3. - Schlösser-Magazin

II.
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II. Report on the Garden Historical Importance: Prof. Dr. Géza Hajós
Emperor Franz Stephan, the husband of
Empress Maria Theresia. But until the 1780s
the range of garden buildings and sculptures
at Schönbrunn was nowhere near as rich as
it was at Schwetzingen. Today, the gardens
of Schwetzingen are comparable only to
Versailles; their variety and complexity
regarding both iconography and content
would be hard to match, and still leaves a deep
and lasting impression on present-day visitors.
When the young gardener Friedrich Ludwig
Sckell returned from a three-year study trip
to France, England and the Netherlands in
1776, the views his employer the Elector
held on the relationship between Art and
Nature underwent a fundamental change.
From the end of the 17th-century the English
had introduced Parliamentarianism into the
political culture of their country, and Lord
Shaftesbury had developed a new view of
Nature that could no longer be kept from
the public. The country’s liberal world-view
opposed the French King’s tyrannical
Absolutism and derided his gardens with
their clipped hedges as a violation of nature.
Around 1720 Joseph Addison and Alexander
Pope had developed a new philosophy of
gardening – gardens should no longer be
dominated by geometrical order; instead
the picturesque principle of the landscape
painting should prevail, conveyed by
subjective mood. Irregularity (propagated
by the garden artists William Kent and
later Thomas Whately, as well as Lancelot
“Capability” Brown) and the meandering
path (William Hogarth defined the “line
of beauty” as a serpentine line), generally
the psychological effects of nature on
Man, and thus those of the artfully created
“Nature” of the parks too, were discovered
and examined (Henry Home). Around the
middle of the 18th-century these ideas were
general knowledge among the educated in
England; from around 1770 they had spread
to the Continent as well. The works of the
French authors of the Age of Enlightenment
that were popular reading in Germany, such
as Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloise,
inspired a desire in garden owners to “return
to Nature”. This no longer meant an encoded
recreation of the Golden Age in Ancient Greek
or Roman forms, as in the Baroque part of the
Schwetzingen gardens. It meant a tangible
discovering and aesthetic exploration of the
rustic landscape that had been rejected as
profane before, and contemplated from afar
at most. This landscape was to be enhanced
and presented like a painting, by means
of a new type of planting (clumps of trees
on undulating lawns) and artfully ruined
buildings (in order to encourage a mood of
gentle melancholy in considering the past).
Sckell was offered the opportunity to put
these ideas into practice, on a strip of land
immediately adjacent to the Baroque garden.
Nowhere in the world is it possible to
experience the confrontation of the two
attitudes towards Nature as directly and
immediately as at Schwetzingen. The Trianon
at Versailles may offer a similar situation,
but the Baroque gardens of Louis XIV and
Marie Antoinette’s landscape park are not
immediately adjacent to each other, and
artistically less in tune with each other than
the Baroque garden created by Petri and
Pigage and the landscape garden added by
Sckell – for which Pigage continued to create
buildings. The iconographic depth and the
intensity of the points made by the garden
buildings surpass the “English” garden of
Trianon; in Germany they are comparable to
Wörlitz alone.
The garden buildings of Schwetzingen also
reflect a fundamental shift in the historical
consciousness of the time, towards an
awareness of history in Winckelmann’s sense.
The Baroque age had seen ancient Greece and
Rome mainly as a Golden Age of mankind,
long past but perceived as an unchanging
phenomenon; there had been little interest
in the question of how Classical art and
architecture had developed. The eternal
validity of Classical antiquity produced ideal