Balthasar Neumann

Balthasar Neumann was the outstanding architect of the German Baroque and designed spaces of a structural daring that still surprises engineers. Born in Eger in Bohemia in 1687, the son of a cloth maker, he was apprenticed as a bell and cannon founder — a training in metal, casting and geometry rather than in building. He moved to Würzburg, joined the prince-bishop's artillery, and remained a military engineer all his life, rising to colonel and working on fortifications, bridges, water supply and barracks alongside his architectural commissions. In 1719 the new prince-bishop Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn set him to design the Würzburg Residenz. He was sent to Paris and Vienna to consult Robert de Cotte, Germain Boffrand and Lukas von Hildebrandt, and absorbed what he needed without deferring to them. The Residenz staircase is his most famous work: a single unsupported vault spanning some thirty by eighteen metres over the stairwell, without a central column. Contemporaries doubted it would stand, and Neumann offered to fire artillery at it to prove the point. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo frescoed it in 1752-53 with the largest ceiling painting in the world. It survived the bombing of Würzburg in March 1945, which destroyed most of the palace and the city. The pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen, begun in 1743, is his other masterpiece. Its plan is built from interlocking ovals rather than a conventional nave and crossing, so the walls appear to undulate and the space has no single fixed centre. He also designed Neresheim abbey and Bruchsal's staircase. He died in 1753.

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