History

The nearly 472-year gap between the Minster’s 1421 foundation stone and its 1893 tower completion represents one of the most extreme examples of interrupted cathedral construction anywhere in Europe, the Reformation’s 1528 halt freezing the tower in an unfinished state for over three and a half centuries before 19th-century civic and architectural ambition finally completed it in a self-consciously neo-Gothic style matching, as closely as contemporary builders judged appropriate, the original late Gothic design intention. This building history gives Bern Minster’s tower a genuinely composite character, its lower reaches authentically late medieval and its upper sections a deliberate 19th-century historicist completion of a centuries-old unfinished project.

The Last Judgment portal’s survival of Reformation-era iconoclasm, when Bern’s newly Protestant authorities systematically removed or destroyed religious imagery throughout the Minster’s interior, makes Erhart Küng’s 234 sandstone figures an exceptionally rare surviving body of pre-Reformation Swiss ecclesiastical sculpture — their preservation likely owing to the portal’s exterior, public-facing location and its function as a civic as much as purely devotional monument, factors that may have shielded it from the wave of interior iconoclastic destruction that swept the building’s inner decoration.