3. - Schlösser-Magazin

II. Report on the Garden Historical Importance
The World Status of the Electoral Residence
of Schwetzingen: Art Historical Report
As an art historian and a professional
involved in the care and preservation of
historic gardens the world status of the
Electoral residence of Schwetzingen appears
to me to be threefold.
1. Schwetzingen represents a unique
and uncommonly vivid example of the
fundamental shift in the manner Western
civilization perceived the relationship
between Art and Nature (embodied by the
garden, always an ideal representation of the
world) that occurred in 18th-century Europe.
2. The spatial layout of the palace and garden,
and of the palace and town, was realized in an
almost Utopian form. Considered against the
intellectual and social conditions of the time, a
transitional period between princely Baroque
and Romantic Enlightenment (here frequently
without definite and identifiable models) it is
also remarkably modern.
3. The manner in which the gardens that
define and inspire this princely residence are
cared for and maintained have been pointing
the way for historic garden conservation not
only in German-speaking parts but throughout
Europe.
The Relationship of Art and Nature:
Old Attitudes and New
From the later 17th-century onwards the
ruling princes of the German states modeled
their palaces and gardens on the one great
model, Versailles. The apotheosis of the Sun
King, Louis XIV, on the central axis of the
terraced gardens between his bedroom and
the Apollo fountain, required nothing less
than a resurrection of Classical times with
the aid of garden buildings, marble statues,
water features and parterres set with flowers;
the microcosm created in this manner could
then be contemplated and admired in the
Humanist tradition as a “terza natura” (a third
nature besides wild and agrarian nature, the
two types of nature distinguished by Cicero).
In a pre-Romantic garden natural phenomena
were harnessed for the greater glory of
the ruler in near-grammatical formula:
mythological statues represented “the”
elements, “the” seasons and so forth; basins
stood in for “the” sea; grottoes led visitors
down into the legendary underworld where
Art and Nature had become indistinguishable
in an Ovidian sense; shady arbours set with
singing birds or labyrinthine bosquets were
intended to be recognized as “the” forests of
Arcadia; terraces and stairs could be climbed
in lieu of “the” mountain of heaven. Historic
reality and mythological stories become one in
a Baroque garden.
Within this concept the “real” and visible
image of profane Nature did not play any part
in the geometrical, architecturally composed
garden layout. Everything was regular and
smooth as it had been in the depictions of
Paradise ever since the Middle Ages. In this
traditional spirit, but in keeping with his
times, the Elector Palatine, Carl Theodor, had
his new garden laid out from 1748 onwards.
Like the Sun King of France he aspired to
incorporate, and rule, the whole world in
his summer residence. Here, too, was an
opportunity, very much in the spirit of Rococo
and later Régence, to provide the ruler’s court
with the intimacy needed for the Ancient
Régime to celebrate its last parties. Confusing
bosquets and diagonally laid out avenues
provide the garden with a dynamic that had
been unknown to classical Baroque.
This central feature of the garden is a
magnificent creation by two leading artists
– Building Director Nicolas de Pigage and
Court Gardener Johann Ludwig Petri (many
other artists and craftsmen contributed to it
as well). The Lorraine gardens of the Polish
King Stanisław Leszczyński, since destroyed,
served as a model and a point of reference.
A layout comparable to Schwetzingen and
still in existence today is the bosquet area
of Schönbrunn in Vienna; it was restored
at about the same time as the Palatine
residence, in the 1740s and 1750s, by the
Lorraine colony of artists associated with
II.
185