Just a Beautiful Place

Always when I am publishing an article about Schloss Seggau in Southern Styria, there is a shout of joy in the readership. Figuratively. It seems that everybody is loving this castle, situated on a mountain like a trutzburg, and dominating the beautiful landscape with lakes and vineyards. As in our time a shout of joy is a scarce good, I thought these photos would help. So, please try to shout of joy and let me know how the feeling was. You may even weep of joy, both things help to get acid out of your body and to stay healthy. This is what we need in the moment: to retain health and the best distraction from house arrest – alone (and bored) or in larger company (and suffering from noise and fellow occupants in a bad mood).

Let us this time visit the princely rooms. As an art historian I admire the four unchanged remained rooms from the 18th century which were decorated in the 1740ies. Very elegant are the stucchi on the ceilings in each of the four rooms with creeping plants, delicate leaves, garlands, shells and wild beasts, more funnily looking than wildly. To make the illusion of the wilderness perfect, there is in one of the rooms an eagle sitting on the top of a white gold stove that seems to lift off to fly over the visitors´ heads.

Looking downwards from the ceiling one is stunned by a typical 18th century artwork – wood panels with paintings inlayed. In two rooms there are portraits of the bishops that have owned the castle since the 9th century, in the other two rooms there are landscapes, still lives and biblical scenes. Everything made fit together. In the baroque era the wealthy people started to collect paintings and had then to find solutions how to present them. So was the gallery born (one of the first and most famous is the Galérie des Glaces in Versailles) and the decorated wood panels that served as frame for many paintings.

When you turn the right in the same room (s. photo with the open door, above the two photos above) there are two alcoves with original windows and faux marble decoration at the sides. The photo above on the right shows the opposite wall from the photo with the open door. There would be another door to the right of these paintings that leads into the fourth or first room, depends on from which side you are coming. Enter the most amazing room …

The room with the biblical scenes, turn and – voilà – enjoy the view through the so called enfilade (sequence of rooms seen through doors). I hope one can understand how beautiful this apartment is, even as one only may take photos* and may see it with closed shutters and artificial light. This is necessary to protect paintings, furniture and panels from the strong sunlight. If you are interested in guided tours please have a look here. Yes, there is a time after coronavirus lockdown.

Window in the chapel, a connection to the rooms.

*As I had left my camera at home, I took all the photos, except the first and the last one, with my smart phone.