Neuburg Castle (Bavaria)

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City Palace and Danube today
View of the inner courtyard with the hall built from 1537

As Schloss Neuburg is City Palace in Neuburg an der Donau referred.

History of the castle

Reconstruction of the original functional room structure on the first floor around 1559
Castle chapel
Frescoes by Hans Bocksberger the Elder Ä. (1543) with Protestant images
Court room from the 16th century on the ground floor of the west wing
City palace in 1546, before the baroque reconstruction of the east wing
Inner courtyard with sgraffiti
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The original castle complex was built by the Agilolfingers in the early Middle Ages . This Bavarian ducal court went to the Wittelsbach family in 1247 .

City Palace

From the medieval castle to the renaissance castle

When Count Palatine Ottheinrich and his brother took over the rule of Pfalz-Neuburg in 1522, he found a medieval castle complex in his residence town of Neuburg, which, unlike other princely residences of a comparable function, was not structurally similar to that of the last decades of the 15th century had been adapted to the growing demands of a princely court. From 1527 he had the castle redesigned and expanded into a Renaissance castle, which in terms of artistic quality and state of preservation is one of the most important castle buildings of the first half of the 16th century in Germany.

Work began with the round room (which has now disappeared) on the east side of the palace. From 1532 the so-called kitchen construction was carried out in the south. From 1534 to 1538 the wing followed in the north of the palace courtyard with a bathing area, two dining rooms and two living apartments. Originally, the wing did not have the current saddle roof with volute gables and dormitories from around 1590/1600, but originally had an open over the entire building area , in accordance with the ideas that were then made about the imperial ancient palace on the Roman Palatine Hill Terrace that was probably landscaped.

A little outside of the residential city of Neuburg, the construction of a large court garden had already begun in 1529; and a year later the duke and ducal couple had the Grünau hunting lodge built outside the city gates . Here, too, medieval traditions, such as the depiction of hunting trophies and heraldic emblems, were brought together with numerous allusions to ancient high culture.

Castle chapel

From 1537 a new wing was added to the west of the city palace, which also accommodated a court room in a historicizing style reminiscent of Romanesque monastery refectories, a chapel with a manorial gallery and probably a new apartment for Ottheinrich directly connected to it. Above it was a large hall, the wooden barrel vault of which reached into the roof structure. Even before his conversion to Lutheran teaching on June 22, 1542, the Count Palatine had the palace chapel built into the existing building structure of a bastion until it was inaugurated by the Nuremberg reformer Andreas Osiander on April 25, 1543 and provided with extensive equipment, which is still today In the very small choir, the altar, ordered in 1540 and completed in early 1542, with a stone five-part crucifixion group as a retable, the gallery balustrades and the extensive Protestant pictorial program on the ceiling and upper walls, which was only painted from summer 1543 in the Italian-antique style, have been preserved.

The chapel is thus the oldest surviving Protestant church building not only in Bavaria, but worldwide, but at the start of construction with a longitudinal eastward orientation and an altar choir, it was still designed and equipped for Catholic worship, followed by the castle chapel in Torgau , by Martin Luther on 5. Inaugurated personally in October 1544, and built by the palace chapel in Stuttgart's Old Palace , 1558–1562, both of which form the beginning of the only purely Protestant church structure, the transverse church . The famous frescoes in the Neuburg Palace Chapel were designed by the Salzburg church painter Hans Bocksberger the Elder. Ä. The cycle of images is unique in the history of Protestant church building. It shows above all those scenes from the Old Testament that are closely related to the Reformation and begins with the image of the creation of Eve and the fall of man . This is followed by the ten plagues of Pharaoh and images of human violations of the commandments of Moses . The other pictures show Christ's death on the cross, baptism and communion as an overall composition . The ceiling of the chapel shows a fresco with the Ascension of Christ . Not only was the crucial role of Christ as the divine guarantor of grace discussed. Rather, a crucial role of the prince in the distribution of this grace within a godly earthly order was claimed. The work on the west wing dragged on for a long time due to the financial difficulties and the bankruptcy of Ottheinrich in 1544. The shell was already completed around 1540; but in the 1550s, red marble walls were moved to the windows and work was done on the furnishings.

West wing

Count Palatine Wolfgang von Zweibrücken, who succeeded his cousin Ottheinrich in the Duchy of Palatinate-Neuburg, had the west wing on the courtyard side decorated with elaborate sgraffito decorations in 1562. Its main theme is the story of Joseph and his brothers, a theme that is symbolic in several ways. Joseph's fate of being betrayed by his brothers and sold to the Pharaoh in order to then become deputy regent in the pharaoh's realm due to his wisdom and dream interpretation skills, became not only a symbol for the good ruler in general and those persecuted by the Pope and Emperor Protestant princes in particular, but also became a symbol of Ottheinrich's eventful fate. Count Palatine Wolfgang wanted to remind of his steadfastness and eventual justification and to know the ethical core of the picture message, the presentation of a good and just ruler, at the same time related to his own person. Neuburg Castle was, in a sense, raised to the status of a monument of honor for Ottheinrich, from which both the expulsion and the reinstatement of the prince began.

The knight's hall (the lower dining room in the north building) was furnished by Hans Pihel in 1575 with a coffered ceiling and surrounding wooden wall paneling, both of which have been preserved in their original form.

East wing

The imposing east wing was rebuilt in 1665 under Philipp Wilhelm in the Baroque style and supplemented with the two round towers. In 1795, Duchess Amalie , wife of the late Duke Karl II August , moved into the Philipp Wilhelm wing of the palace. Her brother-in-law, King Max I , lived for a while in 1806 on the 2nd floor of the Philipp Wilhelm wing, which was renovated for him in 1810. In 1815 the Empress of Austria was received in Neuburg Castle. After the Duchess' death (1831) the role of the castle as a residence came to an end. In 1866 the palace was finally cleared and the properties, if they did not come to Munich, were auctioned off to the public. In the war of 1866 the castle was used as a hospital. Between 1868 and 1918/19 it served as barracks for the III. Battalion of the Royal Bavarian 15th Infantry Regiment . The city of Neuburg acquired the furniture and the silk wallpaper of the reception salon at an estate auction, but they were destroyed in a fire in 1945.

State Archives

After secularization, there were initially three archive authorities for the Swabian regions. The holdings from Dillingen on the Danube and Kempten were incorporated into the Neuburg Archive Conservatory in 1830 (which went back to the archives of the Principality of Pfalz-Neuburg). The archive, whose name changed several times, was located in the castle until 1989. It was relocated to the Swabian district capital as the Augsburg State Archives .

Museums

The renovated castle now houses several museums :

Exhibitions

  • 2016: Art & Faith. Ottheinrich's magnificent Bible and the Neuburg Palace Chapel . Neuburg Castle. Catalog.

literature

  • Reinhard H. Seitz: The castle chapel in Neuburg on the Danube. One of the earliest Protestant church rooms in the mirror image of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Weißenhorn 2016, ISBN 978-3-87437-572-6 .
  • Adam Horn; Werner Meyer : The art monuments of Swabia. Bd. 5 City and District of Neuburg an der Donau. Munich 1958, on the Neuburg Palace there pp. 158–266.
  • Horst H. Stierhof: Wall and ceiling paintings of the Neuburg Castle in the 16th century. Diss. Munich 1972 (special print from the Neuburger Kollektaneenblatt 125/1972).
  • Ulrike Heckner: In the service of princes and the Reformation. Facade painting on the castles in Dresden and Neuburg an der Donau in the 16th century. Munich 1995.
  • Stephan Hoppe : The palace building Ottheinrich von der Pfalz in Neuburg on the Danube. Considerations on the relationship to the palace architecture of the Electorate of the Palatinate of the 1520s. In: Stefanie Lieb (Ed.): Form and Style. Festschrift for Günther Binding for his 65th birthday. Darmstadt 2001, pp. 202-212. Online version on ART doc .
  • Fritz Grosse: Image of Power. The picture behind the pictures at Ottheinrich von der Pfalz (1502–1559). Petersberg 2003.
  • Stephan Hoppe: Antiquity as a benchmark. Ottheinrich as the client in Neuburg and Heidelberg. In: Suzanne Bäumler, Evamaria Brockhoff, Michael Henker (eds.): By Kaisers Gnaden. 500 years of Pfalz-Neuburg. Catalog for the Bavarian State Exhibition 2005 Neuburg an der Donau June 3 to October 16, 2005. Augsburg 2005, pp. 211–213. Online version on ART doc .
  • Reinhard H. Seitz: The representative buildings by Count Palatine Ottheinrich for the castle in Neuburg on the Danube and their completion by Count Palatine Wolfgang. In: Hans Ammerich (Ed.): Elector Ottheinrich and the humanistic culture in the Palatinate. Revised and expanded lectures that were held on the occasion of the scientific conference "Elector Ottheinrich and the humanistic culture in the Palatinate" on September 20 and 21, 2002 in the Palatinate State Library in Speyer. Speyer 2008, pp. 73-149.

Web links

Commons : Neuburg Castle (Bavaria)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reinhard H. Seitz: The castle chapel in Neuburg ad Donau - One of the earliest Protestant church rooms ; Weißenhorn 2016, ISBN 978-3-87437-572-6 .
  2. ↑ EKD : “Talking Church Space”: Neuburg Palace Chapel reopened , accessed on November 6, 2016.
  3. ↑ Homepage of the Evangelical Church Congregation , accessed on October 2, 2018
  4. ↑ Gerhard Nebinger, 1980, p. 32.

Coordinates: 48 ° 44 ′ 13.3 "  N , 11 ° 10 ′ 51.1"  E