Josefsplatz and the State Hall of the National Library
Why is it significant?
This is the most perfectly proportioned square in Vienna, three sides of pale palace fronts and in the middle an emperor on horseback dressed as a Roman.
Key Facts
| Place | Josefsplatz and the State Hall of the National Library |
|---|---|
| Address | Josefsplatz 1, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20620, 16.36670 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Imperial Heart: The Hofburg, the Habsburg Crypt and Six Centuries of Empire |
| Generated | Generated |
This is the most perfectly proportioned square in Vienna, three sides of pale palace fronts and in the middle an emperor on horseback dressed as a Roman. He is Joseph II, Maria Theresa's restless son, and the statue went up in 1807, long after the reforms he had pushed through too fast for his subjects.
Joseph is a fascinating figure for a royalty walk because he disliked royalty. He opened the imperial parks to the public, abolished serfdom, closed hundreds of monasteries and tried to replace coffins with reusable ones to save wood. That last idea caused such outrage that he had to withdraw it within months. Vienna loved its funerals too much.
The tall central building behind the statue holds the State Hall of the National Library, the Prunksaal, commissioned by Emperor Charles VI and built in the 1720s by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and finished by his son. Inside, walls of walnut bookcases rise to a painted dome by Daniel Gran, and around two hundred thousand old volumes stand in rows, many of them from the private library of Prince Eugene of Savoy. In the centre, Charles VI himself stands in marble, as if the books were his court.
Now turn round and look at the palace opposite, with the giant figures holding up its doorway. That is the Palais Pallavicini, and film fans will know it. In The Third Man, shot in the ruined Vienna of 1948, it played the home of the racketeer Harry Lime, and this square became one of the shadowy stages of the most famous film ever made about the city.
Charles VI, by the way, had no son. He spent his reign persuading Europe to accept his daughter as heir, and the library rose while he worried. The daughter was Maria Theresa, and she did rather well. Now take Reitschulgasse, the narrow lane at the northern corner, and listen for hooves.