ST. PAUL IM LAVANTTAL. - Benedictine abbey in the diocese of Gurk, in Carinthia.
On a hill overlooking the broad valley of the Lavant, at the end of the 10th century there stood the castle of Lavant, with a small church of St. Giles. Count Engelbert I of Sponheim, carrying out the will of his mother, Countess Richkardis, who had already built there a church of St. Paul, called there in 1091 from Hirsau a group of Benedictine monks to found a new abbey; the church was dedicated in 1093. The present Romanesque basilica is of the architectural type of Hirsau, a rare example that escaped the usual subsequent stylistic transformations; after the fire of 1347 the vaults were rebuilt and it was dedicated anew in 1375: it has three naves with a transept, three apses and a crypt (walled up for centuries). The rear Gothic vaults were frescoed by the masters M. and F. Pacher (1470-80). The present furnishings are largely Baroque. Recently, beneath layers of whitewash, valuable frescoes of the 13th-15th centuries were discovered. Around the church, still on the hilltop, are grouped the monastic buildings, partly medieval, but reworked in the Baroque era. Joseph II suppressed the monastery in 1782.
When the famous abbey of Sankt Blasien, in the Black Forest, was also suppressed in 1805, Francis I offered as a new seat the abbey of S. P., where, in fact, in 1809 Abbot Beda Rotter moved with the monks and with almost all the cultural and artistic treasures of Sankt Blasien. At S. P. a gymnasium was established in 1810, with a boarding school and incomparable collections of books, manuscripts (a codex of works of St. Ambrose, of the 5th century, the Reichenau Sacramentary of the 10th century), archival treasures, many unpublished works of the Sankt Blasien monks, and most precious sacred and secular relics.
Bibliography7 works
Giuseppe Löw