Franzensburg

The Franzensburg was raised between 1801 and 1836 on an artificial island in the park pond at Laxenburg, in the district of Mödling in Lower Austria. It is not a medieval survival but a reproduction of a medieval knights' castle, built for Emperor Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, in the middle of the park beside the Laxenburg palaces that already stood there. Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg planned it in two parts, a Ritterburg and a Knappenburg, and it was meant as a museum from the outset.

Extensions continued until 1835, among them the outer courtyard with its ancestors' gallery of sandstone busts. The castle carries the name of Francis, who died in 1835, the year before the work was finished. With its recourse to medieval building forms it is reckoned a milestone on the road to Historicism, and a masterpiece of romantic classicism in the Neo-Gothic manner.

Older fabric was carried to the island and built into the new walls. Components of the parish church at Heiligenkreuz, pulled down in the course of the Josephinist reforms, were used in the building, and set-pieces of other older structures were worked in with them — above all a reconstruction of the Capella Speciosa of Klosterneuburg, the first Gothic-influenced building in the Danube region. The room called the Luisenzimmer has a ceiling, two door surrounds and doors taken from Burg Rappottenstein, dating from around 1600.

The work went up just as brick-making was beginning south of Vienna. The price of the individual brick seemed too high to the emperor, so he simply bought the brickworks at Vösendorf, and Schloss Vösendorf with them.

A ferry was established in 1806 to cross the pond from the mainland to the island, and it runs still, licensed as a shipping company; in winter a wooden bridge replaces it, while a stone bridge reaches the island from the opposite side all year round. Castle and pond sit within a park of some 250 hectares, laid out in the late 18th century in the manner of an English landscape garden, with woods, meadows, several canals, a tournament ground, the Concordia Temple, the Rittersäule, a marble bust of the emperor and the Lusthaus.

The castle had been open to the public earlier, but the museum was reopened in 2003 by Otto von Habsburg. Its collection deals chiefly with the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary and complements those at Bad Ischl, Schönbrunn and Gödöllő in Hungary; it holds the Austrian Museum Seal of Quality. In the Waffensaal the shields bearing the arms of the 44 Austrian lands and provinces are mounted on the ceiling. The Habsburgersaal holds half of Paul Strudel's imperial statues, the other half standing in the Hofbibliothek, while in the Lothringersaal paintings of the later emperors, by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and Friedrich von Amerling among others, are grouped around a Kupelwieser portrait of Francis I.

Guided tours are offered in the castle and plays staged there in summer, when rowing boats and electric boats can be hired on the pond.