The Imperial Palace (Hofburg)
The Habsburg residence at the heart of Innsbruck, where a late-Gothic palace of Emperor Maximilian I was reborn as a glittering Viennese Rococo court for Empress Maria Theresa. Its crowning glory is the Giant Hall, a ballroom of family portraits beneath a vast painted ceiling.
À propos de ce lieu
First raised around 1460 under Archduke Sigismund and enlarged into a late-Gothic showpiece by Emperor Maximilian I by 1500, the Hofburg was the Tyrolean seat of Habsburg power. Almost 250 years later Empress Maria Theresa found it old-fashioned and ordered a sweeping rebuild in the Viennese late-Baroque and Rococo style, sending her court architect Nikolaus Pacassi, the man who reshaped Schonbrunn, to design the long facade on the Rennweg between 1766 and 1773. The result is a white-and-gold palace whose centrepiece is the Riesensaal, the Giant Hall, lined with full-length portraits of Maria Theresa, her husband Francis Stephen of Lorraine and their sixteen children beneath a sprawling ceiling fresco by Franz Anton Maulbertsch. It was here, during the 1765 wedding festivities of her son Leopold, that the empress's beloved husband died suddenly, a grief that turned the joyful palace into a place of mourning and quietly shaped its final, more solemn design.
À retenir
- 1500 year — The Hofburg reached its late-Gothic peak under Emperor Maximilian I by around this year
- 16 children — Full-length portraits of Maria Theresa's children line the walls of the Giant Hall
- 500 square metres — The Giant Hall's painted ceiling, frescoed by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, covers this vast area
📍 Rennweg 1, 6020, Innsbruck