Wiederau Castle: A Baroque Palace Complex in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
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- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page10 sections
History
Wiederau Castle is a Baroque palace complex in Germany, situated at the southwestern edge of Wiederau, now a district of Pegau. Built between 1697 and 1705 in the Dresden Baroque style for the Leipzig privy councillor David Fleischer, it became the centre of a manor estate whose owners and residents shaped its later history.
Construction and Early Owners
David Fleischer, born in Annaberg in 1646 and descended from a Scottish passementerie merchant, acquired the Wiederau estate in 1697 for 21,000 Meissen guilders. He then commissioned the palace complex, which was completed in 1705. The identity of its master builder remains uncertain. The building has been attributed to Johann Gregor Fuchs, a master builder born in Dresden who became Leipzig’s council master mason in 1700. The art historian Jörg Katerndahl instead argued that David Schatz may have constructed it from designs by Leonhard Christoph Sturm.
The estate later passed, among others, to the bourgeois Kypke family. In 1816, Heloise Kypke, born in 1797, married Heinrich Albrecht Wilhelm von Holleuffer, a Prussian royal postmaster and Saxon royal cavalry captain. Their second son, Adolf Conrad Pius von Holleuffer-Kypke, born in 1878, inherited and managed the manor as a member of the von Holleuffer-Kypke family. Other relatives of the owners also lived at the castle, including Lieutenant Colonel von Radtke.
The Manor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
By the mid-1920s, the manor covered 120 hectares and lay in the Borna administrative district. It was leased to Franz Raschke. The von Holleuffer family was expropriated in 1945 and 1946. Konrad Pius von Holleuffer-Kypke remained in Wiederau until his death, while his divorced wife, Eva von Walther, who had come from Dresden, moved to Buxtehude. Their son Xaver von Holleuffer, born in the castle, became the formal heir.
During the East German period, the castle served several purposes, including use as a kindergarten. In the 1990s, lignite-mining excavators were scheduled to demolish it, but the political changes of 1989 and 1990 prevented that outcome. The castle was sold in 2010 to the Baden-Württemberg precious-metals entrepreneur Geiger, who had acquired Güldengossa Castle in 2006. The facade and painted interiors were subsequently extensively restored. An association also began supporting the building’s future with irregular exhibitions, concerts, and other cultural events.
A half-timbered barn belonging to the castle was destroyed by fire during a night in mid-March 2015. A secondary building was also damaged, with losses amounting to 200,000 euros.
Wiederau and Johann Sebastian Bach
Wiederau is associated with Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular cantata Angenehmes Wiederau, freue dich in deinen Auen, composed in 1737 in honour of the new manor lord Johann Christian von Hennicke. Bach was an eighteenth-century German composer and cantor, while Hennicke was a favourite of the Dresden court under August the Strong, the Saxon elector and Polish king Augustus II, whose court was a major centre of cultural patronage in Saxony.
Hennicke’s granddaughter Christiana Sophia inherited the estates of Wiederau, Großstockwitz, and Kleindalzig. She married the Electoral Saxon-Polish master cook Gottlob Erich von Berlepsch at Urleben and died in 1789.
Remains
Wiederau Castle is a block-like palace with a base storey, two main floors, a mezzanine, and a mansard roof. The mezzanine is a partial intermediate story, while the mansard roof has two slopes on each side, with the lower slope steeper than the upper one. The arrangement and ornament belong to the Dresden Baroque, a formal Saxon palace style characterized by symmetrical facades, shallow projections, elaborate gables, and refined plaster and stone decoration.
Exterior and Entrance
On the courtyard side, the outer bays project forward as short wings by the depth of one window axis. The central double-window axis forms an avant-corps, a section of facade projecting beyond the main wall, and ends in a decorated clock gable. The south facade and the six-axis side sections have shallow central projections. Grooved plaster covers the ground floor, and the same treatment surrounds the window frames made from porphyry tuff. Delicate plaster panels articulate the upper and mezzanine floors of the courtyard facade.
The open staircase leading to the entrance portal dates from 1705. On the courtyard side, its surround is made of grooved porphyry tuff, and the entrance carries a double coat of arms. This facade arrangement was first used in Saxon palace architecture at the Palais in the Great Garden in Dresden and was also employed at Knauthain Castle.
Circulation and Painted Interiors
Behind the transversely rectangular vestibule is a double staircase with opposed flights. It probably replaced a three-sided encircling staircase around 1737, although the earlier arrangement survives in the lower storey. Wall and ceiling paintings were created by the Italian painter Giovanni Francesco Marchini, who worked from 1712 for the same patron at Crossen Castle near Eisenberg in Thuringia.
Dining Room
The ceiling painting in the ground-floor dining room presents an allegory of peaceful rule. Four imperial portraits appear in stucco cartouches, linking the room’s decoration with ideas of ordered government.
Ballroom
The ballroom occupies two stories of the three-story building. Pilasters with Composite capitals articulate its walls. A Composite capital combines elements associated with the Ionic and Corinthian classical orders. The illusionistic ceiling painting depicts the cooperation of the arts and crafts under the guidance of Divine Providence, the guiding activity of God in Christian theology. It is regarded as one of the most valuable works of its type in Saxony, and its model was Andrea Sacchi’s depiction of Divine Providence in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome.
Mythological over-door paintings decorate the ballroom. On the east wall are the Judgment of Paris and the abduction of Cephalus by Aurora. The west wall shows the Sacrifice of Iphigenia and Apollo and Daphne, while above the north-wall fireplace is the Visit of Venus to Vulcan. The outer wall sections on the north side carry pairs of putti-supported stucco curtains. The left-hand section shows Eurydice being bitten by a snake while pursued by Aristaios.
Additional Rooms
Paintings on the south wall show putti designing the castle lord’s coat of arms between the two rows of windows. The entablature contains stucco cartouches and red camaieu paintings, a technique using variations of one colour to create a relief-like effect, with scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The room at the western corner beside the ballroom has a ceiling painting of Boreas abducting Oreithyia. At the southeastern corner, paintings depict Fortuna and Juno. Ceiling stucco also survives in additional rooms.
