The baroque abbeys of Bavaria (Bavaria)

Name: Alan Rice

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Product:	Bavaria
Date:	09/05/01 (85 review reads)
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Advantages: Baroque gone nuts!

Disadvantages: A bit off the beaten track

Bavaria is blessed with some of the most beautiful natural scenery in Western Europe. Whether it is the crystal clear mountain lakes, or the emerald green fields that lap up against the snow-capped majesty of the mountains, there can be no dount that Bavaria is an ideal location for a 'scenery-orientated' vacation.

Then there are the palaces, and the delights of Munich, its fine museums, its beer-halls and its churches.

However, one slightly less well known attraction is its fine collection of baroque abbeys. Following the harm they suffered in the Thirty Years' War, and the revival in ecclesiastical architecture and art that was one of the fruits of the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation, many churches and abbeys were rebuilt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The baroque and the rococco tend be looked down on by Anglo-Saxons. The sensual art and exuberance of these periods perhaps clashes with the innate Puritanism of Englishman and Americans, a instinct perhaps reinforced by the fact that in their true, and purest forms, the baroque and the rococco never 'made it big' in England. So it is that in order to witness the fruits of these periods we must travel to Italy, to Spain, to Austria and to Germany.

What better place to start than in Bavaria? After all, as I have said, it boasts magnificent natural scenery and wonderful hospitality.

The most wonderful of these baroque abbeys is undounbtedly that of Ottobeuren, which is not too far from Augsburg. Built in the early eighteenth century, on the site of one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in Germany, Ottobeuren represents the height of German baroque art. The church is vast. The sobre grey and white exterior does not hold any clues about the colourful, dramatic exuberance of the interior, where saints, angels and biblical figures compete for our attention and devotion in an explosion of sensual depiction. Here is art to inspire, to move,
as much as to make one think. Where something is not painted, it is made of marble. Hours can be spent examing the wonderful detail of paintings on the most obscure of side altars.

An hour or two's drive north of Ottobeuren lies the abbey of Weingarten. Although the decoration is not as exuberant and overpowering as that of Ottobeuren, this church is worth visiting for the extremely elegant sanctuary gate, made of wrought iron, and the organ. So that the west window was not blocked by the instrument, the pipes are built round the window. The organ itself is famous for stop which can imitate the sound of a cuckoo and various other birds. Other monasteries worth visiting are Ettal, south of Munich, and Zwiefalten, which is just over the border in Baden-Wurtemburg. The latter is later than the others, and example of rococco rather than baroque art.

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