St. Michael’s Church: A Romanesque and Gothic Parish Church in Vienna
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Austria
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Classical, Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Austria, Habsburg, Holy Roman Empire, Roman
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page19 sections
History
St. Michael’s Church is a Roman Catholic parish church in Vienna, Austria, built between 1219 and 1221 in the late Romanesque style with early Gothic elements. Located in the city’s historic first district, it stands at Michaelerplatz opposite St. Michael’s Gate of the Hofburg, the former imperial palace complex. Dedicated to the Archangel Michael, it belongs to the Archdiocese of Vienna and is one of Vienna’s oldest churches and few surviving Romanesque buildings.
Foundation and medieval parish
The present church was probably begun on the initiative of Babenberg Duke Leopold VI, a thirteenth-century ruler of Austria whose dynasty preceded the Habsburgs. A charter assigning the parish foundation to Leopold in 1221 was once used to establish its origin, but it is now recognized as a fourteenth-century forgery. The first secure written reference dates from 1267, when Pastor Gerhard von Siebenbürgen described St. Michael’s as a subsidiary church of St. Stephen’s. An eleventh-century predecessor has been proposed, but no earlier church on the site has been demonstrated.
During the thirteenth century, St. Michael’s was one of Vienna’s three parish churches, together with St. Stephen’s and the Schottenstift, a Benedictine monastery. It originally operated as a city parish maintained by Vienna rather than by a religious order. Alongside the Augustinian Church, it later became one of the Habsburgs’ two court parish churches, a role it retained until 1784.
Fire repeatedly altered the medieval building. St. Michael’s was damaged in 1275, 1319, and 1327. The nave vault was constructed after the major city fire of 1276. Following the fire of 1327, the choirs were substantially rebuilt and later modified. Duke Albrecht V, a fifteenth-century Habsburg duke of Austria, extended the main choir in 1416.
Burial church and early modern changes
The church cemetery closed in 1508 under Maximilian I, the Habsburg ruler who became Holy Roman Emperor. Burial activity nevertheless continued within the church, where tomb slabs and memorial stones were installed until the eighteenth century. The Herberstein family established the first crypt in 1560, beginning the development of the burial complex beneath the church.
In 1626, during the Thirty Years’ War, the conflict that divided much of Europe and involved major religious and political struggles, responsibility for St. Michael’s passed to the Barnabites. This Catholic order, founded in Italy and formally known as the Clerics Regular of Saint Paul, introduced Baroque treatments, carried out major alterations, and cared for the catacombs. From 1660, the order also maintained a separate cemetery for poorer parishioners.
Barnabite administration ended when the order left Vienna in 1920. The Salvatorians, a Catholic religious congregation founded in the nineteenth century for apostolic and educational work, assumed care of the church in 1923. The parish was dissolved on 1 January 1926, and its territory was divided among neighboring parishes. It was re-established in 1939 and absorbed part of the dissolved parish of St. Peter in 1979.
Music, memory, and conservation
St. Michael’s has also been associated with important events in Vienna’s cultural and political history. At the funeral service for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on 10 December 1791, part of his unfinished Requiem, probably its first movement or first two movements, was performed in the church for the first time. Emanuel Schikaneder, the theater director, actor, and librettist associated with Mozart’s The Magic Flute, funded the service at a cost of 26 gulden and 35 kreuzer.
Archbishop Franz Xaver Nagl blessed the body of Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal at St. Michael’s on 22 February 1912. The church was also used as a filming location for the Sissi trilogy in 1955, 1956, and 1957. Its heritage-protected status reflects its architectural and historical importance. Since 2006, conservation has focused especially on the crypt, where beetles and damp conditions threaten coffins and naturally preserved bodies. A climate-control system was installed to reduce the space gradually to 60 to 65 percent relative humidity and 10 degrees Celsius, conditions intended to place the beetles in dormancy.
Remains
St. Michael’s is a three-aisled church measuring approximately 65 metres in length and 35 metres in width, with a nave about 15 metres wide. Its principal fabric combines late Romanesque construction, early and later Gothic additions, Baroque remodelling, and a Neoclassical western front. The façade faces approximately west-northwest, while the church’s medieval and later chapels, choir, tower, organ gallery, crypt, and archaeological remains form a layered architectural complex.
Medieval church fabric
Nave and choir
The nave, built during the second half of the thirteenth century, retains its historic form. Its columns preserve several types of medieval capitals, including late Romanesque grape-leaf capitals datable to about 1220, chalice-shaped capitals, and later foliage capitals. The earliest Romanesque choir square was built of brick. Its exterior received a coating with white drawn joints that imitated the appearance of larger-format brickwork. After the fire of 1327, this Romanesque choir was replaced by the present early Gothic choir and subsequently altered.
The triumphal arch between the transept, the crosswise section intersecting the nave, and the choir dates from the mid-fourteenth century and has been partly rebuilt. Its decoration presents the Last Judgment, also called Armageddon, with Jesus and his disciples.
Tower chapel
The tower chapel contains a thirteenth-century cross vault and wall paintings from about 1300 and 1325. Decorative work at its entrance dates from 1643. Beside the portal, a wall painting created around 1350 depicts St. Michael weighing souls. Mary with the Christ Child appears as advocate, while Satan acts as accuser. The chapel also contains a memorial relief to Engelbert Dollfuss by Hans Schwathe.
Cross Chapel
The Cross Chapel, formerly the Nicholas Chapel, is a side chapel in the choir that has retained its medieval appearance since about 1350. Gothic stone sculptures of St. Catherine and St. Nicholas stand beneath a baldachin, a canopy placed above a statue or sacred object. A wooden crucifix dating from about 1510 to 1520 is attributed to the Vienna workshop of Hans Schlais. The chapel’s traceried windows date from the thirteenth century.
Small Romanesque window niches were replaced by large Gothic windows at the end of the fifteenth century. The high polygonal Gothic bell tower dates from the sixteenth century. Three superimposed spiral staircases rise within it, with steps made from stone taken from the imperial quarry in the Leitha Hills. A bell cast in 1525 by Vienna bell founder Laszlo Raczko survived damage caused by the 1590 Neulengbach earthquake. It was recovered from the ruined tower crown, repaired, and later survived the wars.
Baroque and Neoclassical interior
Chapels and devotional works
A chapel built around 1630 served as a burial chapel for the Cavriani family. Other chapels began as Gothic spaces and were later remodelled in the Baroque style. The northern chapel contains Franz Anton Maulbertsch’s Adoration of the Child, painted in 1754 and 1755. The baptistery houses a wooden Man of Sorrows statue dating from 1430.
Western façade and portico
The present western façade was built in 1792 in the Neoclassical style to designs by Ernest Koch. It incorporates a portico erected in 1724 and crowned by Lorenzo Mattielli’s sculptural group of the Archangel Michael defeating Lucifer, made around 1725. Inside the church is a monumental alabaster relief of the Fall of the Angels by Karl Georg Merville.
Choir and high altar
The Gothic choir was remodelled in 1781 and 1782 according to a design by Jean-Baptiste d’Avrange. He also designed the Baroque high altar in 1782. Its Evangelist statues are by Johann Martin Fischer, while Philipp Jakob Prokop made statues of St. Roch and St. Sebastian, two putti, small childlike decorative figures, and four angels. Benedikt Henrici produced the bronze ornaments on the tabernacle, altar table, and columns, as well as the gilded relief of the Lamb of God.
Above the tabernacle is the miraculous image of Maria Candia, an Italo-Byzantine work of the sixteenth century transferred from the Church of St. Nicholas in Candia, now Heraklion on Crete. Merville created the stucco relief of the Fall of the Angels that extends from the choir vault toward the altar, together with the surrounding cloud and sky design. Pale-colored marbles dominate the scheme. White Carrara marble was used for the tabernacle and altar facing, with related stonework by Stefan Gabriel Steinböck.
Memorials and organ
Tombs and epitaphs
More than 100 tombs and epitaphs survive in St. Michael’s. Together with St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the church was one of Vienna’s important burial churches. Near the Alexander Sauli Chapel is the oldest discovered tombstone, which bears a carved full coat of arms and commemorates Gotfrid, who died in 1341.
Sieber organ
The gilded pipe organ was built by Johann David Sieber and first sounded on 24 January 1714 in the presence of Emperor Charles VI. Its main work and pedal were divided between cases on the north and south sides of the gallery so that the western window could continue to provide light. The gallery had been extended and converted into a music gallery in 1713, with technical connections passing through its double floor. The organist faces the western window.
Gottfried Sonnholz rebuilt the organ in 1742, followed by further changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the First World War, all its façade pipes were requisitioned for armaments. An unsuccessful restoration begun by Arnulf Klebel in 1972 led to the loss of many historical parts, although the removed components were recovered in Vienna in 1980 and returned to the church. After about five years of legal proceedings, Jürgen Ahrend restored the instrument in 1986 to its 1714 state. It now has 40 stops on three manuals and pedal, with mechanical slider chests, a type of organ wind-chest using sliding valves to admit air to the pipes. Thirty-two historical stops survive.
Michaelergruft and Roman remains
Crypt
The Michaelergruft lies directly beneath the church and extends partly beyond its footprint. Burials within the church took place from 1350, and approximately 4,000 people were buried in the crypt. Four church servants arranged and stored the bones. The crypt reached its present form between 1560 and 1731 and served as the parish burial place for all social classes until 1784.
That closure followed the Josephinian reforms, the ecclesiastical and administrative measures introduced under Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II that restricted many urban burial sites and promoted cemeteries outside city walls. Aristocratic and wealthy family crypts could be reached through marble floor slabs bearing family arms. Coffins were lowered through these openings rather than carried through a side passage.
The crypt is known for naturally mummified corpses, probably preserved by its distinctive climate and relatively constant temperature. More than 4,000 bodies were preserved there, and hundreds of mummies have been described, some still wearing burial clothing or wigs and some lying in open coffins. Pietro Metastasio, an Italian poet and influential eighteenth-century opera-libretto writer, is the best-known person buried in the crypt.
Roman settlement
Excavations in Michaelerplatz between 1989 and 1991 revealed remains of the Roman settlement known as the Canabae, the civilian community that grew around the military camp of Vindobona, the Roman settlement in the area of present-day Vienna. The settlement probably consisted mainly of residences for soldiers’ wives and children. The excavated area was made permanently accessible to the public in 1991, with its presentation designed by Hans Hollein.
