Minna Wagner

Abstract

This biography of Minna Planer, Richard Wagner's wife of thirty years, reveals her as a self-assured woman and artist who was vital to her husband's creative life.

„Repräsentations- und Gebrauchstypen” — Renate Wagner-Rieger und die Bettelordensarchitektur

“…On the one hand, she considered the choir to be an accidental What fascinated her initially, however, was not so much the early use of the hall church as the question of the derivation of the single-nave hall building, which played a prominent role in both orders in Italy into the 15th century. Starting with the lower church of San Francesco in Assisi, the tomb of the founder of the order, which Wagner-Rieger quite rightly saw as the counterpart to San Domenico in Bologna, 23 she examined its ground plan as a combination of an apsidal transept and a single-nave nave (fig. 9).…”

“…9). For this purpose, she drew, for the first time, on an astonishing range of examples of single-nave church buildings from the 11th and 12th centuries, 24 which also show the most varied choir ends. For the west-orientated transept with directly connected apse, she referred to Old St. Peter, among others, and for an example of the vaulted nave, she used San Lanfranco in Pavia, a single-nave church with a transept built around the same time, which served as the burial place of a local bishop's saint.…”

“…She suspected its importance and placed the hall alongside the single-aisled complexes of the Franciscans as a manifestation of the utilitarian type. 17 A short time later, she published a report on the research situation, in which she outlined the problems of the hall church in Italy. 18 She recognized the dependence of San Giovanni on the hall transepts of the Piacenza Cathedral and conceded that the Dominican church was a model for the flat-roofed hall buildings of the mendicant orders in central Italy.…”