Pilgrimage Church of John the Baptist (Bilfingen)
The pilgrimage church of John the Baptist is in the district of Bilfingen in the municipality of Kämpfelbach in the Enzkreis, Baden-Württemberg . The church is of Romanesque origin and was known as a pilgrimage to St. John the Baptist in 1415 .
history
Bilfingen belonged on the counts of Eberstein the monastery Frauenalb . Pope Celestine III confirmed ownership to the monastery in 1193. In the centuries that followed, Frauenalb expanded ownership and rights. In the early 16th century, the monastery was the sole owner of the double village of Bilfingen-Ersingen. As a result of the secularization of the Benedictine abbey in 1802, the villages that had since become independent fell to Baden. The earliest mention of the church is the year 1258 on a lost stone relic sarcophagus of the local saints Merwinus and Compoldus. The pilgrimage chapel was a branch of the parish church of Ersingen. It was not until 1495 that the chapel in Bilfingen was elevated to an independent parish church and the cemetery was created around the church. The parish died after the Reformation in 1598. After a brief reoccupation in 1729/30, it was not rebuilt as a parish curate until 1909. In 1955/57, the preservation authorities spoke out against renewal. A new building was carried out elsewhere in the village. As the maintenance of two church buildings became too expensive for the Catholic community, the continued existence of the old pilgrimage church was endangered. It has been used as a cemetery chapel since 1967.
Building history
The pilgrimage church was probably built on the remains of a previous church at the beginning of the 12th century. A Romanesque chapel with an extension to the west was built. On the south and north sides of the nave, a 13 m long Romanesque wall has been preserved. The foundations of the western wall found in the interior of the nave and the stone ornamented with a checkerboard pattern and cross, which was reused as a cuboid ( spoil ) on the southeast corner of the tower, bear witness to the Romanesque period. During excavation work, some profiled workpieces such as the fragment of a cube capital came to light . On the south side, a completely preserved Romanesque arched window with square painting on the plaster surface of the inner reveal and figurative painting on the plastered outer reveal was exposed. The figurative painting in the window reveal points to the early 13th century. The south portal is a stepped lintel portal with a masonry soffit made of different sized stones and a relief arch made of wedge stones, inside a semicircular tympanum. There was a Latin inscription at the base of the tympanum. After the uncovering in 1968, the portal was plastered again because it was badly damaged. The outlines have been scratched.
At the end of the 15th century, the building was converted into a Gothic parish and pilgrimage church. Around 1750 the tower was remodeled by the Frauenalber abbess Gertrud von Ichtersheim. In the years 1789 to 1794 the Romanesque-Gothic nave received arched windows and a baroque interior . In 1968 the former pilgrimage church became a cemetery chapel for both denominations with a mortuary.
Checkerboard frieze walled upside down in the south-east tower
May tarry
Painting window reveal and tympanum Drawing south portal
Painting Johannes
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literature
- Gustav Adolf Reiling: History of the formerly women Albic villages Ersingen and Bilfingen. Pforzheim 1937, esp.p. 90 ff.
- Emil Lacroix, P. Hirschfeld and W. Paeseler: Kunstdenkmäler Baden, Volume IX, 7, Pforzheim Land district. Karlsruhe 1938.
- A. Vogel: Reconstruction of the old parish church in Bilfingen. In: Konradsblatt. 1969, no.33.
- Hans Huth : The rescue of the old cath. Pilgrimage church near Bilfingen, district of Pforzheim. In: Newsletter of the preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg. Published by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Culture. 1970, pp. 106-114.
- H. Niester: A quarter of a century of monument preservation in and around Pforzheim. In: Badische Heimat (My Homeland). Vol. 50, 1970, H. 2/3, p. 325 ff.
- Hermann Diruf, Christoph Timm : Art and cultural monuments in Pforzheim and in the Enzkreis. Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, p. 162.
- Ulrike Kalbaum: Romanesque lintels and tympana in southwest Germany: studies on their form, function and iconography. Waxmann Verlag, 2011 ( Google Books ).
Individual evidence
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 57 '4.3 " N , 8 ° 37' 10.6" E