State Hall of the Austrian National Library

Interesting facts

Prince Eugene of Savoy's 15,000 books are colour-coded in morocco leather: blue for theology and law, yellow for natural sciences, red for history and literature.

Emperor Leopold I began an earlier library building in 1681, but it was destroyed before completion during the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.

Before it had a hall of its own, the imperial book collection was kept from 1578 in Vienna's Minorite monastery and later in various court buildings.

The hall measures 77.7 by 14.2 metres, while its oval dome, about 18 by 29 metres in plan, climbs to roughly 29 metres above the floor.

Paired columns in the hall stand for the Pillars of Hercules, recalling Charles VI's claim to the Spanish throne and his motto Constantia et Fortitudine.

Daniel Gran painted the ceiling between 1726 and 1730, following a learned programme of allegories devised by the court scholar Conrad Adolph von Albrecht.

After Prince Eugene died in 1736, his library passed to his niece, who sold the entire collection to Emperor Charles VI.

The roughly 200,000 volumes in the hall were printed between 1501 and 1850, and they stand in tall bookcases made of walnut.

On the roof above the facade, a sculpture by Lorenzo Mattielli shows Minerva in a four-horse chariot triumphing over Envy and Ignorance.

Why it is worth it

The State Hall, or Prunksaal, is the ceremonial heart of the old imperial court library in Vienna's Hofburg, and one of the grandest library interiors ever built. Almost 80 metres long and 20 metres high, it is lined with tall wooden bookcases holding some 200,000 volumes, while the centre of the hall swells upward into an oval dome painted with a sky full of figures. Walking in from Josefsplatz, the first impression is of colour and gold rather than of books: the warm brown of old leather bindings, marble, gilded carvings and frescoes merging into one Baroque whole.

The library wing was commissioned by Emperor Charles VI and begun around 1721 to designs by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, the leading architect of Austrian Baroque; after his death in 1723 his son Joseph Emanuel completed it. The painter Daniel Gran covered the ceilings. The dome shows an apotheosis of the emperor, whose portrait is held aloft by Hercules and Apollo amid allegories of the virtues of the Habsburgs and the riches of their lands, and the two long arms of the hall answer each other as a "war" side and a "peace" side, following the original arrangement of the books. Under the dome stands a marble statue of Charles VI by Peter and Paul Strudel, surrounded by other Habsburgs, and four large globes by the Venetian cosmographer Vincenzo Coronelli, each more than a metre across.

Among the treasures shelved here is the library of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the great general of the age, which was incorporated into the imperial collection. The building did not stand untouched: under Maria Theresa cracks appeared in the dome, and the court architect Nikolaus Pacassi reinforced it with an iron ring, after which Franz Anton Maulbertsch restored the damaged fresco. The hall was thoroughly restored again in the 20th century and remains part of the working Austrian National Library.

Vienna's old town, the Innere Stadt, packs the palaces and churches of a former imperial capital into a few square kilometres, and the library wing forms one side of Josefsplatz, a square enclosed by the palace's own façades.

Getting there

The State Hall is in the Hofburg in central Vienna, with its entrance at Josefsplatz 1 in the Innere Stadt. Vienna International Airport (VIE) is about 18.5 km away.

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Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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