Page - 451 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

451The Neugebäude must have been a low vaulted gallery, probably carrying a terrace accessible from the principal gallery on the piano nobile. This principal gallery on the piano nobile, stretching for fifty meters on either side of the Mittelrisalit, was the most spectacular and unprecedented among the many eccentric features of the Neugebäude. When Maximilian died the west gallery had begun to be built, the east gallery would only be completed in 1579. We know what it looked like thanks to the drawings made in 1601 by the Imperial Architect Anton de Moys to indicate the damage due to infiltra- tion of rainwater through a defective roof [Figs. 9.29 and 9.30].28 It is possible also to reconstruct it because the paired columns and appertaining entabla- ture blocks were reused in the construction, in 1775, of the Gloriette on the hill behind Schönbrunn Palace. Its design, by Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg, can be considered as a conscious memorial to the Neugebäude, which Hetzendorf had dismantled on the orders of Empress Maria Theresa [Figs. 9.31, 9.33–9.35].29 The two galleries which connected the central pavilion or Mittelrisalit to the two end pavilions or towers each consisted of nine arches carried on paired doric columns. These column pairs each carried a complete doric entablature consisting of architrave, frieze of two triglyphs flanking a bucranium, and cor- nice. Though almost pedantically correct, this solution looks very odd and un- classical: instead of stressing the horizontal lines of the facade, the openings 28 Vienna, HHStA, Sammlung der Karten und Pläne, Ra-940-2. 29 Lietzmann 1997, pp. 100–101. The spolia of the Neugebäude reused at Schönbrunn have been identified and discussed in Knöbl 1988, pp. 102–118. Figure 9.29 Anton de Moys, elevation and plan of the gallery of the Neugebäude, 1601.