St. Veit

The Pfarrkirche St. Veit stands in Krems an der Donau, a town on the Danube in Lower Austria. It is a Roman Catholic church also called the ‘Dom der Wachau’. The building’s history begins with a donation by Emperor Heinrich II in 1014, when it served as the mother parish for a wide area. The present church was rebuilt between 1616 and 1630 to designs by the Milanese architect Cypriano Biasino after the medieval structure had deteriorated. Inside, the work of the Passauer sculptor and architect Joseph Matthias Götz from 1733 includes the high altar, choir stalls and pulpit. The ceiling frescoes date from 1787 and were painted by Martin Johann Schmidt, known as the ‘Kremser Schmidt’. Visitors enter a restrained early Baroque exterior and find an 18th-century interior enriched by Götz’s woodwork and Schmidt’s vivid ceiling scenes. On the left transept wall stands a black marble side altar from the former Bründlkapelle, now housing a small Bohemian Madonna of about 1420. Nearby, a late Gothic stone group of Saint Anne teaching the Virgin, carved in the 14th century, occupies its own small chapel on the north-east side.