3. - Schlösser-Magazin

VI.
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VI. Interpretation of the Palace Gardens as a whole: Dr. Michael Niedermeier
inside – a room dedicated to natural history.
The famous Mercury of Thebes or Hermes
Trismegistos is seen here as the guardian of the
chemical wisdoms. 47 If the temple of Mercury
is considered in the light of the then-recent
history of the Electoral Palatinate, the reliefs
that have survived on the temple would allow
further associations. The relief showing Mercury
tying down Prometheus in the Caucuses, after
he had rebelled against Jupiter and the divine
order, might convey an allusion to the Prince
Elector’s major political opponent, Friedrich II
of Prussia, who had died in 1786. The second
relief depicts Mercury in the act of killing the
all-seeing Argos, whom Juno, the jealous wife,
has posted as a guard. Jupiter has transformed
the beautiful Io into a cow and wants to take
her as his lover. The third relief has not been
definitively identified up to the present, but it
might be possible to interpret it as follows: Io,
who has borne Jupiter his son, Epaphus, on the
river Nile, has escaped from Juno by fleeing to
Egypt, where she is worshipped as the goddess
Isis and her son as Apis, the original builder
of Memphis. Still being pursued by Juno, she
and her maidservant, Inyx, are trapped in an
impenetrable fog. Mercury frees them from
there “until they return to God and regain their
initial form and possible identity with God. Nat.
Com. l. VIII. c. 19”. 48 Jupiter is portrayed on the
relief as the eagle beholding his lover. His wife,
who is looking away from what is happening,
carries the peacock as her attribute and has put
the hundred eyes of the dead Argos on its tail
feathers. 49 Mercury’s explicit pointing gesture is
reminiscent of the pictorial motif of the “birth
of Bacchus”, as painted by Nicolas Poussin or
Peter Rysbrack, in which Mercury shows Semele,
Bacchus’s mother, who has remained in the
underworld, the way out of there and back to
Jupiter and Juno, who has been reconciled to
him. 50 The raising up of Jupiter’s lover, who
47 Op. cit., pp. 70f.
48 Benjamin Hederich: Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon.
Leipzig 1770, p. 1352.
49 Metamorphoses by Publius Ovidius Naso translated and
annotated for young people, art students and uneducated art
lovers by August Rode. Part 1, Berlin 1791, pp. *2 and 51ff.
50 Benjamin Hederich: Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon.
Leipzig 1770, pp. 2185ff
had been captured in the fog/underworld
by Mercury, the bearer of the dead, into the
spheres of eternal divine existence and love
might be interpreted as an allusion to the Prince
Elector and his departed mistress. Through this
allegorical comparison, Countess Maria Josepha
Heydeck, who died on 27 December 1771 as
a consequence of giving birth to their fourth
child, would enjoy eternal life, just like Jupiter’s
lover. Also, the son they had together, the Prince
Elector’s heir, the Imperial Prince Karl August of
Bretzenheim, would experience a higher “divine”
legitimisation, transcending death.
The extent to which allusions to the Egyptian
and Eleusinian mysteries had made their way
into the general contemporary sculptural and
architectural design of the gardens is shown
in a document published in Vienna in 1784
by the Habsburg chamber of court architects
and the imperial and royal sculptor, Johann
Wilhelm Beyer, with a title that translates as
“The new muse or the national garden”. In it, the
sculptures with Egyptian-style motifs, such as a
Harpocrates or a derelict circular temple of Isis,
appear side-by-side and on the same footing as a
Leda with the swan or Amour and Psyche. Just
like Carl Theodor and his gardener, Friedrich
Ludwig von Sckell, harmonious unity between
the baroque gardens and the irregular ones was
a heart-felt concern of those who designed and
equipped Schönbrunn. 51
The idea of building a new palace and starshaped
bundled avenues (“Jagdstern”) in the
middle of the space between two regularly
curved buildings, with its axes in line with
the avenue leading directly to Mannheim and
Heidelberg, was abandoned in 1750. Given
that Carl Theodor saw his territories in the
Lower Rhineland as under threat as a result
of Prussian power politics, he decided, as a
display of power in his own right, to build
Benrath Palace in Düsseldorf. So the old palace
in Schwetzingen was not replaced with a new
one, and in 1753 Carl Theodor ordered the
start of work on the newly designed circular
51 Wilhelm Beyer: Die neue Muse oder der Nationalgarten den
akademischen Gesellschaften vorgelegt. Vienna 1784, p. 14,
copper engraving 7