Exaggerated or not, this saying has some merit. Italianate influence is endemic to Munich’s historical and cultural legacy, even if the discovery of its art and architecture scene does not exactly feel like a journey in the footsteps of great Italian masters.
The Italian connection here ostensibly has deep roots. If Vienna is tied to Italy symbolically through the Holy Roman Emperors’ role in upholding the standing of Catholic Christendom, Munich’s Italian connection originates with the export to the Italian peninsula of two names – Guelph and Ghibelline – that are inseparable from the story of post-medieval urban Italy. This happened during the 12th century rivalry between Bavaria’s Welf (Guelph) Dukes and the Hohenstaufen family who ruled the neighboring Swabia from their Waiblingen (Ghibelline) castle. The Guelph (pro-papal) and Ghibelline (pro-Imperial) factions defined politics within the City Republics on the peninsula and the conflicts and alliances between them for the next three centuries. Later on, Renaissance brought to Munich the usual mix of Italian masters from Venice and its Veneto hinterland, as well as from Lombardia and its lakes region, with a notable, top ranked addition, that of 16th century Mantua, a rarely acknowledged renaissance masterpiece.
The export of the Italian arts was underwritten in early 1500’s by the Jagiellonians and the Habsburgs, two great allied dynasties. Jagiellonian patronage reached the pinnacle during Sigismund’s marriage to Poland’s Italian queen Bona Sforza, arranged by Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor. Habsburg contribution peaked after their expansion into Bohemia and Hungary. Their international humanist courts – of artists and scholars centered on the universities of Prague and Krakow – were politically more important than that of the Bavarian Duke, their artistic influence more defining than the courts of the German towns, their patronage of Italian arts and architecture more assertive and deliberate. The Jagiellonian dynasty ruled over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a great power during its Golden Age, and briefly in Bohemia and Hungary, all-in a vast empire where the arts flourished. In this context, Munich was a step further from the Italian peninsula than Budapest, Krakow, Prague, and later Vienna on the cultural map of mid 1500’s and early 1600’s. And for good reasons.
Italian Renaissance outside the peninsula reached its purest form in Hungary and Poland where generations of Florentine artists built enough muscle memory to define the spirit of place. This would be echoed a century later when Italian Baroque finds its epicenter in Vienna. The purity of Italianate forms in the German lands diminished in direct proportion to fragmentation and limitations to the sovereign power of the Habsburgs. Italian masters came to Munich in the 1530’s – when traders from South Germany and South of the Alps competed on Europe’s the main trade routes – later than Hungary and concurrently with Bohemia and Poland. In early 1600’s, independence of the United Provinces would flood South Germany with trained artisans from Antwerp and the Spanish Netherlands looking for greener pastures as commerce shifted to Amsterdam. Later that next century, the rise of absolutist France would expel much of the deliberate Italian influence from west of the Rhine, further confining the Italian influence to Central European lands East of Bavaria. Italy’s relative proximity in itself was not sufficient to radically change the look of Munich’s built environment – Bavaria’s indigenous guilds of master masons and craftsmen had been too entrenched, too good, and too productive, Augsburg’s goldsmiths were head and shoulders above the rest, and Nuremberg’s Durer was a rare early Renaissance genius that could withstand comparisons with Leonardo – causing classicizing Italianate accents to settle for coexistence here with folksy but intricate Germanic legacy.
Despite its reputation as “Italy’s most Northern city’ and the sponsorship of powerful Electors, Munich never quite got there, the Italianate and the Germanic ran in parallel, the result perhaps even more mixed and pluralistic than in Vienna. Even during Counter-Reformation, when Roman influences over Catholic lands were at their peak, this most Italianate of German cities did not take the style of the peninsula at face value. It was never as comfortable with it as Austrian, Polish and other Central European cities that had opened their doors, providing top level sponsorship and new opportunities to Italian artists – Munich’s imposing and highly ornamental Michaelerkirche remained loyal to the bulky forms of German Renaissance while emulating Il Gesu and attempting to rival St Peter’s in style. This unsure adoption of Italian – and later French – influences combined with local craftsmanship and masterful execution is integral to the Bavarian look, perhaps best exemplified in the opulent and one of a kind Rococo interiors of Asamkirche. Later, the Italian arts would flourish again here, as the Bavarian court was elevated, with the help of Napoleon, from ducal to royal, but only as a symbolic accent in the city’s new nationalist vocabulary.
