The ‘Hortus Palatinus’ at Heidelberg and the reformation of the World. Part I: The iconography of the garden

Abstract

Salomon de Gaus, architect and engineer, built a garden for the Palatine Elector, Frederick V, in Heidelberg; work on it stopped in 1620. In that year de Gaus published a book about the garden (figure I).1 It is an analysis of that publication as well as of its subject, the Hortus Palatinus, which forms the matter of this essay. Without the book, with its four pages of text and 30 plates, we would know practically nothing about the garden. The cessation of work on the garden, the writing of the treatise on the Hortus Palatinus and the departure of de Caus's patron for Bohemia all occurred in close proximity during the autumn of 1619. As de Caus himself points out, the garden was never completed because of the war in Bohemia, and in fact its destruction actually began as a result of the expansion of those hostilities into the Thirty Years War with the occupation of Heidelberg in 1622. Continual destruction occurred throughout the wars, as in many instances the new terraces had breached old fortifications and the Hortus Palatinus became the artillery field from which attacks on the castle were mounted.2 Nothing, however, appears to have been systematically demolished. Enough remained of the statuary and ornaments in the latter part of the 17th century to arouse comment from a French visitor, who remarked that only one fountain was still operational.3 Vandalism continued over the centuries (most viciously at the behest of Louis XIV), but 19th-century scholarship was nonetheless able to document the presence of uncultivated tulips of one of the original varieties developed and introduced by the 17th-century botanist Konrad Gesner. But the silence imposed by the Thirty Years War on late German humanism prevents us from knowing with historical certainty how specific, well known, or even commonplace the intentions behind this massive and costly work really were.

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