Admont Abbey library hall in Styria, Austria, the largest monastic library in the world. A jewel of the Baroque era.
The library hall, built in 1776 to designs by the architect Joseph Hueber, is 70 metres long, 14 metres wide and 13 metres high, and is the largest monastery library in the world. It contains c. 70,000 volumes of the monastery's entire holdings of c. 200,000 volumes. The seven ceiling frescoes created by the 80-year-old Bartolomeo Altomonte (1694-1783) in the summer months of the years 1775 and 1776 also breathe the spirit of the Enlightenment showing the stages of human knowledge up to the high point of Divine Revelation.
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Photo credit: © Manfred Glueck / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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