Asam Church

Behind a narrow façade squeezed between the town houses of Sendlinger Straße in Munich lies a small church conceived as a single work of art. Officially St. Johann Nepomuk, it is universally known as the Asam Church after the two brothers who built it from 1733 to 1746 as their own private church: the sculptor and stuccoist Egid Quirin Asam and the painter Cosmas Damian Asam. Nobody commissioned it, so they were free to design it entirely as they wished, and the result is counted among the most important buildings of the southern German late Baroque.

The plot is tiny, only about 22 by 8 metres, and the brothers turned that constraint into theatre. Architecture, sculpture and painting merge into a single two-storey space with no plain surface left. The curved cornice seems to swell and dip as it runs around the nave; and the interior grows lighter as the eye rises, from the dim lower zone of the pews, meant to evoke earthly suffering, to the bright ceiling devoted to heaven. Cosmas Damian's ceiling fresco of the life of St John of Nepomuk is regarded as one of his masterpieces. The high altar is framed by four twisted columns that consciously echo Bernini's baldachin over the tomb of St Peter in Rome, and above it a group of the Trinity is lit from behind by a hidden window, so that the figures glow without any visible source of light. A relic of St John of Nepomuk is kept below the tabernacle, and two angels by the Rococo sculptor Ignaz Günther were added to the gallery altar later. Because it was a private church, it ignores convention: the altar stands at the west end rather than the east, and the crucifix opposite the pulpit hangs unusually low.

Egid Quirin lived in the house next door, the Asamhaus, and from a window there he could see the altar of his church. He bought four houses for the project, demolished the two in the middle to make room for the church, and covered the façade of his own house with lavish Rococo stucco; the northern house became the priest's residence. The church was badly damaged by bombing in 1944, and its interior was restored between 1975 and 1983. The church's own façade is built into the row of houses on Sendlinger Straße and swings gently outwards towards the street.

Getting there

The church stands on Sendlinger Straße in Munich's old town, close to Sendlinger Tor. Munich Airport (MUC) is about 29 km away.