Neumann reached architecture through gunnery. Born in Eger in 1687, the seventh of nine children of a clothmaker, he was apprenticed to his godfather, a bell and metal founder, and from 1711 worked in a Würzburg foundry, qualifying as a master gunner. In 1712 he enlisted as a private in the Franconian Circle artillery, the only route by which a civilian could become an engineer. The prince-bishop appointed him building director in 1719, and from 1720 he ran the Würzburg Residence. That ballistic training shows: his churches are exercises in the geometry of intersecting ovals, vaults calculated rather than composed, at Gößweinstein, Neresheim and above all Vierzehnheiligen. He died in Würzburg in 1753, nineteen years before Vierzehnheiligen was consecrated.
