Baroque garden
The Baroque garden was a style of garden based upon symmetry and the principle of imposing order on nature. The style originated in the late-16th century in Italy, in the gardens of the Vatican and the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in the gardens of the Villa d'Este in Tivoli, and then spread to France, where it became known as the jardin à la française or French formal garden. The grandest example is found in the Gardens of Versailles designed during the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV. In the 18th century, in imitation of Versailles, very ornate Baroque gardens were built in other parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria, Spain, and in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In the mid-18th century the style was replaced by the less geometric and more natural English landscape garden.
Characteristics
Baroque gardens were intended to illustrate the mastery of man over nature. They were often designed to be seen from above and from a little distance, usually from the salons or terraces of a château. They were laid out like rooms in a house, in geometric patterns, divided by gravel alleys or lanes, with the meeting points of the lanes often marked by fountains or statues. Flower beds were designed like tapestries, with bands of shrubbery and flowers forming the designs. Larger bushes and trees were sculpted into conical or dome-like shapes, and trees were grouped in bosquets, or orderly clusters. Water was usually present in the form of long rectangular ponds, aligned with the terraces of the house, or circular ponds with fountains. The gardens usually included one more small pavilion, where visitors could take shelter from the sun or rain.Over time, the style evolved, and became more natural. Grottoes and "secret gardens" enclosed by trees appeared, to illustrate the literary ideals of Arcadia and other popular stories of the time; these were usually placed in the outer corners of the garden, to give suitable places for quiet reading or conversation.
Origins in Italy
The ideas that inspired the Baroque garden, like those of Baroque architecture, first appeared in Italy in the late Renaissance. In the late 15th century, the architect, artist and writer Leon Battista Alberti proposed that the house and garden were both sanctuaries from the confusion of the outside world and that they both should be designed with architectural forms, geometric rooms, and corridors. In a very popular allegorical story, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili , one of the first printed novels, the Dominican priest and author Francesco Colonna described a garden composed of carefully designed ornamental flowerbeds and rows of trees shaped in geometric forms.The Cortile del Belvedere or courtyard of the Belvedere at the Vatican in Rome was one of the first gardens in Europe which adopted these geometric principles, and was a model for many later Baroque gardens. It was begun in 1506, constructed for Pope Julius II, in connected his residence on a nearby hillside with the Vatican. The garden was three hundred meters long, filled with orderly flower beds and gardens geometrically divided by alleys and hedges, with fountains at the intersections of the paths. It was finished in 1565 by Pirro Ligorio. The original garden was drastically modified by the later addition of the Vatican Library.
The same architect who completed the Cortile del Belvedere, Pirro Ligorio, was commissioned in the same year to design an even more ambitious garden, Villa d'Este, for Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este. This garden was designed on a steep hillside, which could be viewed from the Villa above. The garden was composed of five terraces, elaborately planted in geometric forms and connected with ramps and stairways. Like many Baroque gardens, it was best viewed from above and from a distance, to get the full effect.
This architectural form for gardens continued to dominate in Italy until the construction of Villa Borghese gardens in Rome by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1605. In this very large garden, the regular and geometric alleys, flowerbeds and groves of aligned trees were joined by other parts of the garden in asymmetrical forms, and by a number of "secret gardens", small sanctuaries of trees and flowers planted with flowers and fruit trees, and surrounded by rows of oak trees, laurel and cypress trees, and populated with birds and animals. This garden marked the beginning of the transition to the more natural landscape garden, based on the romantic vision of an imaginary Arcadia.
All of these gardens underwent extensive redesign in the 18th century, turning them into more natural-looking landscape gardens. Except in a few preserved paths and flower beds, it is difficult now to imagine them in their original state.
The ''Jardin à la française''
At the end of the 15th century, Charles VIII of France invited Italian architects and garden designers to France to create an Italian garden for his Château d'Amboise. In the 16th century, the development of the Baroque garden in France was accelerated by Henry IV of France and his Florentine wife, Marie de' Medici. Their first major project in the style was the garden of the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris. The new garden, on the bluff above the Seine, featured an extensive belvedere with ramps and stairways, scattered with an assortment of pavilions, grottoes, and theatres. Following the assassination of the King, his widow built a palace and a garden of her own, now called the Jardin du Luxembourg. She planted groves of full-grown trees and laid out parterres, alleys and fountains on the model of the gardens of her native Florence.The French Baroque garden reached its summit under Louis XIV, due to his garden designer, André Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre's first large-scale project was for Vaux-le-Vicomte, the château of the King's Superintendent of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet, built between 1656 and 1661. The central feature of this garden was a main axis descending from the château, composed of a series of terraces decorated with parterres of low hedges in ornamental designs. Large basins with jeux d'eau were placed along the central axis, and the garden was set between rows of trimmed trees on the left and right, to lead the eye on the long perspective to the last fountain and grotto below. The garden was meant to be seen from the château, which overlooked it like the box of a theater.
The young Louis XIV had Fouquet imprisoned for his extravagance, but greatly admired the garden he created. He commissioned Le Nôtre to design a similar, but vastly larger, garden, for his own projected Palace of Versailles.
The most famous Baroque gardens were the Gardens of Versailles created by Le Nôtre between 1662 and 1666. It was built around the original small square park of ninety-three hectares before the château started for Louis XIII by Jacques Boyceau in 1638. In 1662 following the model of Vaux-le-Vicomte, Le Nôtre made the park ten times larger, centered on a grand canal which reached to the horizon. The new park was divided into an elaborate grid of flowerbeds, paths, and alleys, decorated with fountains and sculptures. A third enlargement expanded the park by another six thousand five hundred hectares, including forests for hunting and several nearby villages, surrounded by a wall forty-three kilometres long with twenty-two gates.
The centrepiece of the garden was the Fountain of Apollo, the symbol of Louis XIV, the sun king himself, surrounded by a network of paths, basins, colonnades, theaters, and monuments. The King himself designed the route that visitors should follow, with twenty-five different mythological scenes, stations, and panoramas. The garden became an outdoor theatre for pageants, promenades, theatre performances, and fireworks shows. Its greatest deficiency was insufficient water for all of the fountains; only a few fountains could work at the same time; they were turned on only when the King was approaching them.
Between 1676 and 1686, Louis XIV built a smaller version of the Versailles gardens at the Château de Marly, located in a more tranquil valley, where he could escape from the crowds of Versailles. After his death in 1715, portions of the Gardens of Versailles were gradually modified to the new style of an English landscape garden, with trees untrimmed and planted in more natural groves, winding paths, and replicas of Greek temples and even a picturesque model village for the amusement of Marie Antoinette. The gardens of Versailles had many royal visitors, including Peter the Great of Russia, and many of its features were imitated in other European palace gardens.
Germany
The Baroque garden style was first introduced to Germany in 1614 by Frederick V of the Palatinate, who imported a French landscape architect, Salomon de Caus, and began building a garden called the Hortus Palatinus at his castle in Heidelberg. The hilltop location, overlooking the Rhine, limited the size and presented difficult terrain, but de Caus succeeded in building a series of parterres with concentric circles of greenery, a circular fountain, and a bosquet of laurel trees, ingeniously linked by stairways and ramps.The style soon appeared in at the castles of other German princes, including Herrenhausen in Hanover, built at the end of the 17th century. Its designer, Martin Charbonnier, was French, and he included the classic Versailles elements, including a central axis aligned with the castle, a circular pond at the far end of the axis, bouquets of trees, and "secret gardens", small gardens enclosed by trees, places for reading or quiet conversation, at the edges of the garden. He also borrowed some features of Dutch gardens, which he had visited in his research, including a canal surrounding the garden and wedge-shaped parterres surrounded by low hedges.
Another notable Baroque garden in Germany is the Schlosspark, Brühl, designed by Dominic Girard, who was a pupil of Le Nôtre at Versailles. Like Versailles, it features a central axis flanked by ornamental parterres and circular basins with fountains, all flanked by alleys and geometrically trimmed rows of the trees.
Other notable Baroque gardens in Germany include the Großer Garten in Dresden, Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe near Kassel, the garden of Weikersheim Castle, and the gardens of Nymphenburg Palace, which rivaled the Gardens of Versailles in size. The Baroque age in German gardens came to an end with the construction of the garden of Schwetzingen Palace, made in 1753–58 for the Elector Palatine Charles Theodore, by architect Nicolas de Pigage and gardener Johann Ludwig Petri. This garden was filled with artificial Roman ruins, a Chinese bridge, a mosque and other picturesque landmarks; it marked the debut of the romantic English landscape garden in Germany.