VIKTRING

VIKTRING. — Former Cistercian abbey in the diocese of Gurk (Klagenfurt), in Carinthia, Austria.

The village of V. is already attested in the Carolingian period, with a parish church (850), but the monastery was founded in 1142 by the duke of Carinthia, Bernardo di Spanheim. The first monks came from Weiler-Betnach (Lotharingia), a filiation of Morimond. The abbey church was built in the transitional Cistercian Gothic style, very similar to that of Fontenay, with three naves and a transept, raised vaults, and a typically austere character. It was consecrated by the archbishop of Salzburg, Eberardo, in 1202. The choir received figurative stained-glass windows from the 14th–15th centuries. A grandiose Baroque high altar and wooden side altars. Many funerary slabs. In the Baroque period the monastery too was rebuilt; but Giuseppe II in 1786

(phot. Alinari)
VILIGELMO — The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and their labor. Detail of the reliefs by V. and his assistants on the façade of the cathedral of Modena (12th century).

suppressed the abbey and made the church a parish church (1787), while the abbey buildings became the site of a large textile factory. In 1847 the church was shortened because it was partly unsafe, and it received a new façade. V. is known above all for the abbot Giovanni di V. (1213–1345), who left, in five successive versions, the Liber certarum historiarum, published several times (most recent edition by L. F. Schneider, in MGH, Script. rerum Germ. in usum schol., XXXVI [1909–10], 2 vols.). The original is preserved in Munich (Clm 22107).