Basilika Scheyern, Catholic parish and Benedictine abbey church in Scheyern, Bavaria, Germany
The Basilika Scheyern is a late Romanesque church from the 12th/13th century, consecrated in 1215, with a three-aisled nave under a barrel vault with lunettes and no transept. The choir is closed on three sides and filled by the high altar. The nave was lengthened in 1768–1770, when the Romanesque windows were widened into pear shapes and the north chapels were joined into a second aisle.
Count Otto V of Scheyern moved the Wittelsbach house monastery, founded in 1077 at Bayrischzell, to the site of his former ancestral castle in 1119. A church consecrated around 1127/28 burned in 1171 and 1183; its successor, consecrated in 1215, survives in the core. The monastery was dissolved in the 1803 secularisation, and the church became Scheyern's parish church.
The Scheyern Cross, a relic of the cross of Christ kept in the Heiligkreuzkapelle since the late 12th century, is the goal of a pilgrimage. The chapel's early Rococo stucco by Wessobrunn craftsmen, including Ignaz Finsterwalder, incorporates mirrors meant to suggest divine radiance. The monastery remains the house monastery of the Wittelsbach family, whose members were buried here until 1253.
The church stands in Scheyern, in the Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm district of Upper Bavaria. The nave is a barrel-vaulted hall without a transept, and the high altar fills the full width of the three-sided choir. The Heiligkreuzkapelle, which holds the Scheyern Cross, keeps its 1738 frescoes by Melchior Buchner and early Rococo stucco with inset mirrors.
The Scheyern Cross, a cross relic held by the church since the late 12th century, is kept in a monstrance made in 1738 by Johann Georg Herkomer, inside the Holy Cross Chapel. The chapel's altar of 1738 holds a large Renaissance cross from around 1600, with figures of Saints Helena and Magdalene dated around 1650. Mirrors worked into the early Rococo stucco of 1768/69 are meant to suggest divine radiance.
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