Hospitalkapelle St. Nikolaus und Elisabeth, Baroque chapel in Andernach, Germany

The Hospitalkapelle St. Nikolaus und Elisabeth is a Baroque church located within hospital grounds, characterized by tall windows and arched vaults that shape its interior space. The Rococo furnishings date to the 18th century and were carefully restored following a fire that damaged the building.

The Andernach council allowed the Annunciation nuns to found a monastery in 1643; the first five arrived in 1652, and construction began in April 1667. Their church was built over three years from 1736 and consecrated on 25 March 1740. After the French occupied the Rhineland in 1794, the order was dissolved in 1803 and the buildings were leased to the city in 1804, later used as stables and storage before the St. Nikolaus-Stiftshospital took over the complex in 1841.

The chapel is dedicated to Saint Joseph, its permanent patron, and to Saint Nicholas, chosen as patron of the hospital. The ceiling paintings include the life of Blessed Jeanne de Valois, founder of the Annunciation Order, on the nuns' gallery. Today the chapel serves the hospital and Marienstift senior centre, as well as the Maria Himmelfahrt parish and wedding ceremonies.

The chapel belongs to the St. Nikolaus-Stiftshospital and the Marienstift senior centre, so visits fit around the institutions' services; it also hosts weddings. Enter from the west front, where a pilaster-flanked portal carries a volute gable with a tuff statue of St. Joseph in a shell niche. The single nave is 28.22 m long and 11.89 m wide, so the ceiling paintings are best read from the centre of the room.

The organ dates from the 1960s, not the 18th century: it has 21 stops and came from Josef Klein's workshop in Obersteinebach. The two windows beneath the gallery differ by two centuries, one showing the Cleansing of the Temple (1739) and the other the Stations of the Cross (1950).