St. Charles's Church

This guide to St. Charles's Church in Vienna opens with a vow Emperor Charles VI made in 1712 as the plague loosened its grip on the city, promising a church to the saint who once tended the dying in plague-stricken Milan. It follows architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, who won the design competition but died before the dome was finished, and the son who took over the job for another fourteen years. Along the way it lingers on Johann Michael Rottmayr's ceiling fresco, painted across more than a thousand square meters of curved plaster above the nave.