ABSTRACT
The pilgrimage church “Maria Birnbaum” – Our Lady of the Pear-Tree –, situated between Augsburg und Munich, was erected 1661-68. Being one of the most unorthodox buildings of its epoch, its forms and constructions predate the complex spatial experiments of the famous South German Rococo. (fig. 1)
When, after the Thirty-Years War, a pilgrimage developed in the open countryside to an old pear tree with a small wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, the local commander of the Teutonic Order, Johann Philip von Kaltenthal, decided to build a church around the sacred spot. Von Kaltenthal, the driving force behind the building project, was a retired commander of the Papal Guard in Rome. As Construction supervisor, he chose the expert master-builder Konstantin Pader. Although Pader himself was a well-known architect, he had to implement Kaltenthal’s ideas and suggestions for “Maria Birnbaum”:
Being an erudite dilettante, the commander of the Teutonic Order found the main inspiration sources for his project in contemporary architectural treatises as well as in the monuments of Antiquity and CounterReformation in Rome (for detailed information about history and planning: Schütz, 1974). The unusual, even fantastic traits of the design are the results of a dilettante’s architectural ambitions.
