Weilheimer Peterskirche, Late Gothic hall church in Weilheim an der Teck, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
The Peterskirche is a three-nave hall church with five bays and a single-bay presbytery ending in a 5/8 choir. Its interior is spanned by a network vault with floral decoration and 19 painted keystones. A square tower with two Gothic side portals carries an octagonal belfry crowned by a Welsche Haube and a lantern; the tower is 36 m high, its viewing platform 29 m. Lancet windows with Gothic tracery, white plaster outside, grey stone buttresses.
A Romanesque basilica, 22.3 m long and 16.5 m wide, was begun in 1089 under Duke Bertold II of Zähringen and consecrated by his brother Gebhard, Bishop of Konstanz. The present Late Gothic hall church was built from 1489 to 1495 for St. Peter's Monastery in the Black Forest, which held the patronage right until 1806. Count Eberhard im Bart supplied builders from his Urach workshop, including Peter von Koblenz, who finished the choir.
The church's name recalls the apostle Peter, its patron since the Romanesque predecessor founded in 1089. A donor painting from around 1520 shows Duke Bertold II holding a model of that earlier church, with the Württemberg coat of arms added during the Reformation. Thomas Schick the Elder painted the monumental Last Judgment in 1499; his son added scenes of the church's founding, the martyrdom of St Catherine and the rosary around 1523.
The tower stands 36 m tall, but the accessible viewing platform in the belfry is at 29 m. The church is white-plastered outside, with grey stone base, buttresses and mouldings, and a red-tiled saddle roof. The choir windows by Gerhard and Gisela Dreher were installed between 1954 and 1958.
The organ's white-and-gold Rococo case is decorated with lidded vases and putti blowing trumpets. After its 1954 renovation the "Weilheimer Regulativ" was drawn up here, and in 1985 earlier changes were largely reversed to return the instrument to its original disposition. It has 23 stops on two manuals and pedal.
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