Dynastic History | Prunksaal, Josefsplatz, Vienna — The Court Built Its Books a House

Karl VI decided in the spring of 1722 that the court library should have a building of its own. The design was Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach's; he died in 1723, and his son Joseph Emanuel raised the shell, substantially finished by about 1726. Daniel Gran signed the dome fresco in 1730 — an apotheosis of the emperor who had commissioned the building, painted on the ceiling of the room that held his books, with a marble statue of the same emperor standing beneath it. The library gives the hall's length as almost eighty metres and its height as twenty.

It was the Hofbibliothek: a department of the court, staffed by court appointees, holding a collection the dynasty had assembled. The largest single addition of the period was Prince Eugene of Savoy's library, some fifteen thousand volumes, which the City of Vienna's historical register dates to a purchase in 1737, the year after he died. The building gave trouble early. The same register records four heavy piers put up inside the hall by 1763 to hold the structure still; they are still standing in the middle of the room.

Then the institution changed hands without moving. After the republic was proclaimed, the Hofbibliothek was renamed in 1920 and became the national library, and a household's collection turned into a state's. Around two hundred thousand historic volumes stand on the shelves today, four Venetian globes sit on the floor, and the room is ticketed like any other museum.

📸 Cover: the Prunksaal, with the marble statue of Karl VI beneath Daniel Gran's dome fresco, photographed under coloured lighting that is not part of the room, Harvey Kneeslapper, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons