Foreign travels and change of style. of Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach

At the turn of the 18th century, Fischer was at the height of his career. In a visible sign of his success as a court architect, he was raised to the nobility in 1696. The imperial alliance with Prussia, Holland, and England during the War of the Spanish Succession enabled Fischer, in 1704, to visit those countries and to study their architecture, particularly in relation to Palladio. The result was a remarkable change in his architectural style. In 1707 he went to Venice to study Palladian architecture at its source. The result was his development of a new type of “Palladian” palace facade, classical in its proportions but enlivened with richly sculptured decoration. It consists of a central projection accentuated by a giant order and surmounted by a triangular pediment and of relatively unarticulated lateral sections. Its models were English and North German Baroque interpretations of Palladian architecture as well as the works of Palladio himself and of his Italian followers. Fischer’s major achievements in this field are the facades of the Bohemian Chancellery (1708–14) and Trautson Palace (1710–16), both in Vienna, and of the Clam-Gallas Palace (begun 1713), in Prague, which were imitated by architects all over the Habsburg empire.

During the first 10 years of the 18th century, however, Fischer designed fewer buildings than in the years before. His time was taken up by his administrative duties as chief inspector of court buildings and his work on a great history of architecture, Entwurf einer historischen Architektur. His book, which reveals the wide range of his learning, was the first comparative history of the architecture of all times and all nations; it included significant specimens of Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Muslim, Indian, and Chinese architecture, illustrated by engravings with explanatory notes. Some of the archaeological reconstructions that appeared in the book were among the best of Fischer’s time. At the end of the historical survey he placed his own achievements, which he saw as a logical continuation of the Roman tradition of architecture. The book was published in 1721.

Final projects.

When his second imperial patron, Joseph I, died in 1711, Fischer’s position as the principal architect at the Viennese court was no longer uncontested. Many preferred the more pleasing and less demanding architecture of his rival Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt to Fischer’s lofty conceptions. Yet he was also able to gain the favour of Charles VI, to whom he dedicated his history of architecture in manuscript in 1712, and to obtain the commission for the building of the Karlskirche (Church of St. Charles Borromeo; begun 1715).

Charles had vowed to build the Karlskirche as an offering to his patron saint for the city’s deliverance from an epidemic of the plague. In its imperial grandeur the building Fischer conceived not only glorified St. Charles but was also a monument to the emperor himself. In this church he attempted to incorporate and harmonize the main ideas contained in the most important sacred buildings of past and present, beginning with the Temple of Jerusalem and including the Pantheon and St. Peter’s in Rome, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and also the Dôme des Invalides in Paris and St. Paul’s in London. The relatively independent parts of the building—a pair of Roman triumphal columns, low towers, a high oval dome, a central portico modeled after a Roman temple facade, a transept and presbytery—are harmonized to form a visual unity from whatever point they are seen. The complex formal and symbolic structure of the building is the result of its twofold function. For example, the most striking feature of the church—the pair of giant triumphal columns on either side of the portico—is decorated with spiral reliefs glorifying the life of St. Charles. The pair of columns, however, also alludes to the emperor’s emblem, the “pillars of Hercules.”

Fischer did not live to see his masterpiece completed, but his son Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach completed the church with some alterations. Joseph Emanuel also completed the Imperial Stables (1719–23) and built, according to his father’s designs, the Imperial Library (designed 1716, built 1723–37), the interior of which was the most imposing library hall of its time.

Legacy

In a highly idealistic formal synthesis, Fischer tried to combine the achievements of past and present, mixing forms from ancient Roman, Renaissance, Italian Baroque, and French Baroque architecture to find a new and unique solution for each architectural problem. The leading principle of his building was the integration of various plastically conceived elements, complete in themselves, by dynamic contrast.