Building the house

After Prince Hans Ulrich was made Governor of Inner Austria in 1625, he immediately commissioned the most important court artist in the country, Giovanni Pietro de Pomis, with the planning and design of his new residence. His enormous cash reserves made it possible for him to complete the structure of the building in only ten years - even during the turbulent period of the Thirty Years' War - by incorporating large sections of the former castle. After de Pomis' death in 1631, his foremen Pietro Valnegro and Antonio Pozzo were commissioned to complete the new residence. The palace was at least temporarily occupied from the middle of the seventeenth century, but the main residence of the time still remained the City Palace or "Stadtpalais" at the foot of the Schlossberg hill (now located in the Sackstrasse 16). And it was not until the second half of the 17th century that Prince Johann Seyfried von Eggenberg, Hans Ulrich's grandson, was finally able to bring all work to a close by incorporating all the designs, furniture, tapestries and decorations into the state rooms and the Planetary Room in 1685.

After the male line of the Eggenberg family died out, the State Rooms were modernised, bringing them into line with the tastes of the age between 1754 and 1763.  The commissioning patrons for these alterations were the last Eggenberg princess, Maria Eleonora and her third husband, Johann Leopold Count Herberstein.

The surviving interiors, together with the three Far Eastern side rooms and the Palace Chapel, which was added to the building complex instead of a theatre, all date from this period.

Nonetheless, the rooms would be used for only a few years until 1789. After that date, the building passed into the ownership of another line of the Herberstein family, who seldom resided at Eggenberg.  For this reason, the Rococo décor and the great cycle of ceiling paintings, dating from the 17th century, remain unaltered to this day.

In 1789, Eggenberg passed by inheritance to the older main branch of the family, the Imperial Counts of Herberstein, whose main residence was far away in Silesia, meaning that they visited Eggenberg for only a few weeks a year. It is true that in the early 19th century, Johann Hieronymus Count Herberstein had the formal Baroque garden laid out as an English landscape garden in line with the tastes of the time, but the State Rooms were left completely untouched. Seen as old-fashioned, visitors were only infrequently able to marvel at its wonders in the company of the Palace’s castellan, and so the rooms fell into a deep and lasting slumber over a period of a hundred years. The first inventory, dating from the 18th century, and the first photographs, taken circa 1900, provide an almost identical glimpse of the building’s historic interior.  From today’s perspective, it was a particular stroke of luck that the fittings and décor survived this long period of hiatus.

Only the family’s living quarters on the piano nobile were altered on several occasions after 1850 to meet modern requirements.

After the First World War, the Herberstein family was forced for economic reasons to sell the house, and it was finally acquired by the state of Styria in January 1939. The Reichsmusikschule (Reich Music School) was housed here until 1945. After suffering war damage and being extensively restored, the building was incorporated into the Landesmuseum Joanneum in 1948 and opened to the public in 1953 as the Baroque Museum.

The house was run from 1972 onwards by the Schloss Eggenberg Department, part of the Joanneum association of museums, and from 2003 it was systematically developed as the central location for the Joanneum’s collections of Old Master paintings. Since the reorganisation of the Alte Galerie (Gallery of Old Masters) on the piano nobile (2005), the reopening of the Münzkabinett (Numismatic collection) (2007) and the recent construction of the Archäologiemuseum (Museum of Archaeology) in the Palace Gardens (2009), the palace complex, with its sumptuous historical interiors and carefully restored gardens, has become one of the highlights of the museum world in Austria.

Since 1 August 2010, Schloss Eggenberg has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, ‘City of Graz – Historic Centre and Schloss Eggenberg’.