Laudon Castle

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Laudon Castle

The Laudon Castle , and Castle Hadersdorf called, is a baroque moated castle in Hadersdorf , the 14th district of Vienna today Penzing belongs.

history

Hadersdorf Castle around 1670. Engraving by Georg Matthäus Vischer

The Lords of Hadersdorf were first mentioned in a document around 1130; around this time there was probably a fortification on the site of today's castle. In the following centuries the rulership changed hands several times until the castle came to the sovereign in 1358, who assigned it to the respective forest master as a residence.

The castle was destroyed during the first Turkish siege in 1529. After the reconstruction, the property went to the Teuffenbach family in 1551 and to Sigmund von Hohenburg zu Pranckh in 1588 . In 1654 it was finally bought by Eleonora of Mantua , the wife of Emperor Ferdinand III. , acquired. After damage during the second Turkish siege in 1683, the castle was rebuilt as an early Baroque moated castle by its new owner, court official Andreas Schellerer. In 1708, Elisabeth Christine , the wife of the later Emperor Charles VI. , then as Karl III. Opposite king in Spain, here two nights. A Latin inscription in elegiac distiches in the stairwell reminds of this:

hIC noCtes regIna DVas hIspana Manebat
IaM CaroLo Laete nVpta prIore DIe.
InnVMeros parIt haeC praesentIa rara DeCores.
sIT nobIs posthaC CharIor ergo DoMVs.
( The Spanish Queen, who had been happily married to Karl the day before, spent two nights here. This rare visit creates innumerable splendor. So may the house be all the more expensive for us from now on. ) 

These are chronodistiches , a form of the chronogram : The capital letters in each line, read as Roman numerals , result in the year 1708.

The palace was given its present form in 1744 by Franz Wilhelm Schellerer.

Field Marshal Ernst Gideon von Laudon acquired the castle in 1776 and lived here until his death in 1790. The castle remained in the possession of the Laudon family until 1925. Then it came into the possession of the industrialist Otto Parnegg, after 1938 " Aryanized ". 1945–1955 it was occupied by the Soviet occupying forces . In 1960 it was sold by the Parnegg sons to the Archdiocese of Vienna, which had the furniture auctioned. In the same year the archdiocese sold the rather devastated castle to Consul Alfred Weiß , who had it repaired and operated as a luxury hotel from 1962 to 1973. It has been leased to the Republic of Austria since 1976 and houses the federal administration academy . The Public Sector Department of FH Campus Wien is also located in the building called "Oktogon", which is located in the palace gardens. The castle is not open to the public.

Exterior construction

The castle is laid out around a square inner courtyard, which is surrounded on three sides by the two-story main wing and towards the southeast by a single-story utility wing. The waters that surround the castle are fed by the Mauerbach .

Interior decoration

Fresco by Johann Bergl, originally in Donaudorf Castle (detail)

Most of the remarkable interior was designed by Field Marshal Laudon. The library's original classical furnishings have been preserved in their entirety. The door leaves of the bookcases and the canvas covering the walls that remain free are decorated with grisaille paintings (mythological figures based on Giovanni Antonio Gori, mythological scenes based on the “Monumenti antichi inediti” by Johann Joachim Winckelmann ).

The frescoes that were saved in 1954 when Donaudorf Castle was demolished during the construction of the Ybbs-Persenbeug power station and transferred here in 1963 are housed in a room next to the library . The frescoes are the work of Johann Bergl (around 1770).

garden

Field Marshal Laudon had a magnificent landscaped garden laid out around 1780/90, only parts of which have survived today. Scattered in the garden there are several staffage elements, two monumental sculptures Boar and a statue of Laudon as ancient philosopher.

Laudon's tomb

Tomb of Field Marshal Laudon
Tomb of Gideon Ernst von Laudon - detail

The classicistic tomb for Field Marshal Laudon was commissioned by his widow Klara and executed in 1791 by the sculptor Franz Anton Zauner . It has the shape of a cuboid with a gable roof and is decorated on all four sides with relief tondi with mythological figures. There are Latin inscriptions on the two long sides: a dedication from his widow and his heirs ( ... coniux ... ac haeredes pos [uerunt] MDCCLXXXX - erected by the widow and heirs in 1790 ) and an appreciation of his military merits ( tiro ad Borysthenem, dux ad Moraviam, Viadrum, Boberim, Neissam, Vistritiam; veteranus ad Unnam, Istrim, Savum - as a recruit to the Dnieper , as a leader to the March , Oder , Bober , Neisse and Bystritza , as a veteran to Una , Danube and Save ). Next to the tomb there is a life-size figure of a mourning knight as a grave guard.

The location of the tomb was originally in the Laudon Gardens, but today it is an inconspicuous place in the forest on the other (north-eastern) side of Mauerbachstrasse. The tomb is empty, Laudon is buried elsewhere in the palace gardens, the exact location is unknown.

literature

  • Dehio Handbook Vienna, X. to XIX. and XXI. to XXIII. District . Anton Schroll & Co., Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-7031-0693-X , pp. 296-298.
  • Hanns Jäger-Sunstenau : Hadersdorf Castle, today Laudon Castle, and its owners . In: Penzinger Museum Papers . No. 14, 1967, pp. 229-238.
  • Franz Pesendorfer: Field Marshal Loudon: The victory and its price . ÖBV, Vienna 1989, ISBN 3-215-07218-1 .

Web links

Commons : Schloss Laudon  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 48 ° 12 ′ 51 ″  N , 16 ° 13 ′ 16 ″  E