The church is truly beautiful, from its graceful outer lines to extensive marble works inside, including the marble tomb in the apse of Eleonore of Portugal, wife of Emperor Frederick. She was married at age 16 after the emperor deemed a painting of her pretty enough. He accused her of frivolity and causing the deaths of three of their children in infancy by feeding them too much sugar. The other two children, including his heir Maximilian I, lived very spartan lives by order of the emperor and survived to adulthood. After her death at age 30, probably of a gastric infection, Eleonore was entombed there in 1467 along with her three babies.
Although no longer a monastery, today the church serves the community as a parish church and contains an extensive library on theology, history, philosophy and science.
Several views of the outside of the church.
We saw several weeds and twiglets growing high up on the side of the church. So who climbs up there to remove this small tree before its roots start to break the stone?
Two pictures of the monastery area.
I loved this old staircase inside the monastery. It's in an area that has not had any restoration so you can just imagine generations of monks using it all day long.
A quiet and serene inner courtyard.
One of the gates leading out of the courtyard.
Here are two side altars inside the church. Note how much marble is used on all these altars.
This is the high altar.
Another side altar.
This is the balcony.
This is Eleanore's marble tomb.
The inscriptions on these two marble relief panels are in an old Germanic script that is extremely hard to read, much less translate. All I could get is that the one of the woman is from 1548.
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