BEURON. - Archabbey of St. Martin (Hohenzollern, Germany). From 1077 it was a priory of Lateran Canons, which later became an abbey in 1687 and was suppressed in 1803. Princess Catherine of Hohenzollern granted the buildings to the brothers Mauro and Placid Wolter (v.), Benedictine monks of the abbey of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome (1863); it was re-established as an abbey in 1868 and raised to an archabbey in 1884.
From it the following abbeys were later founded: Emmaus (in Prague-Czechoslovakia), Seckau in Styria (Austria), Maredsous (in Belgium), Erdington (England), Maria Laach, Gerleve, Neuburg (Germany), Sion (Jerusalem). Through its assistance the Benedictine women's abbeys of Maredret (Belgium), St. Gabriel (Prague, later transferred in 1920 to Bertholdstein, Styria), Eibingen, Kellenried (Germany) were also erected. B., constituted as a Congregation in 1868 and definitively confirmed on 8 July 1929, also cooperated in the founding of other monasteries such as the abbeys of Weingarten, Neresheim, Grüssau (Germany), as well as in the revival of other Congregations, and contributed to the establishment of the Pontifical Institute of St. Anselm in Rome. B. promoted in a special way the liturgical worship and Gregorian chant in Germany; in the scholarly field B. founded its institute for palimpsests and became the seat of the theological school of the Beuronese Congregation with a specially well-stocked library.
Bibliography4 works
Matteo Rothenhäusler
SCHOOL OF BEURON
In connection with the spirit that urged the restoration of the ancient liturgy and of Gregorian chant, a school of painting arose at B. in the second half of the 19th century. It was founded by Peter Lenz, b. in 1832 at Haigerloch. He, after studying sculpture in Munich and in Rome, became a Benedictine under the name Desiderius in the monastery of B., where he later died in 1928; here the converted Calvinist painter Wüger (D. Gabriel), the painter Steiner (D. Luke) and later others joined him. The first work, executed in 1870, was the chapel of St. Maurus at B., where the new style is already completely formed. Other decorations followed in the cathedral of Constance (chapel of St. Conrad), in the abbey church and in the cloisters of B. With the raging of the Kulturkampf the monks
BEURON. - View of the Archabbey.
they had to leave, and, summoned to Italy by d. Boniface Krug, abbot of Montecassino, in 1880 they decorated the Torretta of the archicenobium with an imposing complex of frescoes and reliefs. After the decoration of the churches of Emmaus and St. Gabriel in Prague and other works executed in Stuttgart, at Maria Laach and elsewhere, the Beuron monks, who had lost don Gabriel Wüger but gained don Adalbert Gresnicht, received the commission to complete their most important work: the very rich decoration of the hypogeum of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica in the abbey of Montecassino, inaugurated in May 1913.
The school subsequently completed many other works, also attending to goldsmith work, furnishings, and embroidery.
The Beuron monks had a tendency to synthesize forms within geometric schemes; their mysticism also led them in the footsteps of the Italian fourteenth-and fifteenth-century masters, particularly of Angelico.
The rigor of the method, fixed by d. Desiderius Lenz himself in a formulary, has nevertheless sometimes generated manifestations of a new kind of mannerism. There remains, however, always the fascination of a work accomplished by a community with perfect unity of purpose, with the harmonious fusion of all the major and minor arts and with the maximum aesthetic exploitation of the various techniques and the most diverse materials.
Bibliography4 works
Corrado Mezzana