3. - Schlösser-Magazin

However, archaeological activity was not
limited to the summer residence. In 1749
Carl Theodor decreed that all “antiquities and
other monumenta” discovered in his territory
were to be handed in to the authorities,
in exchange for a financial compensation.
The decree marks the beginning of state
archaeology in the Palatinate, and set
a precedent in the history of German
monument protection. In order to document
topographic and historic features as well
as antiquities, the Palatinate “Academy of
Sciences” drew up a questionnaire that was
sent out to all municipalities in 1771. This
compilation of an inventory could well be
called the precursor of the surveys undertaken
by today’s State Offices for Monument
Preservation, and with it the Palatinate court
had assumed a pioneering position in the
history of European monument preservation
(Hensen 2009).
The redefinition of the old-fashioned
as a valued tradition carrying historical
significance, the emphasis on continuity,
was also applied to the garden itself – it
shows in the deliberate, conceptually
justified preservation of the formal areas as a
legitimate layer in time.
In 1778 Carl Theodor moved his residence to
Munich. Despite the loss of its function as a
summer residence the garden was not merely
maintained; it was completed, magnificently
and larger even than originally planned. The
iconographic bias shifted somewhat. The
mosque, the largest of the park’s architectural
features, and the Mercury temple were built in
those years; they represent a newly syncretic,
coded idiom. It is almost as if the Electoral
Palatinate, on the point of becoming history
itself, was to stand as an enduring monument
to the past, surrounded by a near-mythic glow.
From this interpretation, backwards-looking
now, of a Golden Age of the Palatinate, arose
a strategy of protecting and preserving that
now encompassed the entire property, not
individual relics of history. It anticipated
modern attitudes to monument preservation
by aiming to keep the whole of the garden as
3. Justification for Inscription
a ”Churpfälz[isch]es Monument“ for posterity,
as Nicolas de Pigage had postulated in his
”Protocollum commissionale“ of 1795. This
early version of a management plan goes
well beyond expressing general respect in its
very concrete suggestions for maintenance
and preservation. The idea of preserving the
garden completed in Carl Theodor’s time as a
“beautiful memorial” (Sckell 1804) was carried
on by the authorities in charge; as a report
by the “Grand Ducal Garden Administration”
states in 1882, almost a hundred years after
the ”Protocollum Commissionale“: “If we
but look closely, we will see the laudable
endeavour to preserve this creation of an
earlier century, so rare in Germany, as best the
disposable means allow. The gardener’s task,
to preserve that which is there, is being solved
to the best of the existing possibilities.”
This interpretation of the Schwetzingen
garden as a monument, which started very
early, in fact shortly after the garden’s
completion, and the lasting preservation
strategy that arose from it, are unique among
European gardens.
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