3. - Schlösser-Magazin

parterre, the “Schwetzingen compass” in
accordance with the garden plans by Johann
Petri. This was a completely new idea, and
everything else was given a lower priority.
This project was occasionally explained as a
logical further development of the abandoned
idea of a star-shaped hunting lodge and palace
and the axial constraints of reorienting the old
castle to serve as a summer residence. 52 Recent
research has found a basis for the belief that the
circular parterre with the intersecting axes in
the middle had been quite deliberately designed
and implemented: “The circular parterre is
unique in the whole world as an unrivalled
three-dimensional creation of baroque garden
art, whose shape and size can be considered as a
sign of utopian modernity. The spatial concept
for laying out the town takes the intersection
axes from inside the garden further and forms
the underlying system of coordinates for
designing the whole of the gardens, not just the
parterre. The market square, which was laid out
in 1748 completes the basic existing baroque
structure in Schwetzingen, but it is the circular
parterre that is its crowning glory”. 53 The circle
combined with the cross, which has made its
way into the basic pattern of Schwetzingen
Gardens corresponds in fact to Kircher’s
hieroglyphic monad, which is also reflected
in Mercury’s caduceus or Anubis’ key to the
Nile. Kircher saw this as a symbol of the divine
system of the world. The circle symbolises the
Ptolemaic universe with the trajectories of the
planets and the fixed stars, whereas the cross
symbolises the four elements. 54 At all events,
the shape of the circle or sphere was the Jesuits’
metaphor for the integration of the whole
universe; it was the expression of a manifestly
“closed” infinity and the universal order of
things. Through his combinatorics, Kircher
succeeded in uniting Islamic alchemy, Jewish
kabbalah, Persian magic, Chaldean astrology and
Zoroastic mysteries in the sense of “everything
52 Fuchs/Reisinger, p. 69
53 Troll, Förderer, Schmitt: Der Schlossgarten Schwetzingen.
Munich 2008, p. 28.
54 Joscelyn Godwin: Athanasius Kircher. Ein Mann der Renaissance
und die Suche nach verlorenem Wissen. Berlin 1994, p.
61; cf. also Leinkauf: Mundis cmbinatus, pp. 18ff, 28, 159, 184ff
and 211ff
VI. Interpretation of the Palace Gardens as a whole: Dr. Michael Niedermeier
in everything”. “The use originally intended
for the circular pavilions as orangeries helps
complete a full iconographic circle from the pure
utopia of its geometry to an iconography of the
Golden Age anchored in the garden. It is thus
correct to assume it to be a canonical allusion
to the history of the ideas concerning the
gardens themselves. In the mind of the cultured
visitor of the time, this would trigger memories
of examples such as the mythical island of
Cythera from Francesco Colonna’s seminal
work (1499) or the programmatic shape of the
botanical garden in Padua with references to
the cosmological allegory of the heavens, which
were already common in the middle ages.” 55 In
this respect, it is also possible to establish an
ideational link to the temple of Apollo. After all,
Mercury was the one who was prompted to start
playing music of his own after hearing Apollo
playing the lyre. Apollo had acquired the musical
instrument from Mercury in exchange for his
cattle and for teaching him the art of prophesy. 56
The spherical music, as can be experienced
in Apollo’s musical prowess, was the highest
expression of divine harmony – and Kircher was
of that view too. 57 A prominent feature on the
western side of the temple building is formed
by the numerous gilded allegories of the sun
incorporated in the railings, showing it to be a
temple to Apollo as the sun god. This is where
the gardens’ cosmological programme reaches
its zenith, after beginning in the bath house
with the ceiling painting of “Dawn (Aurora)
banishing the night” and reaching its conclusion
in the mosque, with the various moon and star
symbols.
The mosque built with two minarets in
Schwetzingen’s Turkish garden resembles the one
from Kew Gardens (built around 1763, but not
surviving). Apart from the fashionable nature of
these oriental-style garden structures, the carefully
selected Arabic inscriptions adorning the mosque
show that its builder harboured the ambitious
aim of “addressing an elite of the virtuous and
55 Hartmut Troll: Manuscript 2009, see section 3.c of the
Nomination
56 Benjamin Hederich: Gründliches mythologisches Lexikon.
Leipzig 1770, pp. 331ff
57 Leinkauf, Mundus combinatus, pp. 342-348
VI.
245