Things Seen Inside the Freiburg Cathedral

The Cathedral at Freiburg (Münster in German) looks like a slightly smaller sister to the Strasbourg Cathedral. Freiburg's church is built of the same pink sandstone as Strasbourg's and many of the gothic details look the same. In fact, the two churches shared some of their architects and I'd bet money that they shared stone masons and carpenters as well.

On the inside, Freiburg's Cathedral has impressive art pieces, much more so that Strasbourg. I believe this is because the building never traded hands during the protestant reformation and, consequently, was never purged of it's idolatrous depictions of saints. (You can play with an interactive photo of the interior at this site.)

The intro picture is a woodcarving (almost lifesize) of the last supper. I could only get half of it in the camera's viewfinder and you need to double click on the picture to enlarge. This carving turned out to be the major topic of conversation for the Da Vinci Code readers. To the extreme left is Jesus at the center of the table. Immediately to His right is a figure with a clean face and long hair with head on His lap. Is this Saint John the Evangelist? Or Mary Magdalene? You be the judge.

The remaining pictures below are of the stained glass and statues. As you may have noticed from previous posts, I'm a sucker for stained glass. The Freiburg Cathedral has some really sharp colors...vivid reds and deep blues. The figures are also well-executed and are almost always dressed in the garb of the middle ages. Even the folks removing Jesus from the cross (first picture of stain glass, above) look more like German burghers from 1400 than they look like Israelites of 33 AD.In the last picture, note the scissors in the center window. I believe this is a symbol of the tailor's guild. Many of the windows bear such symbols - pretzels for the baker's guild and barrels for the wine makers.