The Protestant St. Vitus church in Gärtringen is considered one of the best-preserved late Gothic village churches in Württemberg. The oldest surviving component is the tower, which was built between 1455 and 1460.Roman Janssen: Die Kirche St. Veit bis zur Reformation. In: Evangelische St.-Veit-Kirche Gärtringen: 1496–1996. pp. 7–39, see bibliography With its height of 38.5 meters, which can be attributed to its former use as a fortified and watchtower, it still represents the dominant landmark of the village. The year 1496, when the choir was completed, is considered the year of construction of the pilaster church.Karl Halbauer: Bau- und Kunstgeschichte, Baugeschichte. In: Evangelische St.-Veit-Kirche Gärtringen: 1496–1996. pp. 77–84, see bibliography
The continuously vaulted village church has unusually rich late Gothic vault paintings and is classified as a monument of special importance.Julius Fekete: Kunst- und Kulturdenkmale im Landkreis Böblingen. Theiss Verlag, 2006, , pp. 119 f. The interior of the church, which is in need of renovation, was extensively restored from May 2009 to September 2010.Innenrenovierung der St.-Veit-Kirche Gärtringen 2010. Festschrift zur Einweihung 12 September 2010 (PDF; 6,35 MB)
History
History of the construction The Liber decimationis from 1275 mentions the predecessor building of the present church for the first time. Little is known about the dimensions of the predecessor building, because no remains have been preserved above ground and there have been no excavations in the area of the church. There is a hint of the previous nave on the tower wall in the nave's roof truss. There the old gable line can be seen, from which it can be concluded that the earlier nave was shallower and 4.5 meters lower than the present one.
In 1485, 30 years after the completion of the tower, the construction of a more spacious church began with the choir. It was completed and put into use in 1496. The nave vault was completed shortly after, probably between 1498 and 1500, as evidenced by dendrochronological studies of the trees used for the nave roof truss.
When the architect Christian Friedrich von Leins drew up his plans for a comprehensive renovation of the church in 1869, the church had already been repaired and renovated several times in the previous centuries. Von Leins' plans, which would have largely transformed the church into a neo-Gothic building, were not implemented, however, so the original architectural style and the old building fabric were preserved. A thorough restoration by Heinrich Dolmetsch planned in 1896 also failed to materialize. Finally, the architects Felix Schuster and Theodor Dolmetsch undertook the overdue renovation of the church in 1913. In keeping with the changed historical consciousness, they were interested in preserving what had been handed down unaltered.
A comprehensive restoration of the church interior took place in 1965 under the direction of architect Paul Heim. In the process, an oil-fired forced-air heating system was installed, wall and vault paintings were uncovered, and some changes from the 1913 renovation were reversed. An extensive renovation of the roof truss in 2007 cost 480,000 euros.
In 2008, cracks appeared in the vault, chunks of sandstone and pieces of mortar occasionally fell from the ceiling. A net stretched underneath the ceiling therefore protected visitors from the falling debris until renovation work began in mid-May 2009. During this renovation, the vault ribs, which had begun to detach from the vault due to temperature changes and also due to static defects, were fixed to the vault shell with stainless steel cores. Furthermore, the interior walls were cleaned and the heating system was replaced. The organ was cleaned, modernized and extended by two stops in the course of this church renovation. On 12 September 2010 the church was reopened with a festive service.
Church history
The County Palatine of Tübingen were the patronage lords of the church until the late 14th century. This function was taken over in 1382 by the House of Württemberg, which in 1456 transferred the associated rights to Herrenberg abbey, into which the church was incorporated in 1457. After the exiled Duke Ulrich returned to Württemberg in 1534, he soon introduced the Reformation and Protestant worship. The House of Württemberg had the monasteries and convents in its domain dissolved and again exercised church rights directly itself. The Protestant regional church took over the last Catholic pastor, Eustachius Kain, into its service.Fritz Heimberger: Überblick über die neuere Kirchengeschichte. In: Evangelische St.-Veit-Kirche Gärtringen: 1496–1996. pp. 41–59, see bibliography
It is not known exactly when St. Vitus was elevated to a patrocinium. Until 1436 he was clearly only altar and chaplain saint. The veneration of St. Vitus must have been considerable by the middle of the 15th century, so that possibly the previous church was already dedicated to St. Vitus from about 1455. However, the patrocinium probably changed with the construction of the present church.
Building description
The church stands on the upper edge of a terrain sloping down to the south and east. The height of the surrounding wall, which is largely still in place and has been renovated on three sides, indicates its former defensive function. On the west side, the square tower rises above mighty walls. Its height of 38.5 meters, which is quite high for a village church, is based on its former function as a fortified and watchtower. The tower is shifted a little to the left of the church. It does not stand in the middle on the west side, but jumps out a bit over the nave on the north side.Karl Halbauer: Bau- und Kunstgeschichte, Baubeschreibung. In: Evangelische St.-Veit-Kirche Gärtringen: 1496–1996. pp. 84–93, see bibliography
The main entrance to the church is in a small porch on the tower and west wall of the nave with an almost square floor plan, oriented like the tower. The nave is just under 20 meters long and a little over 12 meters wide, including the inset chapels. It is divided into four bays by three buttresses on each long side. The west wall of the nave is the only wall of the nave oriented like the tower and porch; the interior buttresses do not abut the wall of the nave at right angles, but mediate between the two different orientations. There are inset chapels with their own vaults in the spaces between the buttresses.
To the east, the nave is joined by the choir, the width of which corresponds to that of the nave without the chapels. The choir and nave are separated by a choir arch. The choir is almost twelve meters long and has three transverse axes and a three-axis apse. The corners of the choir polygon and the axis flanks on the south side are provided with external buttresses. The rectangular sacristy, the length of which corresponds to two choir axes, adjoins the north side of the choir. In width, it projects a little beyond the alignment of the nave north wall.
All rooms have ribbed vaults; the porch, the nave with its eight chapels, the choir, and the sacristy have net-rib vaults; the tower hall, the oldest part of the church, has a cross-rib vault.
Tower
The tower façade is divided into four barn floors of different heights, which are characterized by circumferential cornices. Like the entire building, the walls are made of plastered rubble. Only corner edges, cornices, and door and window jambs are made of exposed ashlars. The upper end is formed by the crippled hipped roof with half-timbered gables, which dates from the time of construction.
The three lower floors have rectangular window slits that widen inward. A large pointed arch window with tracery infill on each side serves as the sound opening for the bell frame on the fourth floor. The clock faces of the tower clock, which was added later, are set into the gables of the hipped roof facing west and east. On the north and south sides, they are set one story below.
The division of the floors inside does not correspond to the design of the facade. The oak-beamed tower internals form seven stories, including the tower attic floor. The entablature rests on steps of masonry that tapers inside from floor to floor.
Porch The rectangular narthex, unadorned on the outside, was almost certainly not envisioned in the original planning of the church. Although the nave base continues into the narthex, and the narthex shed roof exactly matches the nave cornice, the tower door and the window slot above it are so closely adjacent to the narthex that it is assumed to be a later addition. Inside, foliage corbels support the net vault, which ends with a keystone adorned with a depiction of the church saint Vitus in the oil boiler.
Nave
The single-nave church is designed as a pilaster church. This means that the buttresses statically required as abutments of the vault are designed as wall piers, which in the Gärtringer church were completely drawn into the interior. The nave is thus flanked on both long sides by a series of inset chapels separated by the pilasters and opening in high arcades to the center. With the Blaubeuren Abbey and the town church of Schwaigern, there are only two other churches of this type in Württemberg.
The smooth exterior wall of the nave of St. Vitus church is subdivided by three circumferential cornices: the base cornice, the invert cornice and the roof cornice. On the south front, which is designed as a showcase, there are four large, three-light, regularly arranged pointed arch windows. The ogee-arched south portal is placed slightly east of the symmetry axis of the nave, as it would otherwise meet one of the buttresses. On the north side, only two windows originally existed in the first and second inset chapels from the east, the last being the only tracery window in the nave with only two lights. The door and window openings in the fourth inset chapel of the north side date from later times. However, the north side is largely obscured by the high churchyard wall.
The nave is spanned by a uniform net vaults, whose single-fillet ribs spring from the wall without a corbel. The height of the vault is slightly more than 9 meters, all the rib intersections located on the central axis are provided with decorated keystones. The net vaults of the eight inset chapels, which are just under a meter lower, have the same structure, each with a central keystone.
Choir
The choir is distinguished from the nave by its height and rich decoration. At just under eleven meters, the height of the choir vault exceeds that of the nave by about two meters. The considerably higher cornice and the widely raised windows make this difference already visible from the outside. Light enters the spacious choir through five tracery windows, three in the eastern end of the choir and two in the south wall. The middle of the eastern windows, the axial window, is four-lane, all others three-lane. For no apparent reason, the section of the south wall closest to the nave was not given a window. In contrast, the north wall has no windows because of the adjacent sacristy and the originally existing sacrament house. The window jambs of the choir are richly profiled inside and out. An increase compared to the nave is also formed by the more closely meshed vaulting, in which the keystones are closer together. In addition, the forked ribs are double fluted and rest on head coberls and a foliage corbel.
Sacristy