Chiesa di Nostra Signora della Palude

South of Vipiteno's old town, where the ground once turned marshy, stands the town's great parish church: Unsere Liebe Frau im Moos, Our Lady of the Marsh. A choir begun in 1417 grew into a late Gothic hall church whose foundation stone Emperor Maximilian I laid in 1497; the church is also associated with Hans Multscher's altar.

Why it matters

This is the parish church of Sterzing/Vipiteno, and its name preserves the landscape: the Moos, the boggy ground south of the medieval walls. Its site includes a Roman burial ground and a gravestone of the second or third century AD. The church is documented in 1254, when a donation incorporating the parish into the Teutonic Order's nearby hospice named it explicitly. Hans Multscher of Ulm created the Sterzing Altar for the church in 1456–1459; the Deutschhaus foundation describes it as the most important artwork of the Sterzing region and the finest work of the Ulm master.

What to notice

The choir, begun in 1417 and essentially complete by around 1473, is the oldest part still visible; the tower followed from 1443. A Latin inscription on the nave's door lintel records that Emperor Maximilian I laid its foundation stone in 1497. The vault keystone of 1510 and the completion of the three-aisled hall church by 1524 (with finishing work possibly continuing to 1533) close the Gothic story. Inside, the Rococo remodelling of 1753 brought the airy stucco-and-fresco interior you see now, including ceiling frescoes by the Austrian painter Joseph Adam von Mölk, who also worked in the pilgrimage church of Maria Trens nearby. On the high altar stands the Madonna from Multscher's dismantled altar, flanked by the female saints Barbara, Catherine, Apollonia and Ursula — the figures that never left the parish.

Context and history

The church's history is closely linked to the neighbouring Teutonic Order commandery. The 1254 donation that brought it into the Teutonic Order's orbit made it an Order parish under the protection of the Deutschhaus commandery next door; Georg von Frundsberg, the Landsknecht commander, later supported the building campaign, as did the Brotherhood of Saint James and local patrician families. Multscher's winged altar served the church for over three centuries before a Rococo altar displaced it in the eighteenth century; the scattered parts were gradually recovered — panels restored in Munich's Alte Pinakothek, most pieces now shown in the town museum in the Deutschhaus — but the Madonna and the four saints stayed here. After the Napoleonic upheavals, the Austrian government reorganised the parish in 1821. The church and its cemetery were placed under formal monument protection on 12 May 1986, and the organ in the gallery was built by the Gebrüder Mayer firm in 1911.