Frederick III - Imperial Residence Wiener Neustadt

“Austria est imperii cor et clipeus“ (”Austria is the heart and shield of the empire") - this statement by Rudolf the Founder was a commitment to Austria's anchoring and obligations that extended beyond its borders into Europe. Frederick III clothed the same commitment in his symbol “AEIOU” and had it carved in this form countless times on stone tablets and above archways.

“Even today, Emperor Frederick III is still one of the most controversial and enigmatic rulers in Austrian history,” said art historian Hanna Dornig-Eger. His reign coincided with an era of transition, a time when medieval traditions stood alongside ideas that belonged to a dawning new age. The monarch was expected to combine both.

Governor Eduard Hartmann saw Frederick III as a ruler who played an important role in the history of Lower Austria: “It was he who gave the great concept of Rudolf the Founder, which had been laid down in the Privilegium majus, recognition under imperial law and showed Austria the way to statehood. He achieved the elevation of Vienna and Wiener Neustadt to bishoprics and asked the Pope to canonize the patron saint of Lower Austria, St. Leopold.”

Alphons Lhotsky, chairman of the scientific staff of this national exhibition, characterized Frederick III as follows: “This enigmatic man was one of the most lackluster figures in the history of medieval rulers who could boast the title imperator Romanorum. Often incomprehensible to his contemporaries and therefore misinterpreted, he spent his long life in largely self-inflicted isolation. [...] As the essentially irrelevant father of an interesting son, he lives on in textbooks and manuals - a strange but essentially unjust fate.” The national exhibition should prove that this fate is undeserved, said Lhotsky.

Wiener Neustadt was the city in Austria that suffered the most damage during the Second World War. The historic buildings were gradually restored, such as the former castle, St. George's Church, the Gothic arcades and the Marian column on the main square, the “Spinnerin am Kreuz” and the Reckturm. The venue for the 1966 provincial exhibition was the former Dominican monastery of St. Peter an der Sperr: “It is good to remember today that not much would have been missing and this important church ruin would have become a victim of the pickaxe,” says exhibition director Rupert Feuchtmüller.

The exhibition on Frederick III was an attempt by the Province of Lower Austria to present history and art through the life of a ruler for the first time after the previous epochal and monographic provincial exhibitions.

St. Peter an der Sperr