St. Maria (Ainhofen)

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Church of St. Maria in Ainhofen

The Catholic branch and pilgrimage church of St. Maria in Ainhofen , part of the Markt Indersdorf community in the Upper Bavarian district of Dachau , is essentially a Romanesque building. The church at Bürgermeister-Hefele-Straße 13, in the middle of the cemetery, is a protected architectural monument .

History of the pilgrimage

Ainhofen has been a place of pilgrimage for over 500 years and is said to refer to a miracle in 1519. The highlight of the Marian pilgrimage was around 1700. The aim of the pilgrimage is the Romanesque figure of a breastfeeding Madonna made of lime wood. It was carved around 1130, making it the oldest figure of Mary in Central Europe. The sculpture stood in the monastery church of Indersdorf for several centuries before it came to Ainhofen around 1500. In 2019 the Ainhofen pilgrimage celebrates its 500th anniversary.

Building history

Two different documents from the Indersdorf monastery state that the year of foundation was 1229.

A square tower with a curved dome rises between semicircular gables in the northern corner . It is a hall building with a retracted choir closed on three sides ; this was probably extended around 1300, extended from 1668 and the sacristy moved from the tower.

From 1717 onwards, the church building was significantly redesigned due to the increase in pilgrimages. This gave it the baroque shape and furnishings that can still be seen today. A cemetery wall was built with other components, the portal was renewed and the pulpit staircase. The high altar in its present form was created in 1732. The current onion-like tower end dates from 1764 and replaced the previous old gable roof. The stucco frame ceiling and the frescoes come from the circle of Johann Anton Gumpp (died 1716), a Tyrolean who worked as a painter and architect at the electoral court in Munich.

Furnishing

Miraculous image of St. Mary, around 1120

Of the furnishings , the elaborate high altar from 1732 with carved figures of Saints Barbara and Dorothea with 17 angels and three putti heads is worth mentioning. As a miraculous image, he has a small figure of Our Lady from the 12th century (around 1120), which was later fitted into a baroque altar with a halo. It is the oldest miraculous image from the Diocese of Freising and was originally the founding figure of the Indersdorf Monastery . The Maria lactans - a representation of the Mother of God with the suckling child - is a type of the Mary representations and was popular in the Middle Ages. Pre-Christian parallels to this can be found in Egyptian art (goddess Isis with the Horus boy), the figure emphasizing the mother-son relationship and at the same time referring to the divinity of the boy. In the course of time, however, this type of representation of Mary was considered offensive, and so the cult figure was given to the neighboring village church of Ainhofen, not without changing the figure a little by flattening the chest side. From 1700 onwards she received special veneration in the course of popular piety.

The cross with the depiction of a Mater Dolorosa (Mother of Sorrows) dates from 1718. The devotional image with the scourged Savior from the 17th century. The numerous votive tablets go back to around 1650 and are a sign of the lively pilgrimage that lasted until the middle of the 18th century. The pulpit and the side altars with St. Nicholas - a statue from around 1500 - come from the renovations in 1719/20. The fourteen plaques commemorating the Way of the Cross are from 1795.

literature

Web links

Commons : St. Mary  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Archdiocese of Munich and Freising
  2. ↑ a b c d Hans Schertl: Pilgrimage Church of St. Maria in Ainhofen. March 9, 2018, accessed January 15, 2020 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 23 '58 "  N , 11 ° 22' 41"  E