Church of Our Lady , which had existed since 1345, and to enclose it with a wall. And so the church became the Freistädter Friedhofskirche and remained so until this cemetery was closed on September 14, 1855. The dead were always carried through the south gate from the church into the cemetery, which is why this gate was named "Death Gate".
The school sisters' monastery was later built on the site of the former cemetery, and a car park was built in the 20th century. The small, preserved remnant is a listed building and is surrounded by an arcaded wall. A late Gothic shoulder arch portal and a loggia above the dean's crypt (1620–1855) are located in the cemetery. The loggia has a single nave and two bays with groin vaults and a wall painting Last Judgment from around 1620. There are walled gravestones on the wall that are baroque and classical.
The church outside
The picture above on the right shows the west side of the church with the portal, which is only half visible due to the constant elevation of the street and can only be reached via steps leading down. Above the entrance in the tympanum is a new, but already slightly faded image of Mary. The high pointed arch window , once an integral part of every Gothic church, is blocked by the organ inside and is no longer important. The little turret, like the two side altars (Aloisius, Josef) and the windows of the nave, was built in the Neo-Gothic period. The two bells that Franz Hollederer had cast in Linz in 1861 had to be delivered in 1917 and were replaced by two bells from the St. Florian bell foundry in 1929 .
The church inside
When you enter the church through the west entrance, you are immediately impressed by the bright, bright choir. The architecture of the choir is also worth mentioning, with its balanced dimensions of 9 m × 9 m × 6 m. The walls are broken up by high tracery windows. These windows were once decorated with excellent paintings, of which only those in the tracery have been preserved, such as the stained glass from around 1500 in the high windows. In the first window on the top left there is a beautiful picture of the Madonna, who is called “Our Lady of Freistadt”.
A special Gothic work of art, the only one of its kind in the city, is the six-meter-high column "Lux Perpetua" for Eternal Light from 1484, which once shone for the dead in the cemetery ( death lamp ). The column is a foundation of the mayor Horner and the work of the Freistadt stonemason Mathes Klayndl . At the end of the 19th century it was restored as part of the regotisation and placed in the east choir of the Liebfrauenkirche and thus saved from deterioration.
The black and gold main altar by the Linz sculptor Hans Hens (Henz) in the style of the very early Baroque (or late Renaissance ) around 1640 with the altarpiece “Adoration of the Magi” by Adriaen Bloemaert is a Christmas and Mary altar. St Francis of Assisi and Anthony of Padua stand on protruding pedestals around the altarpiece, as well as the plague saints Rochus and Sebastian above . Above the picture of the Madonna by the Munich painter Ludwig Glötzie from the period of regotisation stands the Annunciation Angel, the most beautiful figure on the altar. The Rosary Brotherhood was founded in Freistadt in front of this altar in 1648 . The altar is considered a scaled-down image of the large, 15 m high Baroque altar by the two artists in the parish church, which was erected in 1641, but of which neither a description nor a picture has been preserved.
Above the west choir of the church is the organ loft with a baroque organ case around 1780 (probably by the organ builder Lorenz Franz Richter from Freistadt) and a grille with sheet metal cuts (around 1650).
Tracery windows
Death lamp
altar
organ
literature
- Othmar Rappersberger: Freistadt - jewelry box of the Mühlviertel. Kunstverlag Hofstetter, Ried im Innkreis 1992.
- Vicarage Freistadt (ed.): The Church of Our Lady in Freistadt. Church leader, Plöchl Druck.
Web links
- Liebfrauenkirche on kirchen-fuehrer.info.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Florian Oberchristl: Bells of the Diocese of Linz. Verlag R. Pirngruber, Linz 1941, p. 134f.
Coordinates: 48 ° 30 ′ 48 ″ N , 14 ° 30 ′ 22 ″ E