Karlskirche

Church · Wieden (4th)Vienna,Austria

A Viennese plague church of 1713 combining a Greek portico, a green copper dome and two free-standing Roman columns claiming imperial descent from Rome.

The Karlskirche puts a Greek temple portico, a Roman oval dome in green copper, and two colossal free-standing columns into one front. The columns are copied from Trajan's in Rome and spiral with carved reliefs, and nothing structural requires them: they are there to claim that this emperor's authority came down from ancient Rome. A long shallow pool laid across the square reflects the whole facade, with a large modern sculpture set in the middle of the water as a deliberate counterweight. Charles VI vowed the church while plague was killing Vienna in 1713, and Fischer von Erlach built it. The dedication flattered him twice, because the saint is Karl Borromäus and the emperor paying was Karl VI. Inside, everything pulls upward into the cupola, frescoed by Johann Michael Rottmayr with the patron saint rising through cloud. For twenty years a lift left over from restoration carried visitors up to see the brushwork at arm's length; it was dismantled in 2022, and the fresco is again something you look at from the floor.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The columns tell one man's life — the spiral reliefs winding up them are scenes from Charles Borromeo, the archbishop the church is dedicated to, and they read from the bottom up.
Read the pediment before you go in — the relief over the entrance carries the cardinal virtues with the patron at its apex, which is the argument the two columns then make at length.
Dusk doubles it — floodlights come on and the whole front, columns and dome included, appears again upside down in the reflecting pool across the square.

Things to do

1
Look up until your neck complains
Stand directly under the centre of the cupola and stay there. Rottmayr's fresco is arranged to be read from exactly this point, with the figures foreshortened so they resolve only from below, and the oval of the dome does the rest. It is the view the painter actually designed for.
2
Look at it from the far end of the pool
Stand at the opposite side of the water on Karlsplatz. The reflecting pool was laid to give the church a second version of itself, and from that distance the portico, the two columns and the dome resolve into the single strange composition they were designed as.