The Residenz

Building was begun on the Residenz in 1720.  The owner wanted a palace big enough to show that he was an absolute monarch.
It is full of Baroque and Rococo architecture and painting.  One of the things I like about Rococo is how art interacts with it's surroundings.  Swords in paintings come out of the wall.  A man painted on a ledge, actually sits on a ledge.  A curious cherub statue touches a nearby light fixture.  There are no frames composing boundary lines.

Today, most of the original Residenz splendor has been reconstructed, as the building was destroyed by fire in 1945.  "From the attic the fire ate down through wooden ceilings and floors, and all the furnishings and wall panelling which had not been stored elsewhere were devoured by the flames. Much of the furnishing and large sections of the wall panelling of the period rooms had been removed in time and thus escaped destruction."
One of the few things not destroyed at that time was the beautiful staircase and it's ceiling painting--supposedly the largest fresco in the world.

My pictures are all from outside the building and in the garden.  Inside you're not allowed to take pictures.

Which is too bad, as it is beautiful.
The famous staircase, the green room, and the room of mirrors being my favorites.
I suppose you'll just have to go see them for yourself.

Mummy on the stairs

When I came upon this strange statue sitting on the stairs of the Kilianplatz, I was intrigued.
What did it mean?
What was it doing there?

As there were no signs to mark it in any way, it took me a while to locate the information that it was a work of Maria Lehnen, called Großer Sitzende (Big Seated).
Still, what was it doing there all by itself?

Then I came across a website with a story.
I'm not sure how true this version of the origin of the statue is, but it claims the Big Seated was put there by the museum next door. They had redesigned the square outside their entrance next to Dom St. Killian and added stairs.  The city decided the stairs were dangerous to pedestrians as they were not well marked and told them to put in a railing.
But a railing would ruin the aesthetic appeal. Instead, they added this statue.

The bound up man seems to be a way of following the letter of the law, but not the spirit.

Dom St. Killian

Dom St. Killian has a Romanesque outside with a baroque interior.  The building of the cathedral started in the 11th century and took about 200 years for the outside structure to be completed.
It has gone through numerous changes throughout different building periods.

Little of the damaged rococo interior was preserved after WWII, but some of it is housed in a small museum.

It was replaced by a lot of modernity when it was burned in 1945.

It makes me understand reconstruction, restoration and building in a different way.
Maybe these projects are not undertaken to restore the original, but to remodel an reinterpret beauty--just like one would do to a "living" house where a few changes were needed.

Neumünster Church

This church is a Romanesque one with a Baroque facade.  It takes so long to build these old churches that architectural styles go through decades of change.
Neumünster church was built in the 11th century to commemorate the martyr of Irish missionaries.  Among them was St. Killian, whose death--if wikipedia can be believed--was reminiscent of John the Baptist's.

Because it was less damaged than others, it served as the main cathedral after World War Two until 1967.

The skulls of the three saints are carried in a procession each year by theological students from the crypt to Würzburg Dom.

Inside, there are several works of art from different eras.  Most of which I can't identify or don't recognize.
But that's okay.  I just look at it and think about how pretty it all is, and how much work it has taken to put it all together.

Marien Kapelle

The real old stuff--not the replicas--is all over Germany, and I was constantly reminded of this.

Like how the Marien Kapelle in Würzburg is a real Gothic building, not a building copying the Gothic style.
It sits in the middle of the market, without even enough space around it to stand back and get a good look.  It's been there a long time and people have built up a number of other interests and buildings.

It doesn't look like a six hundred year old building inside, though.  That's because so much of Germany was damaged during WWII, and the Marien Kapelle was one of the casualties.

I wanted to see real, old stained glass, but I would have to wait for another church.  But I wondered if I would see any original stained glass at all due to all that was destroyed.

And here's one of the more mysterious things I found in the chapel.
A rooster under his feet?  Huh?

I guess that's what identifies that guy way up there as Peter?  I guess you need to figure out a system of identification like that when you're one of a hundred statues in one of hundreds of churches.