Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Jesuit church in Landsberg am Lech, Germany.
Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche stands on a rise above the old town of Landsberg am Lech, a white-walled church with a broad red terracotta roof. Its single nave has side chapels between pilastered piers, a choir of three bays ending in an apse, and a two-storey sacristy on the north side. Two green onion-domed towers flank the west front, where a vestibule carries two galleries.
Count Schweikhard von Helfenstein founded the Jesuit college and its church in 1575 and laid the foundation stone in 1576; Peter Canisius attended the opening in 1578. The first church was replaced between 1752 and 1754 by a new building under the Dillingen Jesuit architect Joseph Ignaz Merani, consecrated in 1754. After the Jesuit order was suppressed in 1773, church and monastery passed to the Knights of Malta, and the church took the name Malteserkirche.
The church was designed as a novitiate church, and its decoration shows Jesuit saints as models for the young: Aloysius Gonzaga, Francis Xavier, Ignatius of Loyola, Paul Miki and companions, and Stanislaus Kostka. After the order was suppressed in 1773 the church passed to the Knights of Malta and has been called the Malteserkirche since then.
The church stands on a rise above the old town, next to the former Jesuit college to the north and the former Jesuit Gymnasium, now the Neues Stadtmuseum, to the south. The interior is entered through a vestibule between the two west towers, beneath two galleries. The organ, built by Augustin Simnacher in 1756, was restored by Georg Jann in 1986–1988 and renovated by Friedemann Seitz in 2023.
The main altar was crafted in 1758 by Johann Baptist Baader and features a central crucifixion scene that dominates the altar area. Baader's work combines sculpture and carving in a way that immediately draws the visitor's eye.
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