Germany Guide
Northern Bavaria: Franconia
The Residenz
Opening time: Daily: April– Oct 9am–6pm; Nov– March 10am–4.30pm
Price: €5
Dominating the Altstadt's eastern flank, the Residenz is an eighteenth-century status symbol that puts Würzburg firmly into the architectural super league, as it was fully intended to do. Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn, prince-bishop of Würzburg from 1719 to 1724, transferred his court from the Marienberg to the town, but was not at all satisfied with the modest little Schloss on the site of the present Residenz, and he commissioned Balthasar Neumann to design something more appropriate to his princely status.
The results are breathtaking: impressively wide, the Residenz faces a paved Hof on three sides. Inside, the highly theatrical Treppenhaus, or staircase, stretches across five bays and is topped by a mammoth unsupported vault – a structurally audacious design of which Neumann was so confident he offered to fire a battery of artillery at it to prove its strength. His confidence was vindicated in 1945, when the ceiling withstood the aerial bombardment of the city – which wrecked the north and south wings of the Schloss but left the Treppenhaus intact. The stairs rise through a series of half-landings, their walls richly ornamented with stucco, but everything is merely a setting for Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's magnificent allegorical ceiling fresco, which measures thirteen by eighteen metres and is the largest ever created. It depicts the four continents of Asia, Africa, America and Europe, with the Würzburg court depicted as the centre of the arts in Europe.
At the top of the stairs, the white and pale grey Weisser Saal is decorated with tasteful stucco work by Materno Bossi. Completed in 1745, the room provides an entirely deliberate aesthetic breathing space between the Treppenhaus and the most extravagant of the state rooms, the giddily oppulent Kaisersaal, with its twenty red marble columns, large oval dome and Tiepolo frescoes celebrating Würzburg's position in the Holy Roman Empire. In the north wing,the Grünlackiertes Zimmer, or Green Lacquered Room, is the highlight. The Southern Imperial Apartments can only be visited on a free guided tour but are well worth seeing for the Spiegelkabinett, a riot of painted mirror panels and gold leaf.