St Stephen’s Cathedral — Baroque After the Fire
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Transcript
Passau’s cathedral took its present Baroque form after a devastating city fire in 1662. Italian-trained architects and artists helped rebuild a bishop’s city that wanted recovery to look triumphant rather than provisional.
The result is a cathedral whose scale makes sense only when you remember the political role of the prince-bishops. This was the seat of a church ruler whose territory and influence extended well beyond the old town. The famous organ tradition adds another layer, but the architecture itself already tells the story: catastrophe did not end Passau’s ambitions. It gave the city an opportunity to remake its centre in the visual language of the Counter-Reformation.