Current research project

The Civic Building Projects at St. Stephen's and St. Michael's in Fifteenth-Century Vienna

          This project is dedicated to the culture of founders and construction of Vienna's parish churches in the area of tension between the complex art-historical and historical approaches.
          The municipal large-scale civil building projects, St. Stephen and St. Michael, were the central locations of the city and were interrelated in terms of building and church operations. As parish churches, they were of great importance in the life of every person and, in contrast to the monasteries, were freely accessible to all social groups of the most diverse gender. They provided the ideal framework for building donations and for donations of sculptures and cult objects. The donors and the people involved in the foundation process (craftsmen, architects, officials) – the networks of patronage - essentially determined the architectural design and content; generally, the effort involved in execution. The functions, formats and contents of the donated objects, including their location in the church, make it possible to obtain differentiated information about the foundation's motivation, including the memoria, representation, ecclesiastical teaching, piety and/or family relationships.
The objective of the research project is to reconstruct, collate and compare the diverse foundations, furnishing concepts that are often lost in the context, and the donor ambitions of the individuals, groups and institutions in the city's parish churches.
          The project is founded by the Austrian Science Fund
lifetime: 01.05.2021-30.04.2025
          Follow-up project “St Stephan in Vienna. Architecture of the Written Sources”
and “St. Stephen’s in Vienna – artwork and cult objects in the light of the written sources"

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