Albrechtsburg

In 929 King Henry I of Germany subdued the Slavic Glomacze tribe at the Siege of Gana and built a fortress within their settlement area, situated on a rock high above the Elbe river.

[1] This castle, called Misnia after a nearby creek, became the nucleus of the town and from 965 the residence of the Margraves of Meissen, who in 1423 acquired the Electorate of Saxony.

His grandsons, Ernst and Albrecht, ruled over Saxony and Thuringia together from 1464 to 1485 and commissioned the master builder Arnold von Westfalen to build the first German palace on the site of the old margravial castle in 1471.

From this period are the loop ribbed vault in the style of Benedikt Ried, who worked in Prague, on the first floor of the north-eastern building and a fireplace in the room above.

At that time the sculptor Christoph Walther I was also commissioned to create figural reliefs for the balustrades of the Great Staircase Tower, the frames of which show typical early Renaissance forms.

At first, Dresden was intended to be the manufactory, but Augustus the Strong chose the empty castle, isolated because of its location, because nowhere else would the secret of porcelain production have been so certain.

The former electoral castle rises above a hook-shaped ground plan on a rocky plateau steeply sloping towards the Elbe north of Meissen Cathedral.

Albrechtsburg Castle was not only to become a residential palace that was particularly comfortable to live in, but also an unmistakable sign of the increasingly consolidating territorial rule of the Wettins, which was gaining in imperial, administrative and economic importance.

While the architectural decoration belongs to the Late Gothic period, the structure of the building forms already leads to the culture of the European Renaissance.

The large main staircase to the south, which provides access to the upper floors used for stately purposes, is a masterpiece of stonemasonry with intricately curved steps winding up around an open eye in the centre.

In the following period, such spatial formations were to become a characteristic feature of elaborate Central European palace construction in Wittenberg, Torgau, Neuburg a. d. Donau or Heidelberg, among others.

The large northeast apartment was probably originally intended for high-ranking guests, but in the course of the 16th century the princes retreated there to a separate table during the main meals.

The small room of the Elector's apartment in Meissen is architecturally designed to be a real showpiece, offering multiple views across the Elbe valley in various directions.

In its position away from the hustle and bustle of the palace courtyard, it corresponds exactly to the advice of the influential Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) for the construction of such rooms.