Liechtenstein Garden Palace
Why is it significant?
Stand at the end of the Fürstengasse, the Princes' Lane, and look down the axis to the pale baroque palace in its garden. Around 1700 this was open countryside outside the walls, and the Princes of Liechtenstein built themselves a summer residence here.
Key Facts
| Place | Liechtenstein Garden Palace |
|---|---|
| Address | Fürstengasse 1, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.22260, 16.35960 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the end of the Fürstengasse, the Princes' Lane, and look down the axis to the pale baroque palace in its garden. Around 1700 this was open countryside outside the walls, and the Princes of Liechtenstein built themselves a summer residence here.
In 1687 Prince Johann Adam Andreas of Liechtenstein bought land in this area. He built not only a palace but also a whole new settlement next to it, with a brewery, workshops and houses for craftsmen, and he named it Lichtental. So the suburb you are about to cross was, quite literally, a princely business plan. The garden in front of you, later reshaped in the more natural English style, is open to everyone today as a quiet green shortcut through the district. Nearby, the Porzellangasse is named after Vienna's first porcelain manufactory, founded in this quarter in 1718, when making true porcelain was still a closely guarded chemical secret in Europe.
The palace was finished in the early eighteenth century, and its great hall carries a vast ceiling fresco by Andrea Pozzo, the Jesuit master of illusion, showing the deeds of Hercules. Pozzo was famous for painting flat ceilings so cleverly that they seem to open into domes and skies. It is perspective, mathematics and optics, used to fool the human eye. In a way, it is the science of perception, two centuries before Freud's science of the mind.
Today the palace shows parts of the princely collections of Liechtenstein, among them great works by Rubens, mostly on guided visits, and it hosts concerts and events. For some years, from 1979 to 2001, it even housed Vienna's museum of modern art, before that moved into the MuseumsQuartier.
The family that built it still owns it, and still rules a small country of its own between Switzerland and Austria. Few aristocratic houses kept so much through two world wars and a revolution. Now leave the garden behind and walk north up the Liechtensteinstraße towards Lichtental, the village the prince founded, to its parish church.