Palais Schwarzenberg: Two Architects, One Palace
Why is it significant?
Through the railings you can see a long Baroque front, pale and calm, curving around a courtyard, with a park stretching away behind it. It looks like one harmonious design. It is actually the work of two rival geniuses.
Key Facts
| Place | Palais Schwarzenberg: Two Architects, One Palace |
|---|---|
| Address | Schwarzenbergplatz 9, 1030 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.19670, 16.37610 |
| Part of Walk | Gold, Rebels and The Kiss: Vienna from the Secession to the Belvedere |
| Generated | Generated |
Through the railings you can see a long Baroque front, pale and calm, curving around a courtyard, with a park stretching away behind it. It looks like one harmonious design. It is actually the work of two rival geniuses.
Around 1700, the land outside the city walls was where Vienna's aristocracy came to breathe. The Ottoman siege of 1683 was over, the danger had passed, and noble families raced each other to build summer palaces with gardens on these slopes. This one was begun for Count Heinrich Franz von Mansfeld, Prince of Fondi, by the young Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt. The count died, and in 1716 the Schwarzenbergs bought the unfinished house and handed it to Hildebrandt's great rival, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, and then to his son.
So what you are looking at is a duet between the two men who shaped Baroque Vienna. Fischer von Erlach, the scholar, who thought in Roman temples and imperial grandeur, the architect of the Karlskirche. Hildebrandt, the more playful one, who loved movement and light... and who, a few years later, would build the Belvedere next door for Prince Eugene.
The family that owns it has a strange history of fate. In 1732 Prince Adam Franz of Schwarzenberg, the man who bought this palace, was killed during a stag hunt by a stray shot... fired by Emperor Charles VI himself. And in 1810, in Paris, Princess Pauline of Schwarzenberg died in a fire that broke out during a ball at the Austrian embassy, celebrating Napoleon's marriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise. She had gone back into the flames to look for her daughter.
The palace was badly damaged by bombs in 1945 and later restored. It is still owned by the Schwarzenbergs, more than three hundred years after they bought it, and it is not open as a museum, so enjoy it from here. Now continue east along Rennweg, the old road to Hungary, to the long low palace on your right.