Minoritenkirche

Franciscans received this site in 1224, and the foundation stone of the present church was laid by King Ottokar II of Bohemia in 1276, the year after a fire swept the city. Work continued until about 1350. The result is one of the earliest Gothic churches in eastern Austria, built to French cathedral patterns, with a tympanum — a rarity in Austrian architecture — carrying Christ on the branched cross between Mary Magdalene and John the Evangelist. The choir begun in the 1310s was absorbed around 1340 into a three-aisled hall church.

Its most improbable possession is a mosaic. Napoleon commissioned the Roman craftsman Giacomo Raffaelli in 1809 to copy Leonardo's Last Supper in stone; the finished panel measures a little over nine metres by four and a half and weighs some twenty tonnes. Napoleon never received it, and the Emperor Ferdinand I gave it instead to Vienna's Italian congregation, which had held the church since the seventeenth century. It has hung on the wall of the nave ever since.

The long, high stone interior is dry and resonant, and the church has become one of the smaller Viennese venues for sacred and eighteenth-century programmes.