Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach

Austrian architect

• Born: July 20, 1656
• Birthplace: Graz, Austria
• Died: April 5, 1723
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

The founder of the Austrian Baroque movement, Fischer von Erlach was the pivotal figure in the artistic life of late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century Austria, creating an architectural style that embodied the imperial pride of the revived Habsburg Dynasty.

Early Life

Johann Baptist Fischer, the father of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (yoh-HAHN BURN-hahrt FIHSH-ur fohn UR-lahkh), was a sculptor in Graz, Austria. He had sufficient means to send his son, whom he had trained as a sculptor and stucco worker, to Italy to complete his artistic education. It was natural that the younger Fischer should go south for his apprenticeship. The lands of the Austrian crown had long been little more than an artistic extension of the Italian Baroque, with itinerant architects, painters, and stucco workers from northern Italy, especially from the Como region, disseminating there the aesthetic canons of the Jesuit-dominated Counter-Reformation. Fischer would be the first native Austrian to challenge this virtual monopoly of the Italians, and in so doing he would become the father of the Austrian and German Baroque.

Nevertheless, Fischer’s sojourn in Italy proved immensely rewarding. Although the exact length of his stay is unknown, he seems to have spent at least twelve years there between the early 1670’s and around 1686, working and studying first in Rome and then in Naples. In Rome, Gian Lorenzo Bernini was still alive, and Francesco Borromini was not long dead. The work of both men greatly influenced the young Fischer, but he seems to have been especially fascinated by Borromini. Italy had much to teach him, but he was no mere architect’s apprentice or a hanger-on in artists’ ateliers. Already, he possessed a voracious appetite for reading and learning and a boundless intellectual curiosity that, in time, would make him something of a Renaissance man.

By 1687, Fischer had returned to Graz and, by 1690, he was established in Vienna. Between 1688 and 1689, he worked (with the Italian Lorenzo Burnacini) on the Dreifaltigkeitssaule, or Pestsaule, the sculptured column erected by Leopold I in the Graben to remember a recent plague epidemic. In 1688, he also began his first major architectural commission for Count Michael Althan at Schloss Frain (Vranov, Czechoslovakia), on a magnificent cliff-top site, where he designed a freestanding domed Ahsensaal, a hall in which the count’s ancestors were commemorated, with ten niches in which stood life-size statues of ancestors and with a frescoed ceiling representing the familial virtues of the Althans. The painter was Johann Michael Rottmayr, a native Austrian from the Salzkammergut, who later worked with Fischer in Salzburg and in the Karlskirche.

By now, Fischer had attracted the attention of the Habsburg court, and on the occasion of the crowning of Leopold’s heir (the future emperor Joseph I) as king of the Romans in 1690, he was commissioned to construct an elaborate triumphal arch, for which the exuberant design still exists. Thereafter, he was appointed architectural tutor to Joseph, presumably on the strength of his growing reputation as the first Austrian architect to rival the ubiquitous Italians (Leopold was committed to reducing French and Italian influences at his court). He was also ennobled, aquiring the title “von Erlach.” On his accession in 1705, Joseph I appointed Fischer von Erlach chief imperial inspector of buildings and festivities. The emperor stood as godfather to the architect’s eldest son, Joseph Emanuel, who was to pursue a distinguished career as an architect in his own right. It was Joseph I who requested Fischer von Erlach to design for him a palace at Schönbrunn to outshine Versailles. Although the palace was never built, the design survives and has been described as “one of the great visions of architectural history.”

Life’s Work

During the first fifteen years of the eighteenth century, Fischer von Erlach achieved his full stature as an architect. It was during these years that he set his distinctive mark upon Vienna, executing many commissions for town palaces for the nobles of the empire, who were eager to employ the emperor’s favorite to build residences that would advertise both their wealth and their taste. The first of these commissions was the palace he built for Prince Eugene of Savoy between 1695 and 1700 on the narrow Himmelpfortgasse, later to be enlarged by his rival, and the prince’s favorite architect, Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt. He gave it a Roman facade of the kind that would become his hallmark and designed a Treppenhaus (an entrance hall with a double staircase) that ranks as one of the finest examples of a form for which the Austrian and German Baroque is rightly famous. The upper level of the staircase is supported by magnificent muscular atlantes, which Fischer von Erlach would employ again to great effect in the Batthyány and Trautson palaces and in the Bohemian Chancellery.

Eugene’s town palace was followed by the construction of the Batthyány palace (1699-1706), the Klesheim palace at Salzburg (1700-1709), the Bohemian Chancellery (1708-1714), the Trautson palace (1710-1716), the Schwarzenberg palace (1713), and the Clam-Gallas palace in Prague (begun in 1713). Notwithstanding these secular commissions, mainly in Vienna, Fischer von Erlach had also established a reputation as an ecclesiastical architect, primarily through his work at Salzburg. Largely because of an idiosyncratic dislike of Italian craftspeople on the part of the reigning prince-archbishop of the city, Johann Ernst von Thun-Hohenstein, Fischer von Erlach replaced Johann Caspar Zuccalli as court architect and was commissioned to build there the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (the Church of the Holy Trinity, 1694-1707), the Kollegienkirche (the Collegiate Church of the Benedictine University, 1696-1707), and the Ursulinkirche (the Church of the Ursuline Convent, 1699-1705). In 1709, the archbishop died, and since his successor preferred to employ Hildebrandt, Fischer von Erlach’s connection with the archiepiscopal city came to an end. There was also a hiatus in his church-building until 1715, when he began work upon his ecclesiastical masterpiece, the Karlskirche.

By then, he had become by far the most celebrated architect in the emperor’s dominions. With his acute intelligence and his wide-ranging interests, there was much of the scholar about him, as well as the artist, and it should come as no surprise to find him a correspondent of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Indeed, it has been suggested that Fischer von Erlach aspired to create in stone a transcendent vision of the harmony and order inherent in the mind of the Leibnizian “Divine Mover.”

In 1712, Fischer von Erlach dedicated to Charles VI the preliminary manuscript version of his lavishly illustrated history of architecture, Entwurff einer historischen Architektur (pub. 1721; A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture in the Representation of the Most Noted Buildings of Foreign Nations Both Ancient and Modern, 1730). The treatise was to be one of the most influential architectural works of the eighteenth century. It was characteristic of Fischer von Erlach’s intellectual curiosity that his researches led him far beyond the world of classical antiquity to Egypt, the Middle East, and Asia. He seems, for example, to have had an appreciation for Islamic architecture that was rare among Europeans at that time and indeed for the following two centuries.

In 1713, the plague again struck Vienna, and in fulfillment of a vow made at that time to Saint Carlo Borromeo for the city’s deliverance, the emperor determined to construct a great basilica for the saint facing across what was then open ground toward the Hofburg, the imperial palace. Leading architects of the day such as Hildebrandt were invited to submit designs, but it was Fischer von Erlach’s plan for the basilica that was accepted, and in 1715 he began work upon his masterpiece. The foundation stone was laid in 1716, but it was not until 1738 that the Karlskirche was finally dedicated. At the time of Fischer von Erlach’s death in 1723, however, the frame of the church was already standing (the dome and the dome drum being completed during 1723-1724), and under the direction of Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach, the dead architect’s son whom Charles VI held in great esteem, the project went forward in accordance with the original design.

The internal arrangements of the Karlskirche center on a longitudinal oval at right angles to the facade, crowned by a mighty dome, but it is the facade of the Karlskirche that gives it a unique place among Baroque churches. As was his custom, Fischer von Erlach designed the front exterior with great care. The central section was to consist of a Roman portico, behind which would be seen the great high-drummed dome above the nave. The portico was then linked to two rather squat campanili by concave walls, in front of which were to stand two immense columns derived from Trajan’s column in Rome and similar to a pair that had originally been incorporated into his grandiose design for Schönbrunn. Both columns were to be encircled, like their Roman original, by commemorative bas reliefs, in this case illustrating the life of Saint Carlo Borromeo.

Just as Fischer von Erlach did not live to see the completion of the Karlskirche, so he did not see the completion of his other masterpiece, the Hofbibliothek or imperial library. The Hofburg, for generations the Vienna residence of the Habsburgs, had deteriorated greatly, and Charles VI turned to Fischer von Erlach for a master plan for its renovation. Between 1716 and 1720, therefore, the latter drew up designs for an imperial library as the first stage of the rebuilding. It was to represent, symbolically, a temple of knowledge and science, perhaps reflecting the ideas of Leibniz, who certainly took a great interest in its design. Delays resulting from lack of funds and the declining health of the architect meant that the finished building, erected between 1722 and 1738, was as much the work of Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach as it was of his father. Nevertheless, the son was meticulous in following his father’s original plan, although he himself deserves full credit for the quality of the finished interior, with its ceiling frescoes by Daniel Gran, who had worked with both father and son on the Schwarzenberg palace.

Significance

One of the most original architects of the late Baroque period, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach was the founder of the Kaiserstil, or imperial style, which spread from Austria, in one form or another, throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Possessing an equal aptitude for ecclesiastical and secular building, he left an indelible mark upon the landscape of Vienna. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, Fischer von Erlach was no mere technician: Rather, he was the embodiment of the notion (perhaps derived from Leibniz) that the architect could be both the formulator and the interpreter of the ideals of the age, an assumption as implicit in his great treatise on world architecture as it was in the elaborate symbolism of the Karlskirche and the Hofbibliothek.

Bibliography

Aurenhammer, Hans. J. B. Fischer von Erlach. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973. This is the only book available in English devoted solely to Fischer von Erlach. As such, it must be regarded as an invaluable study.

Fergusson, Frances D. “St. Charles’ Church, Vienna: The Iconography of Its Architecture.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29 (1970): 318-326. A detailed account of the imperial symbolism attached to the building and decoration of the Karlskirche. Essential reading.

Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard. Entwurff einer historischen Architektur, in Abbildung unterschiedener berühmten Gebäude, des Alterthums und fremder Völcker. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1964. Fischer von Erlach’s treatise on the history of architecture, reprinted in the second edition of 1725, together with the English translation of 1730, entitled A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture, in the Representation of the Most Noted Buildings of Foreign Nations, Both Ancient and Modern.

Hift, Fred. “Salzburg.” Europe no. 358 (July/August, 1996): 36. Describes Schloss Klessheim, the ducal palace designed by Fischer von Erlach.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Late Baroque and Rococo Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974. An outstanding survey of its subject, excellently illustrated with photographs and ground plans.

Sedlmayr, Hans. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Vienna: Herold, 1956. The definitive monograph on the architect. In German.

Tapié, V. L. The Age of Grandeur: Baroque and Classicism in Europe. Translated by A. Ross Williamson. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960. Virtually an instant classic upon publication, this book provides the best general background to the art and aesthetics of Baroque Europe.

Wangermann, Ernst. The Austrian Achievement, 1700-1800. London: Thames & Hudson, 1973. An excellent introduction to Austria’s golden age, setting Fischer von Erlach’s activities in historical perspective.

Weber, N. F. “Baroque Splendors of Vienna’s Schwarzenberg Palace.” Architectural Digest 47, no. 10 (September, 1990): 116. Photo essay about the palace, designed by Fischer von Erlach and Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt.