Mariä Krönung: A Late Gothic Pilgrimage and Parish Church in Lautenbach, Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.9
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page19 sections
History
Mariä Krönung is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage and parish church in Lautenbach, Germany, built in the late Gothic period for the veneration of Mary and dedicated also to John the Baptist and John the Evangelist. Pilgrimage to a miraculous image of Mary probably began in the early fourteenth century, before the present church was constructed from 1471 onward to accommodate pilgrims and serve as a burial church for the local lower nobility.
Origins of the pilgrimage
Records concerning the church site reach back to 1190, while the documented pilgrimage belongs to the fourteenth century. Lautenbach was formerly connected with the parishes of Oberndorf and Oberkirch. In 1303, Oberkirch and Lautenbach passed into the secular possession of the Bishopric of Strasbourg.
A tradition relates that a shepherd found the Marian image in a hollow tree beside a spring after hearing extraordinary singing. The image was first venerated outdoors, and a simple wooden chapel was later built around it. This tradition helps explain the continuing importance of the spring and the image, although the pilgrimage’s early fourteenth-century beginnings provide its historical framework.
Allerheiligen and the new church
The pilgrimage was closely associated with Allerheiligen Abbey in the Lierbach valley. Its Premonstratensian canons, members of a Catholic order founded by Norbert of Xanten whose communities combined religious life with pastoral and liturgical duties, served the surrounding parishes.
After a fire destroyed part of Allerheiligen on 13 April 1470, the canons temporarily stayed on estates belonging to their provost, Andreas Rohart of Neuenstein. They also supported construction at Lautenbach. For a long time, the canons had hoped to move the abbey from its remote and severe Black Forest valley to the more accessible and milder Rench valley. The Schauenburg family opposed the plan because their ancestor Uta von Schauenburg had founded Allerheiligen through a charter of 1195 or 1196, and the family used the abbey as a burial place. The proposed transfer was prevented in 1480. An oath taken by the convent in 1484 rejected any future move, and the canons returned fully to the restored abbey in 1485.
The intended monastery nevertheless influenced the design of Mariä Krönung. The elongated choir was probably planned for the use of a large group of canons, while the building wing on the south side of the nave formed the front of an unfinished four-wing cloister complex. The church thus embodied plans for both a pilgrimage centre and a religious community.
Construction of the present church began in 1471. A document from 1526 states that the Junkers von Bach and von Schauenburg donated the site and laid the foundation stone. The new building replaced the earlier pilgrimage chapel and was intended to serve the growing number of pilgrims as well as the local nobility.
Local noble families, including the von Bach, von Schauenburg, and von Neuenstein families, contributed funds. Donations from pilgrims and townspeople also supported the work, including those of the baker Konrad Wegstein. The Bishop of Strasbourg placed the church under his authority and entrusted its administration to the provost of Allerheiligen. In 1480, he ordered an offering box to finance completion, furnishings, and worship. The pilgrimage consequently became an important source of income for the abbey.
Completion and religious administration
The Strasbourg master builder Hans Hertwig of Bergzabern, who operated a traveling construction workshop, supervised the work in 1482, when the church was still unfinished. It was sufficiently advanced for consecration by Albrecht, Bishop of Strasbourg, in 1483. Final consecration followed in 1488, although work on the choir and glazing continued into the early 1490s.
In 1483, Bishop Albrecht recommended a separate and worthy setting for the especially venerated Marian image, also called the sorrowful altar. The Chapel of Grace was completed in 1485. The rood screen, a substantial medieval partition separating the congregation’s nave from the clergy’s choir, was finished in 1488, while the earlier nave work had largely been completed by that time.
From 1488, Allerheiligen regularly supplied a canon for the church through a chaplaincy. In 1491, Mariä Krönung received the possessions and rights of the dissolved women’s religious community at Oberndorf near Oberkirch. In return, a Mass was to be celebrated each week for the Ortenau nobility, particularly for the community’s founders.
The south-side wing became a pilgrim hostel around 1490. It later provided temporary accommodation for canons of Allerheiligen after another abbey fire in 1555 and after the abbey was secularized in 1803. Since 1815, the wing has served as the parish house, while Mariä Krönung has also functioned as Lautenbach’s parish church.
Warfare, alteration, and survival
The church and its furnishings survived repeated devastation in the Rench valley during the German Peasants’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the War of the Palatine Succession in 1689, and the French period. Soldiers of the French Revolutionary army looted, destroyed, or burned votive offerings, votive panels, and documents associated with answered prayers in 1796.
Between 1895 and 1898, Max Meckel, building director of the Archdiocese of Freiburg, extended the nave westward by two bays for the enlarged parish and built the present tower. The medieval west portal and parts of an older tracery window were reused in the work. The Chapel of Grace was restored in 1997, when a copy of the miraculous image was installed after the original sculpture had been stolen in 1973.
Mariä Krönung remains an exceptionally complete example of southern German Late Gothic architecture. Its principal medieval structures and furnishings survived with relatively little loss or alteration, including the high altar, two additional altarpieces, the Chapel of Grace, rood screen, pulpit, choir stalls, west portal, and much of the medieval glazing.
Remains
Mariä Krönung is a single-nave church built from local red sandstone and plastered rubble masonry. Its original four-bay nave became a six-bay structure after the western extension of 1895–1898, and the interior is covered by a Late Gothic net vault, whose ribs form an interlacing network. A strongly recessed, elongated choir consists of an almost square section and a polygonal apse with a five-eighths termination. Its axis lies about one metre south of the nave axis, an unusual arrangement probably retained from the earlier pilgrimage chapel and its consecrated altar.
Church structure
Choir and sacristy
A two-bay, two-storey sacristy adjoins the north side of the choir. Its outer walls, a built-up altar base, and two later blocked Romanesque window arches preserve elements from the second half of the fourteenth century, probably incorporated from the earlier pilgrimage chapel. Around the church, exterior buttresses absorb the sideways pressure created by the vaults and roof. A continuous sill-course runs beneath the large pointed-arch windows and steps around the buttresses.
Inside the nave, simple half-piers with deep hollow mouldings and rounded shafts rise into the ribs of the irregular net vault. In the choir, the ribs rest on polygonal corbels. Much of the original colouring survives on the ribs, vault surfaces, and bosses. Around 1897, the painter Rieger replaced the sparse earlier decoration in the vault fields and spandrels with Neo-Gothic designs showing wheat ears, vines, and medicinal plants.
Windows and entrances
The pointed-arch windows contain Flamboyant tracery, a Late Gothic pattern of flowing, flame-like stone forms. The west window and the window at the apex of the choir have three mullions, while the other four choir windows have two. On the north wall of the nave are two one-mullion and two two-mullion windows. One opening on the south wall was omitted because of the attached building wing. Most windows are seven panels high, and small square-headed openings light the space beneath the rood-screen gallery.
The west portal has pointed-arch mouldings made of hollows and rolls. Its central trumeau, the supporting pier that divides a doorway, carries the lintel and tympanum, the decorated field above the entrance. The central roll ends in a foliage capital supporting a statue. The portal was reused during the nineteenth-century extension, when its wooden canopy was renewed. The former small roof turret with a bell was removed, and a two-light gable window with three finials was added.
Other entrances include pointed-arch doorways on the north side of the nave, a square-headed doorway from the north choir bay to the sacristy, and a keel-arched portal from the first choir bay to the parish garden. A square-headed doorway in the third nave bay connects with the parish house. Until 1897, a spiral stair at this point led to a wooden gallery and the upper floor of the adjoining wing.
Rood screen and Chapel of Grace
Rood screen
The five-axis rood screen spans the full width of the nave before the choir. Slender octagonal piers carry pointed arcades with intersecting rod-like mouldings, while trefoil blind arches decorate the spaces above them. The screen hall has a net vault and four chapel-like altar spaces. Its central wooden gate once closed off the choir, allowing the canons to use it as a separate room for the Divine Office.
A stone spiral stair enclosed by a shaft leads through a keel-arched doorway to the gallery above the screen. Balustrades with mouchette tracery, a Late Gothic pattern of curved pointed forms, separate the gallery from the nave and choir. The upper platform formerly held the organ and accommodated singers, and it continues to have a liturgical role on major feasts.
Chapel of Grace
The Chapel of Grace is inserted into the south side of the nave within a baldachin-like structure. It opens toward the nave on its north and west sides through broad round-arched openings between slender piers. The piers rise from tall faceted or fluted bases, contain hollows and rounded shafts, and end in richly ornamented pinnacles.
Trefoil blind arches decorate the chapel above its base. The west side has four-light Flamboyant tracery, while the north side has three-light tracery. Its gables combine keel arches, finials, and intersecting open arches enriched with trefoils and crockets. The net vault springs directly from the walls. A south-wall window gives direct light to the chapel, with a sill reaching far below the vault.
The church’s interior creates four distinct ecclesiastical spaces beneath one roof: the main nave, which served as a burial church for the local lower nobility; the Chapel of Grace; the enclosed canon’s choir behind the rood screen; and the enlarged western parish church.
Parish wing and precinct
The two-storey parish-house wing is built of plastered rubble masonry with red sandstone surrounds and a hipped gable roof. It bends eastward from the south wall of the nave toward the intended but unfinished cloister complex. The walled pilgrimage precinct included a Marian fountain with a column. The fountain was built in the seventeenth century, although a late-fourteenth-century date has also been proposed. It stood in the area now occupied by the rectory grounds.
Altars and sculpture
High altar
The high altar is a three-part winged altarpiece, an altar shrine with hinged panels that can be opened or closed according to the liturgical season. It stands on the altar consecrated in 1488. The carved central shrine and superstructure were made between 1483 and 1488, while the painted wings date from 1506–1511.
The central shrine contains nearly life-sized, gilded and silvered limewood figures of the Madonna on a crescent moon with the Christ Child, John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist. They stand beneath a richly carved and gilded Late Gothic net-vault canopy. A figure of the risen Christ appears above the altarpiece, and the predella, the lower section of an altarpiece, shows the half-length figures of Saints Gregory and Ambrose.
The wings contain tempera scenes from the life of Christ, including the Adoration of the Shepherds, Adoration of the Magi, Circumcision of Christ, and Presentation in the Temple. When closed, they show the Birth of Mary, Annunciation, Visitation, and Death of Mary. Donor figures identify Petrus Burkardi, Heinrich Fehl, and Johannes Magistri. The paintings combine natural detail, carefully modelled figures, linear perspective, controlled colour, geometry, and light effects with their devotional and liturgical purpose.
Altars beneath the screen
The left altar beneath the rood screen is the Sorrow Altar, founded by Provost Heinrich Fehl and described as a work of 1523. Its older central shrine contains a Vesperbild, a devotional image of the dead Christ supported by Mary. The altar also includes figures of Saints Philip and James, half-reliefs of Saints Catherine and Barbara, an Annunciation painting with Heinrich Fehl as donor, and a predella showing Christ as Salvator Mundi together with Saints Catherine, Barbara, Philip, and James.
The right altar is the five-part Martin Altar, founded in 1521 by Bishop Albrecht and Melchior von Schauenburg. Its central shrine contains carved figures of Saints Wolfgang of Regensburg and Martin of Tours. The movable wings show Saints Anthony and Wendelin, while the predella depicts Saints Genevieve, Margaret, Dorothy, Agnes, and Apollonia. Painted fixed wings showing Saints Elizabeth of Thuringia and Mary Magdalene came from a lost altar.
A high-quality crucifix made around 1500 stands beside the Martin Altar. It was formerly placed above the northern side door and later above the cross altar on the rood-screen gallery. Between 1964 and 2017, it was combined with new crossbeams and statues of Mary and John. Its form follows a 1467 crucifix by Niclas Gerhaert van Leyden.
Two further altars beneath the rood screen are lost. One was a 1513 winged altar with Saint Sebastian, Saints Fabian, George, and Florian, and a Premonstratensian donor. The other was dedicated to Saint Ursula and showed her martyrdom together with a clerical donor.
Chapel altar and pulpit
The present Neo-Gothic Altar of Grace stands in the Chapel of Grace. Its centre holds a copy of the miraculous Marian image stolen in 1973 and installed in 1997. The date and authorship of the original remain uncertain. It has been interpreted as a heavily re-carved Romanesque work, an early Renaissance sculpture from around 1400, or a work made during the first half of the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, it was identified as a sculpture by Johannes Maier of Gengenbach.
The wooden pulpit was made in 1650 by Johannes Maier of Gengenbach. Its inlaid decoration includes reliefs of the four Evangelists, while the sounding board carries a figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd. The stair and back wall were replaced later. The choir stalls date from the end of the fifteenth century and have flat-carved foliage on crenellated gables.
Vault sculpture and portal imagery
The vault bosses, made approximately between 1480 and 1492, include foliage and heraldic devices associated with the von Neuenstein family, the von Baden family, Schauenburg, Bishop Albrecht of Pfalz-Mosbach, and Bishop Ruprecht of Pfalz-Simmern. Above the high altar, a choir boss shows the enthroned Queen of Heaven with the Christ Child.
Bosses in the Chapel of Grace bear the arms of the von Bach, von Schauenburg, and Röder von Diersburg families. The fourteen bosses in the rood-screen hall alternate foliage with figurative reliefs of the Madonna and Child, Norbert of Xanten, and the symbols of the four Evangelists.
The tympanum of the west portal contains an almost life-sized sandstone Madonna and Child as Queen of Heaven beneath a canopy of gnarled branches. Two angels hold her crown. Probably made around 1488 by a Strasbourg workshop from yellow sandstone, the statue shows early Renaissance tendencies. Red-sandstone donor arms flank it, with those of Bishops Ruprecht of Pfalz-Simmern and Albrecht of Pfalz-Mosbach above, and those of the von Bach and von Schauenburg families below.
Medieval stained glass
The medieval stained glass was ordered between 1478 and 1481 and installed in three principal phases, in 1482, around 1485, and around 1488. The choir glazing was produced by a workshop associate of the Strasbourg glass painter Peter Hemmel of Andlau, identified as the Lautenbach Master. Other members of the workshop later produced glass for the nave.
Fifty-nine of the original eighty-one pictorial panes survive substantially, mostly in their original positions. One is held by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and another was lost in Berlin during the Second World War. The windows depict biblical scenes, saints, and donors. Their architectural canopies contain columns, plants, flowers, birds, grotesque lions, foliage, damask patterns, and other Gothic forms.
The choir glazing uses a richer range of colours and two-tier canopies. In the nave, simpler one-tier canopies generally shelter figures standing against grass or dark grounds. Donor panels identify local noble families in the choir and townspeople in the nave through coats of arms and inscriptions. Many of those represented were buried around the Chapel of Grace, before the rood screen, or in the choir. Fragments from missing or restored panes are assembled in the windows above the rood screen.
The Chapel of Grace was reglazed in 1872, and the nave’s plain glazing was replaced with historicizing ornamental panes in 1877–1878. During these changes and the western extension, several rectangular panes were moved, including original Chapel of Grace panes and panes that would have been hidden by the new organ. The choir received grisaille and diamond-pattern glazing in 1970.
The organ gallery and organ were installed during the western extension of 1895–1898. In 1979, Helmut Lutz’s workshop in Breisach created the altar island before the rood screen. Its altar stone, baptismal font, ambo, tabernacle, and eternal-light fittings use motifs of wheat, grapes, flames, the Evangelists, and Gothic architecture.
