3. - Schlösser-Magazin

early as 1753 the “Salle de Comédie” in Lyon
was built, another theatre featuring open
balconies. The Schwetzingen Rococo theatre is
therefore the oldest surviving European court
theatre of the modern type.
The Bathhouse
The bathhouse in the Schwetzingen palace
gardens, built by Nicolas de Pigage for Elector
Carl Theodor between 1768 and 1772, is
unusual in several respects. On the one hand
it is a tiny pleasure palace in the tradition of
the French ”maison de plaisance“, on the other
hand it was at the same time designed to be a
private baths.
True to the type of the small pleasure palace,
the Schwetzingen bathhouse was built to
accommodate its owner and his personal
interests, and served as a refuge away from
courtly ceremonial and governmental
duties. Accordingly the little building is fully
furnished with all the rooms and amenities
necessary for actual living. Carl Theodor is
known to have used the bathhouse for smallscale
musical performances, among other
things, and in this he followed the example
set elsewhere in other pleasure palaces
built in Baroque gardens, the Petit Trianon
at Versailles among them. As regards its
building type and its small size, however, the
Schwetzingen bathhouse cannot be compared
to other pleasure palaces of this kind; in this it
is more comparable to Palladio’s villas.
The function, that determined the shape
the building was to take, was its intended
use as a baths – it should be noted that the
point of bathing there was not so much
personal hygiene but rather relaxation and
contemplation. Comparable courtly “bathing
pavilions” in Germany are the Badenburg
in the park of Nymphenburg Palace 79 and
the “marble baths” in the Karlsaue park in
Kassel 80 .
79 Ulrika Kiby: Die Exotismen des Kurfürsten Max Emanuel in
Nymphenburg. Hildesheim 1990, p. 134.
80 Jens Ludwig Burk: Marmorbad Kassel. Spätbarocker Pavillon
in der Karlsaue mit bedeutenden Skulpturen und Reliefs von
Pierre Etienne Monnot. Regensburg 2002.
3. Justification for Inscription
It is likely that the Badenburg served as a
model for the Schwetzingen bathhouse. Carl
Theodor and his architect, Nicolas de Pigage,
would have seen the structures in the park
during one of the Elector’s many stays with
his Wittelsbach relatives. The Badenburg
was built by Joseph Effner between 1718 and
1722, in the time of Elector Max Emanuel of
Bavaria. 81 It houses a reception hall, ballroom,
bedroom and Chinese cabinets as well as a
large bathroom with a “tub“ about 6 x 9 m in
size that would make a decent enough pool. 82 .
It is surmounted by a gallery supported by
large projecting consoles and paneled with
stucco marble in a conventional “ballroom“
style. The gallery not only reinterprets
the duality common to the architecture of
Baroque palaces – a lower, mundane level, the
Sala Terrena, and an upper domain reserved to
the nobility, the Piano Nobile – it also invites
watching. Exhibiting the bather to that degree
was not what was intended at Schwetzingen.
The basement housed two resting rooms or
“antechambers“ and two bathrooms, officially
called “cooling-down rooms”; they were
connected by a windowed ventilation corridor.
81 Gesche von Deessen: Die Badenburg im Park von Nymphenburg.
München 1986, p. 17sqq.
82 In his ground plan of 1772 François de Cuvilliés calls it a
„Bassin à nager“. See Deessen, loc cit p. 53.
3.
The Marmorbad at Kassel,
interior with the “bathing
temple” and a statue of Bacchus
on the balustrade.
105