Salzburg Baroque Museum

Snapshot

The Salzburg Baroque Museum was built around a collection of 139 oil sketches and 42 scale models: the working drawings and physical prototypes that baroque artists made before executing the frescoes and altarpieces that still cover Salzburg’s church interiors. The museum itself is currently closed, its collection in storage, but the collection represents one of the most specific and unusual holdings in Austrian art history.

The Story

Kurt Rossacher was an art historian and dealer who spent his career collecting something almost nobody else was collecting: the preparatory work. Not the finished fresco on the Residenz ceiling, but the small oil sketch the painter made to test the composition. Not the marble fountain in Mirabell Gardens, but the clay model the sculptor built to show the archbishop what it would look like. By the time Rossacher died in 1988, he and his wife Else had assembled 139 oil sketches, 42 wood and clay models, and a substantial graphic collection, spanning Rottmayr, Altomonte, Maulbertsch, Donner, Tiepolo, and Rubens.

The Rossacher Collection arrived at the Salzburg Museum in 1999 and was formally integrated in 2012. It found its public home in the Orangery of Mirabell Gardens, a Baroque building inside the UNESCO-listed garden ensemble, which gave the collection an appropriate architectural context. Artists like Johann Michael Rottmayr, whose ceiling frescoes dominate the Residenz and the Collegiate Church, appear here not in their monumental final form but in the intimate exploratory version: a small panel, quickly painted, with corrections still visible in the brushwork. The models go further still, showing how baroque patrons and architects communicated through physical objects rather than blueprints.

The museum is currently closed and the collection is in storage. The Salzburg Museum is responsible for the Rossacher Collection and publishes research and exhibition catalogues through the Barockberichte series. A future permanent home remains undetermined.

Visiting

The Salzburg Baroque Museum is currently closed. The collection is in storage and not available for viewing. The Orangery where it was formerly housed is now the Panorama Welterbezentrum (World Heritage Visitor Centre) at Mirabellplatz 3. Check salzburgmuseum.at or barockmuseum.at for updates on the collection’s future. For those interested in the collection’s subject matter, the Residenz and the DomQuartier hold the finished works that many of the sketches and models were made for.