Palais Mollard-Clary, Baroque palace in Innere Stadt, Vienna, Austria.
Palais Mollard-Clary is a Baroque palace at Herrengasse 9 in Vienna's Innere Stadt. Domenico Martinelli enlarged the house from 1695, adding a fourth storey, a three-storey courtyard wing with chapel, and a grand staircase. The piano nobile passage has mythological oil paintings attributed to Andrea Lanzani. Since 2005 the Austrian National Library uses the building for its Globe Museum, Esperanto Museum and music collection.
A house stood on this plot by around 1250; it burned in 1326/27 and again in 1525. Peter von Mollard bought the free house in 1563, and his family kept it until 1760. In 1695 Ferdinand Ernst von Mollard commissioned Domenico Martinelli to remodel it in baroque form, adding a fourth storey, a courtyard wing with chapel and a grand staircase. Lucas von Hildebrandt repaired the dilapidated roof in 1733. Franz Wenzel von Clary und Aldringen bought it in 1760 as a winter residence; the family sold it to Lower Austria in 1922.
The palace now houses the Globe Museum and the Department of Planned Languages, making it a place where visitors encounter collections focused on world exploration and constructed languages. Rooms here attract people curious about how languages develop and how people understood geography across different centuries.
The Austrian National Library occupies the palace at Herrengasse 9. The Esperanto Museum and the Department of Planned Languages are on the ground floor, the Globe Museum on the first floor, and the Music Department on the third to fifth floors. The building was renovated from 2002 to 2005 under architect Gerhard Lindner.
The "round tables" of Joseph II were not furniture but the name of an informal circle of high Viennese nobles who met regularly at Palais Clary around 1780, during the emperor's reign. The gatherings took place in the palace the Clary family had bought in 1760 as a winter residence.
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