Maria am Gestade: A Gothic Roman Catholic Church in Vienna
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- Austria
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- Habsburg, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page12 sections
History
Maria am Gestade is a Gothic Roman Catholic church in Vienna, Austria, near the Danube Canal. Built and enlarged during the medieval Gothic period, it is traditionally associated with Danube sailors and ranks among Vienna’s oldest churches, alongside St. Peter’s and St. Rupert’s.
Early chapel and medieval patronage
The church’s name recalls its former position on the high bank of an arm of the Danube, before the river was regulated. Its Latin names, S. Maria in Litore and S. Maria ad Scalas, refer to this riverside setting and to the steps leading toward the church. The surrounding lane was redesigned between 1935 and 1937 and is now called Am Gestade.
A tradition places a Marian chapel here as early as the ninth century, although that foundation story remains disputed. According to legend, Passau Bishop Mafalvin, also called Maldavin, commissioned the missionary and builder Alfried to construct a wooden chapel for a Marian image carried by Danube sailors. The church is indirectly mentioned in 1137 in connection with the parish of St. Peter and is explicitly recorded in 1158 and 1200.
Ownership of the early church property was complex. Rights were connected with the Schottenstift, Viennese families, and the bishops of Passau. From 1302, the chapel belonged to the Lords of Greif, who obtained its patronage through an exchange involving St. Ulrich’s chapel in Zaismannsprunn. A funerary inscription from 1316 shows that Maria am Gestade served the Greif family as a burial place.
Gothic enlargement and rebuilding
Between about 1330 and 1361, the small eastern chapel was enlarged with a Gothic choir, probably to serve as a family burial chapel. Work on the tower also began during this period. The chapel had already suffered a major disaster when a city fire on 28 April 1262 destroyed it. It was restored soon afterward.
A complete rebuilding began after its foundation stone was laid on 2 June 1394. Work stopped for five years when the property of the builder, Hans Freiherr von Liechtenstein-Nikolsburg, was confiscated. Construction of the nave probably began around 1400, and Duke Albrecht III, a fourteenth-century Habsburg duke of Austria, ultimately became the building patron. In 1403 the church property returned to the bishops of Passau, who completed the rebuilding.
Maria am Gestade remained under Passau authority even after Vienna became a diocese in 1469. It consequently formed a Passau enclave within Vienna, and its connection with the bishopric gave its name to the surrounding Passauer Platz area. The church continued to develop through the later Middle Ages, including the installation of a west gallery in 1515.
Suppression, decline, and restoration
During the ecclesiastical reforms of Emperor Joseph II in the 1780s, the church was suppressed and deconsecrated. It became state property and deteriorated while serving successively as a magazine, arsenal, and storehouse. During the Napoleonic campaigns it was also used as a stable and horse shelter. Valuable furnishings were removed, including Gothic choir windows, pinnacles, and carved wooden choir stalls. The windows were installed in Franzensburg Castle at Laxenburg.
The building was threatened with demolition, but the high anticipated cost of dismantling it helped preserve the church. Emperor Francis II then ordered extensive rebuilding, the replacement of removed furnishings, and its reconsecration in 1812. Repairs and interior refitting continued from 1817 to 1824. Replacement windows made to designs by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld were installed during the restoration between 1817 and 1820, while most of the Gothic stained-glass windows taken to Laxenburg returned in 1946.
Through the initiative of Clemens Maria Hofbauer, a canonized Catholic priest and a major Central European figure of the Redemptorists, the church was transferred to that Catholic missionary order in 1820. Founded in the eighteenth century by Alphonsus Liguori, the Redemptorists continue to use Maria am Gestade as the rectorate church of their college. The church also serves French, Czech, and Slovak Catholic communities in Vienna, with Czech and Slovak worship there recorded from the nineteenth century.
Hofbauer and later conservation
On 4 November 1862, the remains of Clemens Maria Hofbauer were transferred from the Romantic Cemetery at Maria Enzersdorf to Maria am Gestade. His relics became a focus of pilgrimage, and votive tablets preserve the prayers and thanks of worshippers. Hofbauer was canonized in 1909 and proclaimed patron of Vienna in 1914.
Further restoration between 1897 and 1903 renewed the exterior statues and repaired the portals. Additional work took place around 1930. Fighting in Vienna near the end of the Second World War damaged the church, but the damage was repaired soon afterward. The church celebrates its principal patronal feast each year on 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. In the 2020s, the parish is led by Provincial Martin Leitgöb.
Remains
Site, plan, and Gothic structure
Maria am Gestade stands near the former northern edge of Vienna’s Roman and medieval city wall, in a densely built area on the steep slope known as the Ritter Griffo. Historically, buildings and plots lay to the east, a lane ran to the south, and a city gate stood to the west. Beyond the gate, a stairway descended toward the Ottakringerbach. Within this restricted plot, the church remains strictly oriented eastward.
The building is a long, narrow, single-nave church approximately 65 metres long and about 20 metres wide overall. The nave itself is only about 10 metres wide, and it is narrower than the choir. Its walls and axis are laterally offset from those of the choir, creating a pronounced apparent bend. This shape follows the former course of the Danube arm, although the alignment may also reflect medieval methods of setting buildings according to changing sunrise positions.
Nave and choir
The seven-bay nave was begun around 1400. It rises approximately 33 metres and is covered by a net-rib vault, a ceiling formed by a network of intersecting ribs, with figurative bosses. The vault is associated with the workshop of St. Stephen’s Cathedral under Peter Prachatitz. The triumphal arch carries the date 1414 and a painted coat of arms showing a silver lily on a red field.
The choir and tower were begun around 1330. The choir is a three-bay Gothic structure with rib vaults, meaning that its ceiling is supported by intersecting structural ribs. It ends in a polygonal apse, an altar-end formed by several angled sides rather than a semicircle, in a five-eighths plan. At least five tall pointed-arch windows illuminate the eastern part of the church.
Four windows directly behind the high altar contain assembled surviving Gothic stained-glass panels dating from approximately 1349 to 1436. Their small-scale scenes depict episodes from the Bible. Other medieval stained-glass fragments also survive in the choir. The choir’s construction is associated with Michael Knab, who later produced a modified plan for the towers of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, while Peter Prachatitz succeeded him and completed later work. The choir vaults are also associated with Prachatitz and are dated in one account to around 1430.
Tower and exterior decoration
The tower stands outside the church’s southern wall, roughly midway along the building. It has an irregular seven-sided plan, rises approximately 56 metres, and narrows through successive changes in its plan. The seven-sided, seven-level shaft has been repaired or renewed several times. Its openwork Gothic crown, a pierced stone structure rather than a solid spire, was built between about 1419 and 1428, with the tower works completed around 1429.
The crown was designed by the ducal master builder Michael and executed by Peter Prachatitz. Its filigree stonework resembles lace and appears to hover above the church. The structure was visible from a great distance and appears in the oldest views of Vienna. It has been interpreted symbolically as Mary’s crown or as Mary beneath a rose bower. The number seven has likewise been connected with the seven sorrows of Mary and other Christian groupings of seven.
Three portals are decorated with reliefs and sculpture. The choir portal has reliefs of the Virgin of Mercy and the Coronation of the Virgin dating from approximately 1350. The central portal contains realistic figures of angels playing musical instruments. Beneath a canopy, the main portal carries reliefs of Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist from about 1410. Sculptures beside the doorway represent Paul, John the Baptist, Teresa of Avila, Jerome, Leopold, Anne, Joseph, and Peter.
Three mosaics beneath the canopy show the Annunciation, the Pieta, and the Virgin Mary as Queen of the Angels. Albert Neuhauser created them in 1901. Above the portals, the tall gable is richly decorated with pinnacles and forms a prominent facade because of the church’s exposed position. Most of the exterior sculptural decoration was recreated between 1897 and 1903 by Franz Erler and Josef Beyer.
Exterior painting and interior circulation
A restoration in 1931 revealed the remains of an approximately seven-metre-high drawing of Saint Christopher beneath flaking mortar on the exterior wall. The figure was conserved and its incomplete sections were supplemented. By 1994, about 70 percent of the original remains had been lost. Dirt layers included deposits associated with the 1945 fire in surrounding buildings. Because the surviving lines no longer formed coherent shapes, the remains were structurally secured and covered again with plaster. A plastered bulge on the south facade marks the position of the former protective roof over the image.
Five tall, uncolored round-arched windows on each side provide daylight to the nave. Its central aisle is paved with large patterned marble slabs. The main piers are strongly profiled and partly incorporate or retain old sculptures. Gothic wood carvings of the Annunciation and Gothic statues of saints stand on or near the piers around the triumphal arch.
The full width of the west end is occupied by a gallery installed in 1515. Its parapet is formed by delicate tracery, ornamental stone framework in a Gothic opening. The gallery houses the organ and provides space for the choir, which is why it is also called the musicians’ gallery.
Altars, images, and memorials
The high altar was redesigned in 1845 and 1846 by Thomas Marzik using earlier altar elements. A sacrament house on its north side bears the inscription “Ecce panis angelorum factus cibus viatorum vere.” Above the altar hangs a radiating crucifix dating from 1440. Nine additional altars existed in the church during the fifteenth century. One altar founded by Johann Perger and consecrated in 1520 in the first Marian church now stands in a side chapel reached from the choir. Its central Madonna is flanked by Saint Nicholas and Saint John the Baptist, while its predella, the lower section of an altarpiece, shows the Veil of Christ.
A nineteenth-century side chapel contains the Hofbauer Altar and the reliquary of Clemens Maria Hofbauer. A reliquary is a container made to preserve and display a religious relic. The altar table and reliquary are designed in a modern style. In the choir, a sarcophagus with a recumbent figure of Hofbauer was made by Hans Gasser in 1862.
A painting on the north side of the triumphal arch represents the Annunciation. It probably came from a medieval winged altarpiece, an altar structure with hinged panels, dating from about 1360. Its unknown artist placed the scene in a bourgeois interior, with Joseph in a walled garden between the city and the dwelling, while the Archangel Gabriel explains Joseph’s calling.
A separate Annunciation group is attributed to the Master of the Minorite Workshop. Its figures share stylistic characteristics with the portal sculptures of Vienna’s Minorite Church. Their partial detachment from the wall and spatially independent gestures make the group an important transitional work toward the High Gothic.
A late Gothic panel on the south side of the triumphal arch depicts the Coronation of the Virgin. The scene expresses Mary’s bodily and spiritual assumption and the redemption of humanity. The panel belonged to an earlier winged altarpiece and dates from about 1460.
The pulpit stands against a pier in front of the choir arch. Its pulpit, sounding board, and access structure are extensively gilded and ornamented. Installed in 1820 in the Gothic Revival style, it uses an olive-and-gold color scheme and blind tracery. Its sounding board is crowned by Christ as Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World, beneath a pinnacled canopy. It replaced a Baroque pulpit installed in 1727.
The Clemens Chapel preserves the Hornberger Votive Picture, painted in 1462 by the Passau official Caspar Hornperger. This late Gothic votive panel or epitaph shows the donor kneeling before the mystical betrothal of Saint Catherine and the Christ Child. The church also contains a statue of Saint John Nepomuk on a nave pier, a memorial plaque to the priest, writer, poet, and journalist Heinrich Suso Waldeck, and an altar associated with the Venerable Wilhelm Janauschek, who is buried in the church.
Organ and bells
The large organ on the west gallery was built in 1911 by the Salzburg firm Matthäus Mauracher junior. It reused pipework from earlier instruments, including a Baroque organ formerly placed on the choir’s musicians’ gallery. Much of its Neo-Gothic case also came from the preceding organ by Friedrich Deutschmann.
The instrument is a late-Romantic cone-chest organ with 36 stops distributed across two manuals and a pedal. Its key and stop actions are pneumatic, and it includes super- and sub-octave couplers as well as manual-to-pedal couplers. Four bells hang in the slender tower. Three were cast in 1963 by the Upper Austrian Bell and Metal Foundry at St. Florian, while the fourth was cast by Bartholomeus Kaffel in 1831.
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