Eggenberg Palace, Graz

Coordinates: 47°04′26″N 15°23′29″E / 47.07395°N 15.39137°E / 47.07395; 15.39137
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Eggenberg Castle, Graz
)
"Eggenberg Castle" redirects here. Not to be confused with Eggenberg Castle, Vorchdorf.

Eggenberg Palace
medieval section), 1625 (Baroque expansion)
Completedc. 1635 (structure), 1685 (accouterments), 1762 (piano nobile)
Costover 105,000 guilder
ClientUniversalmuseum Joanneum
OwnerThe State of Styria
Height50 m (164 ft) (central tower)
Dimensions
Diameter65 m x 80 m (palace footprint)
Other dimensions90,000 m² (palace grounds)
Technical details
Floor count3
Floor area8,000 m²
Design and construction
Architect(s)Giovanni Pietro de Pomis
Other designersHans Adam Weissenkircher (court painter)
Europe and North America
Extensions2010 (34th session) included Schloss Eggenberg
References
  • Schloss Eggenberg. By Barbara Kaiser. Graz: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2006.
    ISBN 978-3-902510-80-8
  • Planet Eggenberg. By Hermann Götz. Graz: Leykam Medien AG, 2005.

Eggenberg Palace (German: Schloss Eggenberg) in

House of Eggenberg
.

In 2010, the significance of Schloss Eggenberg was recognised with an expansion to the listing of the Graz Historic Old Town among the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Sites.

Surrounded by walls, with a huge portal facing West, the palace is located in the

medieval era through the early modern period, spanning five centuries of European art history
.

History

Ideal perspective of Eggenberg. Copper etching by Andreas Trost, before 1700
Copper engraving with portrait of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg, 17th century

Construction

At first glance, Schloss Eggenberg presents itself as a uniform, new construction of the 17th century. Nevertheless, large portions of the building date back to the

early modern era
.

Before 1460

Papal indulgence from 30 May 1470 refers to the "Capella Beate Marie Virginis Sita in Castro Eckenperg", the Chapel of the Virgin Mary in Eggenberg Castle, which became the nucleus of the new palace built by Balthasar's great-grandson, Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg.[5]

The younger cousin of General

Thirty Years War. As prime minister (in contemporary political jargon)[10] and close, personal confidant of Ferdinand II, Hans Ulrich wanted a grandiose residence representing his new status and authority when he was named "Gubernator" (Governor) of Inner Austria after the emperor chose Vienna as his imperial capital.[11] In 1625 Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg commissioned court architect Giovanni Pietro de Pomis with the planning of his new palace, inspired by El Escorial in Spain.[12] As an architect, painter, and medailleur (designer and minter of medals), de Pomis, originally from Lodi near Milan, became the most important artist at the Grazer court.[13]
Incorporating the original medieval family residence into the new palace, de Pomis himself oversaw the construction work up to his death in 1631. Fortress master builder Laurenz van de Syppe continued the work for two years until the building was finished, in the end, by both of de Pomis' site foremen, Pietro Valnegro and Antonio Pozzo. The shell appears to have been completed by 1635 or 1636. Between 1641 and 1646 work on the ornamentation was brought to a close.

In 1666, Johann Seyfried von Eggenberg, grandson of Hans Ulrich, began to develop the palace according to the splendor and grandeur of the Baroque style and in 1673 the residence again entered the limelight as

Archduchess Claudia Felicitas of Tyrol was a guest in the palace on the occasion of her wedding in Graz to Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor.[14] Under Prince Johann Seyfried, the comprehensive cycle of ceiling coverings of approximately 600 paintings in the rooms of the piano nobile was accomplished in just 7 years. Hans Adam Weissenkircher
began his service as the court painter of the princely Eggenberger court in 1678. He finished the painting cycle of the main festival hall, the famous Planetary Room, in 1684/85. With this, the first phase of accouterment work on Schloss Eggenberg was completed.

After the extinction of the male line of the

Eggenberg family, the Eggenberger state rooms were left in a half-emptied and neglected state. The husband of the last Eggenberger princess, Johann Leopold Count Herberstein, ordered a comprehensive renewal of the complex.[15] Between 1754 and 1762 the building and the garden underwent their second major phase of ornamentation, this time in complete accordance with the tastes of the Rococo. Above all, the accouterment of the piano nobile was modernized. Nevertheless, the Planetary Room and the entire cycle of ceiling paintings remained almost unchanged. Thus, the works limited themselves to wall decorations, stoves and pieces of furniture. In keeping with the taste of the times, three East Asian cabinets were introduced and the state rooms received new wall coverings. The most extensive change was probably the demolition of the Eggenberger palace theater, in the place of which a baroque palace church was established. The supervisor of these works was the Grazer court architect Joseph Hueber, a student of Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt
.

The third phase of the changes came during the 19th century and was limited to the living quarters on the 1st storey (2nd floor in American English) of the palace. The piano nobile remained untouched and unused for a full century. The primary focus of attention of this period was the total transformation of the Baroque formal garden into a romantic landscape garden after the English fashion.

The entire complex remained in the possession of the Herberstein family up to 1939. Shortly before the war, Schloss Eggenberg was acquired with the park by the state of Styria. The oldest museum in Austria, the

Archduke Johann of Austria, took over management of the palace and park. The Joanneum conducted extensive restoration work to repair the damage that occurred during World War II and the subsequent occupation by the Allies
and in 1953 Schloss Eggenberg and the Eggenberg Schloss Park were finally opened again to the public.

Scheme

With his new residence,

hierarchical
, logico-mathematically explicable system.

Schloss Eggenberg relies on the Gregorian calendar as a basis for this constructed universe. The palace has 365 exterior windows, one for each day of the year. Of these, 52 are on the 24 rooms of the piano nobile representing the weeks of one year. The 2nd storey contains these 24 state rooms in a ring-shaped arrangement which symbolize the hours in a single day. Every floor in the building bares exactly 31 rooms counting the maximum number of days in a calendar month. The 52 windows of the piano nobile with the 8 windows of the Planetary Room make a total of 60, representing both the number of seconds in a minute and the minutes in an hour.

The palace is erected on a rectangular plan with the geometrical center being formed by the middle tower with its Gothic chapel. On each corner there is a tower-like rise. Each of these corner-towers represents one of the four seasons and the outside corner of each is aimed exactly in a cardinal direction.

Planetary Room

Painting of Mercury in the Planetary Room

The cycle of 24 state rooms culminates in the main festival hall, the Planetary Room and serves as both the beginning and the end of the ring of state rooms. The cycle of the oil paintings in this hall was created by

House of Eggenberg
.

Piano nobile

Eggenberg Palace courtyard Detail
Central courtyard

The cycle of some 600 ceiling paintings in the 24 state rooms of the piano nobile recalls the history of the world with scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, religious scenes from the Old Testament, and historical legends from Western Europe. This ceiling program with its stucco framing dates back to the first period of accouterment in the 17th century.

Under the married couple Eggenberg-Herberstein, the 24 rooms of the piano nobile were refurbished according to the tastes of the Rococo starting in the mid-18th century. In addition to new pieces of furniture,

Imari porcelain plates and bowls as well as Chinese silk paintings. In the wall coverings of the third cabinet, eight panels of a precious Japanese folding screen have been used. These traditional dividers portray the palace and the fortified town of Osaka before 1615, whereby it can be determined that these panels were executed shortly thereafter. From the early modern era there are very few of these screens depicting the city before its destruction, so these works are especially noteworthy. On account of the viewpoint on Osaka the Eggenberg panels represent a unique exhibit.[16]

The find of the screen created a sensation in Japan, since any visual remnants of the time of Hideyoshi were rare. During the state visit of the Austrian president in 2009 a memorandum of understanding was signed creating a partnership between Eggenberg and Osaka Castle.[17]

  • Main façade with entry portal
    Main façade with entry portal
  • Garden side of the Palace
    Garden side of the Palace
  • Planetary Room
    Planetary Room
  • Piano Nobile
    Piano Nobile
  • Gallery Room
    Gallery Room
  • Gambling Room with wall coverings by J.A.B. Raunacher
    Gambling Room with wall coverings by J.A.B. Raunacher
  • Japanese Cabinet with the rare screen depicting Osaka
    Japanese Cabinet with the rare screen depicting Osaka

Gardens

Entrance gate to the garden and palace
Water feature in the English garden

The various owners and builder-owners have always looked at the palace and at the surrounding gardens as corresponding elements. Thus, every succeeding generation has carried out significant alterations.

The largest expansion of the garden occurred after the completion of the house. In the last third of the 17th century the garden was generously extended around the building. It followed the pattern of the strictly subdivided

aviaries and pheasant
gardens.

Johann Leopold Count Herberstein allowed the whole arrangement to be reshaped into a

French garden
. As early as the 1770s, the Eggenberg Gardens were an attraction open to the Grazer public.

However, with the advent of the

Claude Lorraine[19] whose works inspired the likes of Stourhead
as well as many others. The recently restored Rose Mound formed the climax of this 19th-century landscape park.

The early 20th century saw a dwindling of interest in the palace gardens and the Eggenberg Schloss Park no longer employed a gardener. This had the unfortunate consequences of individual elements of the garden being torn-out and, over the course of decades, the rest being overgrown; the entire arrangement thus becoming more or less a simple city park.

In 1993, in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Bureau of

Cultural Heritage Management (Bundesdenkmalamt), a garden grooming project was begun with the goals of preserving and reconstructing the gardens as a cultural monument to Romanticism
. The still existing elements were to be made recognizable and protected and the lost elements reconstructed in so far as it was possible. The initial phases of this project that have already been completed are the reconstruction of the 1848 Breakfast Garden behind the palace and the reclamation and restoration, which occurred during the winter months of 2007/08, of the Rose Mound, one of the most important components of the romantic English landscape garden.

Additionally, the peacocks from the Graz Peacock Garden formerly located between the inner city and the city park have found a new home in the Eggenberg Schloss Park. The species are of both the white variety and the more common Indian blue peacock. During mating season, the loud cawing of the males as well as their brilliant plumage adds an exotic flair to the splendor of the park as they try to attract the larger but less colorful females.

Planetary Garden

Planetary Garden aerial view

In the north corner of the grounds, an enclosed, separate garden went through such diverse transformations and uses over the course of the palace history that in the end it was discernible only by the spatial structure.

Due to a lack of surviving records, a new design for the flower garden was decided on in 2000 and a new garden grew out of an old idea. Landscape architect Helga Tornquist took up the theme of the Eggenberg scheme and incorporated it into a contemporary garden creation. This reclamation takes up in a playful fashion the ancient system of planetary "signatures", which is of special significance for the iconography of Schloss Eggenberg.[20] The Lapidarium has been established over the foundations of the former orangery as a point of interest and to provide an appropriate setting for the Roman Stonework Collection of the Joanneum.

Schloss Eggenberg enters the 21st century with the opening of a newly constructed subterranean showroom adjoined to the Lapidarium to house the Joanneum's Pre- and Early History archaeological Collections in autumn of 2009 to be ready for the Joanneum's bicentennial celebration in 2011.

peacocks on the bridge

Commemorative silver euro coin

In 2002, the Austrian Mint honored the importance of Schloss Eggenberg, by using it as the main motif of one of its most popular silver euro commemorative coins: the 10 euro Eggenberg Palace commemorative coin. The reverse side shows an image of Johannes Kepler, a personal acquaintance of Eggenberg's[21] who taught at the former Protestant school in Graz. His first major work, Mysterium Cosmographicum describing the Copernican system, written while he was still in Graz, likely influenced the symbolism of the design of the palace.[21]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ Das Joanneum – Österreichs Universalmuseum. 2006
  2. ^ Eggenberg Palace Elevation and Location
  3. ^ "Coin Cabinet Schloss Eggenberg". Joanneum. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  4. ^ "Alte Galerie Schloss Eggenberg". Joanneum. Retrieved 6 October 2019.
  5. ^ Becker, U. "The Eggenberg Altarpiece" in Schloss Eggenberg. Graz: Christian Brandstätter Verlag, 2006, p. 14.
  6. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 43.
  7. ^ The Thirty Years War. 1961, p. 60.
  8. ^ The Thirty Years War. 1961, p. 183.
  9. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 105.
  10. ^ Die Fürsten und Freiherren zu Eggenberg und ihre Vorfahren. 1965, p. 90.
  11. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 97.
  12. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 98.
  13. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 86.
  14. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 68.
  15. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 204.
  16. ^ Ôsaka zu byôbu. 2010, p. 8.
  17. ^ "Universalmuseum Joanneum GmbH". Archived from the original on 30 October 2023. Retrieved 17 October 2023.
  18. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 259.
  19. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 262.
  20. ^ Schloss Eggenberg. 2006, p. 284.
  21. ^ a b "Eggenberg Palace coin". Austrian Mint. Archived from the original on 31 May 2011. Retrieved 9 September 2009.

Sources

External links

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