Melk Abbey

Melk Abbey stands on a commanding rocky eminence above the south bank of the Danube in the Wachau Valley, one of the most celebrated baroque buildings in Europe and the spiritual, intellectual, and administrative centre of the Austrian Benedictine church in the eighteenth century.

The abbey, a Benedictine house founded in 996 by Emperor Otto III and staffed continuously by monks for more than a thousand years, was rebuilt in its present monumental baroque form between 1702 and 1736 under the direction of Jakob Prandtauer, whose work here is widely considered among the most accomplished of all baroque architectural achievements in Europe for the way it combines structural daring, interior decorative richness, and landscape siting into a single coherent statement.

The church, entered through a processional staircase that elevates visitors above the level of the surrounding market town, is a single-nave building with side chapels and an elliptical dome over the crossing, its interior surfaces covered in painted decoration, gilding, and stucco work that Prandtauer pushed to extraordinary richness without ever losing the underlying clarity of the spatial design.

The library, accessed from the north transept of the church, contains approximately 100,000 volumes including many medieval manuscripts and early printed books, and its painted ceiling by Johann Michael Rottmayer, depicting the allegory of divine wisdom, is one of the finest rococo ceiling paintings surviving in Austria.

The Marmorsaal, the marble hall, is Prandtauer's acknowledged masterpiece of interior design: a reception room whose walls of painted illusionistic architecture, with columns that appear to continue upward into a painted sky, seem to dissolve the boundary between interior and the garden beyond the tall windows, unifying inside and outside in a spatial conceit that is the logical and visual consequence of his architectural thinking throughout the complex.

The entire complex was secularised in 1803 during the Napoleonic reorganisations of the Austrian church but was returned to the Benedictine order in 1911 and continues as an active monastery and school.

The Wachau Valley around Melk, recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in 2000, produces the distinctive apricot brandies and white wines, particularly Grüner Veltliner and Riesling, that travellers have associated with the Danube corridor since the eighteenth century.

The terrace behind the Marmorsaal looks directly over the town of Melk and the Danube, and Prandtauer designed this view as the climax of the visit: after the compressed richness of the library and the marble hall, the eye opens to the river and the Wachau hills beyond, with the abbey church dome visible as a landmark from the river far downstream.

Jakob Prandtauer's baroque complex is universally regarded as one of the finest architectural achievements of the eighteenth century in Europe, both for its engineering and for its relationship to the landscape.

The library and the Marmorsaal together represent the high point of Austrian rococo interior decoration.

The abbey's position on the Danube means the building is visible from the river for several kilometres, making a boat passage through the Wachau one of the classic approaches.