Colors and Forms around 1300

The restoration of the Dominican Church was carried out between 2019 and 2021 by a qualified team of restorers team of restorers under the direction of Claudia Riff and Claudio Bizzarri and led to new insights into the design and architectural history of the church. The thesis was confirmed, that not only the choir and nave were designed in their current form from the outset, but also that the polychroming of the architectural structural elements of the entire church interior can be traced back to a carefully planned decoration program. This major Gothic building project was carried out around 1300 by a painter's workshop, whose activities in the Krems area can now be traced.

The texts span an arc from the history of the project, construction and use with a precise description of the description of the building and a detailed and richly illustrated description of the ribbed painting in the choir and nave with information on painting techniques and a classification of the colors and shapes in the context of their time of origin around 1300. 450 different colorful ornaments of the choir have been compiled into a sample catalogue for the first time.

The publication is intended to serve as a basic work for the preservation of architectural monuments, facilitate research into comparable objects in Lower Austria and, if necessary, help to identify further decorations from this specific specific Gothic painting workshop.

Hardly any other medieval object in Austria can boast such artistic freedom and such a variety of ornamentation.