3. - Schlösser-Magazin

VI. Interpretation of the Palace Gardens
as a whole
Schwetzingen Gardens
Veneration of the Memory and Symbol of the
Rule of the Palatine Electoral Family
I. Whatever form architecture may take,
it contains a shape to satisfy the technical
requirements expected of it, but, in addition to
that, it also offers a “reflection of the thinking
of the society responsible for its creation” 1 .
As of the sixteenth-century at the latest, the
semiotisation of architecture changed, given
the consciousness that the world was in a state
of upheaval. Interior design opened itself up to
the construction of political spaces, allowing it
to discover traditions and the representation
of power. The conquest of space in towns
was followed by the spread of the creation of
political spaces into the countryside, too. This
happened synchronously and on the same scale
to begin with, but later on became more and
more the predominant element. 2 This process
was full of tension, insofar as landscape and
garden design no longer derived its importance
solely from the function of representation and as
a repository for knowledge but also from being
the space into which utopian, cosmopolitan and
identity designs were projected – a function
which gardens always possess latently anyway.
In an awareness of discontinuities, the models
of garden spaces were used to reflect the
threat to memory and identity since the time
of the Renaissance, and especially so in the
eighteenth-century. The character of landscape
design and the perception of it as a storehouse
of knowledge and as the scene for a political
display underwent a change induced by
the constraint of time, which is tied in with
successive acts of passing through it and
contemplating it. The image of the maze, which
depicts life’s path as one of trial and error, on
the one hand, and as the correctly chosen path
leading to the acquisition of knowledge and
1 Wolfram Martini: Introduction. In: Architektur der Erinnerung.
Edited by Wolfram Martini. (SFB 434 Erinnerungskulturen,
Giessen University; Formen der Erinnerung, vol. 1, p. 9
2 Cf. Martin Warnke: Politische Landschaft. Zur Kunstgeschichte
der Natur. Munich 1992
virtue, on the other hand, is complemented by
the path of initiation, which the “apprentice of
superior wisdom” might manage to take with the
guidance of a visible or invisible “mystagogue”
in order to arrive at secret knowledge. The
tension between overt and covert political
display and arcane determination of the
meaning of a natural or divine order used to
mould the character of man-made landscapes as
memorial spaces up until the beginning of the
industrial age. Considering the point of view of
imagination and memory, which are rendered
tangible in garden and landscape spaces, the
artistic design of natural space progressed
from a generally marginal position amongst
the arts to one having the same value as the
others and even to one acting as a model for
the others. 3 The gardens of the seventeenth and
eighteenth-centuries can be explained in the
context of forces pulling in different directions,
such as reformation thinking, philosophy and
the formation of various political camps in
Europe, which is symbolically reflected in the
artistic layout and technical equipment of the
“garden considered as a holistic work of art”.
The construction of a Roman/antique and a
Nordic national identity led to a recoding of the
old building styles of Palladianism and Gothic
in garden art. 4 Starting in the first third of the
eighteenth-century in gardens in Britain and
in those in the northern and central parts of
Germany, gardens became increasingly identified
with Teutonic freedom, which was once again
hailed under the house of Hanover, whereas the
Second Palladian Revival by Burlington and his
circle was also used for the assertion of dynastic
continuity, such as between Elizabeth Stuart,
3 Cf. for example John Dixon Hunt: „Ut Pictura Poesis“: The
Garden and the Picturesque in England (1710-1750). In:
Monique Mosser, Georges Teyssot (ed.): The Architecture of
Western Gardens. Cambridge, Mass. 1991, pp. 231-242; Günther
Oesterle, Harald Tausch (ed.): Der imaginierte Garten. (Formen
der Erinnerung, vol. 9). Göttingen 2001; Richard Saage,
Eva-Maria Seng (ed.): Von der Geometrie zur Naturalisierung.
Utopisches Denken im 18. Jahrhundert zwischen literarischer
Fiktion und frühneuzeitlicher Gartenkunst (Hallesche Beiträge
zur Europäischen Aufklärung, vol. 10). Tübingen 1999. Michael
Niedermeier: Erinnerungslandschaft und Geheimwissen:
Inszenierte Memoria und politische Symbolik in der deutschen
Literatur und den anderen Künsten (1650-1850). Postdoctoral
thesis at TU Berlin 2007, pp. 6-18
4 G.B. Clarke: Ancient Taste and Gothic Virtue. Lord Cobham’s
Gardening Programme and its Iconography. In: Apollo 97,
1973, pp. 566-71
VI.
233