Schwetzingen - Schlösser-Magazin

The four-column Corinthian façade –
reflecting Minerva’s peaceful, civil functions
– responds to an Ancient Roman prototype,
the entrance to the Porticus Octaviae. 19 But
despite the classical feel to the white temple
with its canonical Corinthian elements, this
is a unique solution in the history of the type.
Designed for frontal effect, the temple has
a wider mean intercolumniation, offering a
view of the rear cella wall with the statue of
Minerva by Gabriel de Grupello reworked as
a devotional image. Pigage’s garden structure
may owe its genesis to the traditional
peripteral temple of Antiquity, but the
components have been inversed: the cella is
transformed into a spatial shell which opens
up to the natural world around it, and the
columns continue their pattern within. 20 By
ripping open the interior, it echoes Palladio’s
reconstructions of “Corinthian halls”. 21 The
cella is furnished with marble banks which,
like the “seats” in Dessau-Wörlitz, not only
provide a resting-place for visitors to the park,
but are also an imaginary place for the wise to
gather. The temple, then, is a cellar vault ruled
by Pan and expressing the irrational, and a
monument to reason which imposes order
and underlies human civilization.
The Temple of Forest Botany, conceived
in 1777, inaugurated in 1778, but only
completed in 1780, rounds off the Arboretum
Theodoricum, a real-life encyclopaedia of
woody plants and the earliest section of the
landscaped garden. 22 The rough-cast outer
skin of this cylindrical plinthed structure
resembles oak bark. Open steps with sphinxes
guarding their strings lead to the door. In
the rotunda, the round hole in the middle of
the floor leads to the dark cellar vault. The
temple programme is devoted to fertility,
19 Heber 1986, p. 567.
20 The fully circular columns may derive from Marc-Antoine
Laugier: Essai sur l’architecture, [1753] Paris 2 1755, pp. 9-12;
cf. Michael Hesse: Klassizismus als Auflösung des klassischen
Architekturkonzeptes, in: Modernität und Tradition. Festschrift
für Max Imdahl zum 60. Geburtstag. edited by Gottfried
Boehm, Karlheinz Stierle, Gundolf Winter. München 1985, pp.
105-124.
21 Palladio 1570, II, pp. 38-40.
22 Heber 1986, pp. 569-581; Fuchs/Reisinger 2001, pp. 156-160.
IV. Palace Gardens: Role and Significance
growth influenced by the year and the Zodiac,
and the process of ripening and dying away.
The four large fields of relief on the inner
walls symbolize the four seasons, each in
conjunction with an Ancient Greek tripod.
And yet this historically reflective depiction
of the natural rhythm is linked to the modern
natural sciences: medallions portraying the
Ancient authorities Theophrastus and Pliny
face those of contemporary researchers Joseph
Pitton de Tournefort and Carl von Linné
(Linnaeus). Linné’s revolutionary treatise on
the plant system replaced the lost attribute
of fertility goddess Ceres, whose devotional
statue stands in a niche opposite the entrance.
The rotunda, the dome with stepping at
the base, the portal frame crowned by a
triangular gable 23 and the coffered dome with
its central opaion admit association with a
Roman pantheon, for all the formal reduction
and abstraction. This prototype would have
been all the more obvious if the Ionic portico
originally proposed had been implemented:
the six capitals had already been paid for in
early 1778. 24
In summer 1779, on the northern edge of the
Schwetzingen gardens, work began on the
tuff ruins designed by Pigage which from
1828 began to be known as the Roman Water
23 After Sebastiano Serlio: Tutte l’opere d’architettura et
prospettiva. Venice 1618, I, p. 16v.
24 Heber 186, p. 569.
IV.
Fig. 5: Temple of Minerva,
southern angloise, Nicolas de
Pigage, 1767 – 1773 (Photo:
Förderer).
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