3. - Schlösser-Magazin

3. layout
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3. Justification for Inscription
of a monumental Baroque garden
room; the bosquets contain within their
classically laid out wooded areas unusual
elements (“Quincunx” and “Evergreen Copse”),
a sophisticated variation on a theme created
by Nicolas de Pigage; and the landscaped areas
were developed from the very first garden
created by Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, which
was to prove style-forming for his work.
The contemporaneous expert public was
originally taken mostly with the garden
as a whole, blending as it does into a
harmoniously varied whole, a perfect work
of art (Leger, 1829), without stressing the
synthesis of the two great gardening styles
as particularly unusual, although what was
noted was the close succession of stylistic
peculiarities. To see the two styles that had
succeeded each other in the 18th-century
side by side could cause some irritation; it
was a unique occurrence in Germany, and
could be interpreted as an irresolute wavering
between the French and the English taste
(Count Platen-Hallermund 1815). At the
beginning of the 20th-century, however, the
focus was firmly on the element of opposites.
Schoch (1900) gives explicit praise to Sckell’s
achievement of “having connected the two
opposite areas by narrow strips deriving their
charm solely from the planting”, without
mixing styles. Sillib (1907) considers both
areas to be “characteristic monuments to
their style”; to him, the Schwetzingen palace
garden combines “wholly contrary styles
in a way barely to be found elsewhere; it
shows the changes in courtly art and culture
in the eighteenth-century in their abrupt
turn.” Finally, F. Hallbaum describes the
Schwetzingen palace garden in 1928 as the
“most perfect synthesis of the two gardening
styles“ in Germany. The appreciation awarded
both styles, and Sckell’s achievement in
particular, could not be taken for granted in
those years – the Landscape garden had fallen
out of favour with the expert public while
the formal garden was being rediscovered
in the general context of a historicist search
for national identity. As the very fact of the
preserved synthesis of gardening styles would
suggest, Schwetzingen again constitutes a
remarkable exception from the rule.
So it is that the palace garden, for the very
reason of its unusual and harmonious
combination of opposing, richly furnished
styles, always had a presence all its own.
The most eminent garden author of the
19th-century, the Englishman John Claudius
Loudon, writes about the Schwetzingen
gardens in his “Encyclopedia of Gardening”
that they ”are considered to be the most
delightful in Germany“. And Jean Charles
Krafft, the author of the highly respected
“Plans des plus beaux jardins pittoresques
de France d’Angleterre et de l’Allemagne“,
describes Schwetzingen as ”an ancient
residence of the Electors Palatine with a
garden considered the most splendid in
Germany, and not exceeded by many in
Europe”.
2. The palace garden contains outstanding and
highly individual artistic creations from every
one of its developmental stages.
- The “Circular parterre” constitutes a unique
accomplishment arising from a challenge
unusual in 18th-century European gardening:
to create a Baroque parterre, with its distinct
pull towards the distance, from the typically
serene, inward-looking circular shape. The
quarter-circle pavilions”, too, are unique
within late Baroque typology, with their single
storey, roof shape and the fact that they are
built on the same level as the garden – traits
that anticipate the development of the
orangery palace.
- The “Arborium theodoricum” is the first
work of Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, who
not only created one of the earliest south
German landscape gardens at Schwetzingen
but also introduced what was to be the most
distinctive element in a long gardening career,
the meadow vale. Inspired by English models
(Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s “Grecian Valley”
at Stowe) he developed his own scenic diction,
with a stronger modelling of the surface to
justify the curving walks. The Schwetzingen