Schwetzingen - Schlösser-Magazin

At the age of about twenty, Nicolas de Pigage
left Lunéville to embark on a military career
at the École Militaire in Paris. But he soon
abandoned his plans, and in 1744, he started
studying architecture at the Académie Royale
d’Architecture. The mathematician, physicist
and astronomer Abbé Charles Étienne Louis
Camus, known chiefly as a technician and
architectural theoretician, became his teacher.
Pigage’s work at Schwetzingen began when
Elector Carl Theodor appointed him director
of gardens and water features on 10th
February 1749. The intention at the time was
a complete architectural redesigning of both
residences, Mannheim and Schwetzingen,
on French models. Pigage submitted several
designs for a new palace at Schwetzingen;
for Mannheim the completion of the palace
was envisioned. There were plans for the
conversion and enlargement of several
other Palatine properties as well. Pigage
succeeded so well in his new position that,
on 18th February 1752, he was appointed
to the post of Oberbaudirektor (directorin-chief
of building) previously held by
Guillaume d’Hauberat, who had died in 1749.
Within two and a half months he then built
a theatre at Schwetzingen, which was used
for performances in the summer of the same
year. The second quarter-circle pavilion was
built, and now the garden’s east-west axis
had become irreversible. Pigage also supplied
the plans for the redesigning of the interior
rooms both at Schwetzingen and Mannheim,
and he wrote a report on the rebuilding of
Speyer Cathedral when his expert opinion was
asked. In 1756, Pigage became a member of
the electoral treasury and was put in charge
of another major building project, the palace
and garden of Benrath near Düsseldorf,
intended to be the Elector’s new summer
palace and built in the years 1755-1773. At
Schwetzingen he supervised the building of
the new orangery with its own garden, the
new extension to house the kitchens and the
Temple of Apollo with the natural theatre,
as well as the planting of the grand avenues.
VII. Appendices
In 1756, he was made garden director, and
pushed ahead with the extensions and
alterations to the Schwetzingen gardens. In
the autumn of 1767, Carl Theodor sent Pigage
on a study trip to Italy. In January 1768, he
became a member of the Academia di San
Luca at Rome, and in March that year he was
raised to the hereditary nobility by Emperor
Joseph II. Pigage had been a corresponding
member of the Paris academy since 1763; he
was now a member of the two outstanding
architectural academies of the 18th century.
At Schwetzingen the bathhouse was built
as a private retreat for the Elector, with a
magnificent interior. Pigage’s plans to extend
the garden to the south-west, which would
have meant a very considerable enlargement,
were abandoned for financial reasons with the
sole exception of the star avenue. On another
study trip, to England this time, Pigage, in
1776, met young Friedrick Ludwig Sckell
who was studying English garden art on the
instructions of Carl Theodor. The next year the
two of them cooperated on another extension
of the gardens at Schwetzingen, a landscaped
area with the Temple of Botany and the
Roman water tower, that became known as
VII.
Nicolas de Pigage
(1723-1796) (Stadtmuseum
Düsseldorf).
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