Ambras Castle: A Renaissance Palace and Museum in Austria
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Austria
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Habsburg, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page21 sections
History
Ambras Castle is a Renaissance palace in Austria, above Innsbruck, transformed from a medieval fortification by Archduke Ferdinand II of Austria between 1564 and 1583. Its history reaches back to the Counts of Dießen-Andechs and their predecessors, who occupied the site from at least the tenth century. The castle combined a strategic territorial stronghold with a princely residence and an extensive programme of collecting, display, architecture, and garden design.
Medieval Fortress and Territorial Lordship
The early fortification at Ambras was recorded by the eleventh century. The name is associated with the Latin phrase ad umbras, meaning “in the shade.” Ambras belonged to the Counts of Dießen-Andechs, and its position allowed the fortress, together with nearby Straßfried Castle, to control routes between Innsbruck, the bridge across the Inn at Hall, the upland plateau, and the lower Sill Valley.
Henry the Proud destroyed the castle in 1133. It was rebuilt about 150 years later, and parts of material from the earlier Andechs fortification were incorporated into later construction. After the death of Otto VIII, Duke of Merania, in 1248, his territories passed to Albert III, Count of Tyrol. When Albert died in 1253, Ambras passed to Elisabeth’s second husband, Gebhard IV of Hirschberg. Elisabeth died childless in 1256, and the castle then came through her sister’s marriage to Meinhard I of Gorizia. After Margaret of Tyrol, the last member of the Gorizian line, died, Ambras passed to the Habsburgs in 1363.
Ambras continued to serve as a fortified seat of territorial lordship. Emperor Maximilian I later used it as a hunting castle, adding a courtly association to its strategic and administrative role.
Ferdinand II and the Renaissance Residence
Archduke Ferdinand II acquired Ambras in June 1564. A Habsburg ruler of Tyrol and son of Emperor Ferdinand I, Ferdinand converted the medieval fortress into a Renaissance palace. The Renaissance was a European cultural period that revived classical forms and joined humanist learning with courtly display, collecting, and the study of nature. At Ambras, these interests shaped the buildings, gardens, portraits, armouries, library, and collections.
Ferdinand created a residence for himself and his secretly married, untitled wife, Philippine Welser. Giovanni and Alberto Luchese carried out the rebuilding according to plans by Giovanni Battista Guarienti, while Ferdinand himself demonstrably took part in the planning. The Upper Castle was rebuilt and enlarged between 1564 and 1567. The freestanding Spanish Hall followed in 1569–1572, and the Lower Castle, with its library, antiquarium, and hunting armoury, was constructed in 1570–1572. The Chamber of Art and Wonders and three armouries were created between 1572 and 1583, while the Heroes’ Armoury was added in 1589.
Ferdinand’s collections brought together armour, weapons, portraits, books, natural specimens, scientific instruments, rarities, and precious objects. The Lower Castle was designed specifically to house them and became one of the earliest buildings created expressly for museum use. Its armouries and Chamber of Art and Wonders were conceived as collections from the outset, although their principal purpose was princely representation rather than general public access. Ferdinand nevertheless arranged paid visits.
The systematic presentation of armour associated with famous figures, particularly military commanders, gave the collections a historical and dynastic structure. The Chamber of Art and Wonders, or Kunstkammer, was an encyclopedic Renaissance collection that joined artworks, natural specimens, scientific instruments, foreign objects, and unusual things in a display of princely knowledge. Together, Ferdinand’s collecting practices place Ambras at the beginnings of modern museum collecting. The Armamentarium Heroicum, a catalogue of heroic figures and their armour, was completed after his death, published in Latin in 1601, and translated into German in 1603.
Imperial Ownership and Dispersal
Ferdinand died in 1595, and Ambras and its collections passed to his son Charles, Margrave of Burgau. Charles concentrated on enlarging his residence at Günzburg and sold the castle and collections to Emperor Rudolf II in 1606. Ambras then ceased to function as an official residence and was occupied only occasionally.
Preservation became increasingly difficult. During the seventeenth century, Emperor Leopold I transferred important books and manuscripts to Vienna, and further material went to the library of the newly established University of Innsbruck in 1745. During the Napoleonic Wars, the remaining collection was moved to Vienna in 1806 for safety. Books, manuscripts, and drawings suffered losses and deterioration during this long period of changing ownership and use.
From after 1665 through the nineteenth century, the castle served several practical purposes, including accommodation for troops and use as a military hospital. It functioned as a barracks until 1842. Beginning in 1855, Archduke Karl Ludwig, governor of Tyrol, remodelled Ambras as a residential and summer residence. Extensive additions followed in 1855–1858, and the park was reshaped as an English landscape garden. August Wörndle remodelled the St. Nicholas Chapel in Neo-Gothic style between 1863 and 1867. Later work removed some nineteenth-century additions in order to bring the castle’s appearance closer to seventeenth-century views.
Museum and Federal Heritage Site
Ambras was converted into a museum in 1880 under the conservators of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Several dilapidated structures were demolished around 1880–1882, including the Heroes’ Armoury, the Ballspielhaus, and a summer house in the Keuchengarten. In 1913 the castle was intended as the summer residence of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his family, and rebuilding began. His assassination in 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War halted the work.
After the abolition of the monarchy in 1919, the former imperial property became part of the Republic of Austria. Claims by the Province of Tyrol were rejected. The museum reopened in 1922 after the war and reopened again after its closure during the Second World War, sometime after 1948. Administration of the castle and collections passed to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1950.
Restoration and museum work later in the twentieth century included the Spanish Hall, the Upper Castle interiors, and the inner courtyard during the 1970s. The Chamber of Art and Wonders was completed in 1974, the Habsburg Portrait Gallery in 1976, and the armouries reopened in 1981. A new entrance to the Spanish Hall was created in the former basement armoury in 1997 to reduce conservation pressure on the hall.
Ambras is a federal museum of the Republic of Austria and forms part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the KHM-Museumsverband. It is the only federal museum of Austria outside the federal capital. The surrounding park has belonged to the Republic since 1928 and has been protected as a monument since 2007.
Ferdinand’s Park and Courtly Rituals
The park originated in Ferdinand II’s Renaissance redesign, begun in 1567. A description from 1574 lists forests, fishponds, game enclosures, vineyards, gardens, and garden buildings. After Ferdinand’s death, the pleasure gardens west and south of the Upper Castle were largely converted to agricultural use, while the rock cellar, Bacchus Grotto, and some other garden buildings remained associated with the estate.
From 1855, Karl Ludwig reshaped the northern and western grounds as a landscape garden, planting individual trees and groups of trees and creating a large pond. Later changes reduced the northern park area for a motorway and altered parts of the Keuchengarten and courtyards. The wildlife park also received a playground.
The Bacchus Grotto formed part of a Renaissance reception ritual. Guests were held by concealed chains or by a mechanism linked to the Ambras capture chair. They could be released by emptying a wine vessel called a Willkomm, after which they entered a saying in one of three drinking books. The books and ritual drinking glasses remain in the Ambras collections.
The Keuchengarten became an orchard after Ferdinand’s death. In the nineteenth century it received a kidney-shaped bathing pool and formal plantings. The pool was scheduled for removal after 1913, but work stopped in 1914. In 1997, part of the garden was redesigned according to a Renaissance pattern based on a garden book prepared for Emperor Rudolf II around 1592–1594. A Renaissance-style Venetian Fountain had been installed near the lower courtyard in 1914.
Remains
Ambras is organized around a central Renaissance castle in an extensive park. The complex consists of the Upper Castle, or Hochschloss, the Lower Castle, or Unterschloss, the freestanding Spanish Hall, administrative buildings, and the surrounding Schlosspark. The park retains a three-part arrangement, with a wildlife park to the east, a landscape-garden area to the west and north, and the Renaissance Keuchengarten to the south. The Great Pond, Bacchus Grotto, an artificial waterfall fed by a branch of the Aldrans stream, and the tower of the former St. George’s Church form part of this setting.
Upper Castle and Courtyard
Medieval Structure and Portrait Gallery
The Upper Castle is the oldest surviving part of the complex. Its bergfried, a fortified tower, palas, or main residential building, and chapel foundations date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Ambras belonged to the rulers of Gorizia. The palas contains a cross-vault dating from the time of Sigmund the Rich. Residential rooms and the Habsburg Portrait Gallery occupy three floors. The gallery contains approximately 300 portraits dating from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries and representing Habsburgs and members of other European ruling dynasties.
Works attributed or signed by Hans Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach the Younger, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Jakob Seisenegger, Hans von Aachen, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthonis van Dyck, and Diego Velázquez form part of the gallery. Its dynastic range also includes portraits of members of the Wittelsbach, Medici, and Valois families and a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I of England. A portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga at the age of three is attributed to Rubens.
Wall paintings discovered on the second floor in 1980 date from 1565–1566. They include ornamental designs, animals, fruit garlands, tournament scenes, and a life-size portrait of Ferdinand II probably attributable to Hans Polhammer. The Gothic Sculpture Collection is displayed on the ground floor of the tower, built at the end of the thirteenth century. Its principal work is the St. George Altarpiece, made for Emperor Maximilian I by Sebold Bocksdorfer, whose wings depict Saints Christopher, Catherine, Barbara, and Florian.
Inner Courtyard Frescoes
The inner courtyard is covered with sixteenth-century grisaille frescoes painted on wet plaster. Grisaille uses shades of grey to imitate relief sculpture or architectural ornament. At Ambras, the unified painted scheme regularizes the courtyard’s irregular, narrow, and vertically emphatic form.
The decoration presents princely virtues, muses, classical heroes and heroines, heroic deeds, and imagery celebrating Ferdinand II as an exemplary ruler. The scenes include a procession of Bacchus with chariots, satyrs, and bacchants; Orpheus enchanting animals; the Liberal Arts; Old Testament figures such as Judith, Esther, and Jael; battles and horsemen; and the Virtues Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, and Wisdom. The “New Heroes” include Alexander the Great, Godfrey of Bouillon, David, Arthur, Charlemagne, Judas Maccabeus, Joshua, Hector, and Julius Caesar. The frescoes underwent a major restoration between 1984 and 1991.
The courtyard originally contained a Renaissance loggia, and the interruption in the painted decoration still indicates its former position. Remnants of polychrome painting survive on an older plaster layer. A partly gilded decorative iron grille made around 1567 by the court master Hans Peck stands in the northern courtyard vestibule.
Bathing Chambers
The Bathing Chambers of Philippine Welser comprise a bath, a steam bath, heating facilities, and a rest room. The tub is sunk approximately 1.60 metres into the floor and lined with galvanized copper sheet. Steps lead into it, and a stone stool with a wooden seat survives beside the bath.
The dressing room received a wooden coffered ceiling in 1567 and a surrounding fresco frieze probably painted by Hanns Polhammer between 1563 and 1567. The poorly preserved scenes include a festive gathering in a pergola, a fountain of youth, and Diana in the bath.
Spanish Hall and Imperial Room
Spanish Hall
The freestanding Spanish Hall was built between 1569 and 1572. It measures 43 metres in length and has a coffered ceiling that is partly gilded and inlaid. Its doors, made from different woods by the court cabinetmaker Conrad Gottlieb in 1571, contribute to the hall’s Renaissance interior.
Twenty-seven full-length portraits of the ruling princes of Tyrol line the hall. The sequence begins with Count Albert I of Tyrol, continues through the counts of Gorizia-Tyrol and Margaret of Tyrol, and ends with Archduke Ferdinand II. Giovanni Battista Fontana painted the portraits, which were reconstructed during the restoration of 1878–1880 after serious moisture damage.
Other paintings include allegories of the Virtues on the east wall, nineteenth-century scenes from the life of Hercules on the north wall, the Liberal Arts and episodes from the history of Romulus and Remus on the west wall, and the Labours of Hercules in the sixteenth-century frieze.
Imperial Room
The Imperial Room adjoins the Spanish Hall on the east. Originally an antechamber, it contains twelve stucco relief busts of Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian. Its pictorial design and a battle painting date from 1719. Ten full-length portraits continue the dynastic theme of the Spanish Hall by depicting Tyrolean rulers from Emperor Rudolf II to Charles VI.
Lower Castle Collections
Museum Building and Chamber of Art and Wonders
The Lower Castle is an independent, irregular pentagonal structure open toward the east. Ferdinand II built it for his library, antiquarium, museum, and armouries. An antiquarium is a collection devoted chiefly to antiquities and ancient objects. The Lower Castle is one of the earliest purpose-built museum buildings and the only Renaissance museum building in which part of Ferdinand’s collections remains displayed in its original setting.
The Chamber of Art and Wonders originally contained eighteen ceiling-high cabinets, according to the 1596 inventory. Its encyclopedic contents included artworks, natural specimens, scientific instruments, exotic objects, luxury goods, paintings, musical instruments, automata, clocks, and objects of crystal, silver, gold, bronze, glass, and wood. Taxidermied animals hung from the ceiling. Surviving highlights include coral in cabinet boxes, turned wood and ivory, glass figures, porcelain and silk paintings, hand stones, goblets made from rhinoceros horn, coconut, and rock crystal, bronze animals, instruments, and portraits of unusual people.
Among the named objects are the wooden “Little Death,” the Schüttelkasten, a portrait of a disabled man, portraits of the family of Petrus Gonsalvus, a giant pig, a portrait of Vlad Dracula, and the iron capture chair. The collection is now arranged in the building called the Kornschütt, which originally housed Ferdinand’s library. The nineteenth-century room intended for the collection was raised in height and fitted with Giovanni Battista Fontana’s 1586 ceiling painting of the starry sky. Since 1981, that room has displayed arms and armour from the Thirty Years’ War, the European conflict fought from 1618 to 1648, largely from the former Vienna Armoury.
Armouries and Library
The armouries contain armour and weapons dating from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Their displays include pieces associated with Emperor Maximilian I and Archduke Sigismund, tournament armour for the German joust and other tournaments, Ferdinand II’s personal armour, and armour belonging to the Innsbruck court.
Ferdinand’s Heroes’ Armoury presented armour and portraits of more than 120 generals and included about 100 original armours. Eight wooden armour cabinets survive in excellent condition. A series of 24 armours includes 20 complete examples and four represented by individual parts. Nineteen foot-tournament armours form a large surviving group of early modern European armour-making. Ferdinand’s own armour from the 1566 campaign in Hungary against the Ottoman Empire was included among the heroes. From about 1580, much of the armour was made by the court armourer Jakob Topf, including equipment designed for barrier jousts, free tournaments, and foot tournaments.
The Turkish Room formerly stood separately at the end of the Second Armoury. Its contents included saddles, bows, quivers, sabres, shields, helmets, and other luxury accessories, including war booty. Sixteenth-century circular leather mosaics were used in Ottoman tents as floor coverings or wall decoration. Embossed and polychrome-painted iron masks, with hair and the features of hussars and Moors, were made for masquerades and hussar tournaments.
During Ferdinand II’s lifetime, the library occupied the Kornschütt. Its 1596 inventory lists 3,711 titles, probably fewer than the total number of books, arranged under theology, law, medicine, historiography, and cosmography. The library also contained arms, armour, sculptures, paintings, and minerals. Its original cabinets were reused in 1977 as display cases for the Chamber of Art and Wonders. Associated works include Philippine Welser’s cookbook, pharmacopoeia, prayer book, and drinking books; Francesco Terzio’s five-volume Imagines gentis Austriacae, with 74 portraits; and the illustrated Armamentarium Heroicum, which contains 121 full-length engraved representations of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century figures with their armour and weapons. Jakob Schrenck von Notzing supervised the project, Domenicus Custos made the engravings from designs by Giovanni Battista Fontana, and the completed book appeared after Ferdinand’s death.
Glass Collection and Medicinal Garden
The Strasser Glass Collection contains more than 300 objects dating from the Renaissance to the Classical period. Rudolf Strasser assembled the collection over more than fifty years, acquiring works made in European glassmaking centres including Venice, Hall, Innsbruck, Bohemia, and Silesia. Most of the collection was installed at Ambras in 2013, while approximately 60 pieces were transferred that year to Vienna’s Chamber of Art and Wonders.
The medicinal-plant garden lies beside the route from the Spanish Hall to the Upper Castle and is reached by a spiral staircase. Its plants are selected according to Philippine Welser’s pharmacopoeia from the 1560s and 1570s. Since 2007, the area has been arranged as an enclosed Paradiesgarten, an intimate garden, near the women’s chambers and a small kitchen used by the lady of the house.
Park Structures and Gardens
Bacchus Grotto
The Bacchus Grotto, originally called the Rock Cellar, is supported by a substantial pier and four transverse arches. Bacchus was the Roman god of wine, and the grotto’s name reflects the wine-based reception ritual associated with it. Its equipment included drinking vessels, three drinking books, and the iron capture chair.
The chair folds on hinges and contains a concealed mechanism with gripping arms that held a seated participant by the shoulders and limbs. Its rear is decorated in iron-cut technique with floral, grotesque, and hunting motifs. The reception ritual also involved the Willkomm, a wine vessel whose emptying released the participant.
Keuchengarten
The Keuchengarten lies south of the Upper Castle, in front of the Spanish Hall, on a lowered terrace. Its name is linked to the medieval Prison Tower at the southeastern corner, a trapezoidal, three-storey structure incorporated into the Renaissance rebuilding around 1563.
During Ferdinand II’s period, the garden had nine planting compartments and a central round pavilion with columns and an onion-shaped roof. A summer house in the southeast contained water amusements, including a maple table turned by water-powered wheels that splashed guests. A hexagonal tower-like garden building and an elevated stair tower remain as parts of the garden’s architectural arrangement.
A kidney-shaped bathing pool was added in the nineteenth century, together with box, yew, and barberry hedges, clipped box spheres, and yew cones. The garden also includes a twentieth-century reconstruction of a Renaissance arrangement based on Matthäus Merian’s 1649 view and a late-sixteenth-century pattern book associated with Hans Puechfeldner. The lower courtyard was redesigned in 1974 using the Merian engraving as a reference. The site of the Ballspielhaus received a Renaissance-style Venetian Fountain in 1914; an earlier plan for a fountain with bronze figures by Caspar Grass was not carried out, and those figures were later incorporated into the Leopoldsbrunnen in central Innsbruck.
