A creation by the Asam brothers was reconstructed and ceremoniously inaugurated in the parish church of Maria Dorfen in 1971: the famous Asam altar is 50 years old this year.
The congregation is celebrating the anniversary with a church tour at the patronage of the Assumption and with an exhibition that recalls the history of the altar.
During the baroque period, Maria Dorfen had developed into one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in southern Germany. 300 years ago over 100,000 believers came to the Ruprechtsberg every year and sought refuge in their personal concerns at the miraculous image “Our Lady”, a simple and noble-looking Madonna made of linden wood that was preserved from the late Gothic period. Generous donations from the influx of pilgrims made it possible for the pastor Josef Sailler (1655-1737) to redesign the pilgrimage church, built around 1470, in Baroque style.
For this he was able to win over the renowned Asam brothers, to whom our homeland owes numerous wonderful altars and frescoes, for example in the cathedrals of Freising and Innsbruck and in the monastery churches of Metten, Rohr and Weltenburg. However, a draft probably conceived by Cosmas Damian Asam (1686-1739) in 1729 was never implemented. His congenial brother Egid Quirin (1692-1750) redesigned the frescoes in Maria Dorfen's choir in 1740/41 and also made a plan drawing for a new splendid rococo high altar in this context. The Griesbach altar carpenter Wenzel Jorhan (1695-1752) was commissioned to realize it, because Asam was initially contractually bound in Sandizell.
The Asam design was only implemented in 1749 and in a "slimmed-down" form, because Jorhan's workshop was looted in the War of the Austrian Succession in 1745 and the preparatory work for the Dorfen Altar was destroyed in the process.
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The high altar is magnificently crafted.
© Parish Maria Dorfen
A good 100 years later, Pastor Anton Schmitter (1807-77) ordered the purchase of a neo-Romanesque high altar in 1868 for Maria Dorfen, which has now become a parish church.
Of Jorhan's Asam altar, only the substructure and the miraculous image remained.
Another century later, Pastor Hermann Eigner (1924-86) initiated the overall renovation of the parish and pilgrimage church in 1963, emphatically advocating his plan to have Egid Quirin Asam's masterpiece reconstructed. For this he succeeded in obtaining the necessary official approvals, getting financial commitments from the archbishop's ordinariate and also acquiring generous donations from the population.
Eigner's ambitious project cost around DM 300,000, but critics questioned it then as well as now. In 1971 a group of young adults came together and loudly demanded that better investment be made in creating a community recreational facility for young people than in an altar. The required leisure facility was finally made available in 1974 by the city of Dorfen with the youth center on Jahnstrasse, which still exists today. But some art connoisseurs also rated the Dorfen reconstruction of the Asam altar negatively and sometimes even expressed themselves polemically by dismissing the work of art created in this way as a “worthless imitation”.
But Pastor Eigner's motivation for this lighthouse project was, in particular, a revival of the old Dorfen Marian pilgrimage, as it actually succeeded in the following years.
Julius Cardinal Döpfner, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, attended the consecration of the new altar of grace on June 19, 1971.
The church choir under the direction of Benno Meindl framed the festival service.
This jubilee day was followed by a week of festivities.
To this day, the Asam altar has proven to be the heart of the venerable Marian pilgrimage church.
Exhibition and guided tour
The
exhibition of the historical district
Dorfen in the parish and pilgrimage church Maria Dorfen can be seen until September 20th.
Herbert Moser and Wolfgang Lanzinger collected material and information for the reconstruction of the grace altar of the Asam brothers 50 years ago.
A
church tour with organ music will be
offered
next Sunday
for the church patronage
on the Assumption of Mary.
The tour in the parish church of Maria Dorfen with Herbert Moser and music by Ernst Bartmann starts at 3 p.m.
Admission is free, registration is not necessary.
Participants must wear FFP2 masks and register on site for reasons of hygiene protection.
VON WOLFGANG LANZINGER,
teacher of Catholic religion at the Dorfen grammar school and member of the board of the Dorfen Historical Society.