Beschreibung

The Prussian gardens in Berlin, Potsdam, and elsewhere in Brandenburg: for the first time, texts and photographs present an overall view of all the gardens and parks created under the Hohenzollerns over a period of more than three centuries. Only the cross-genre collaborative effort of garden designers, gardeners, architects, scenographers, sculptors, painters, and creative rulers, the most prominent of whom were Frederick II and Frederick William IV, made it possible ‘to turn the environs of Berlin and Potsdam […] step by step into a garden’, as Frederick William IV put it in 1840. Figures such as David Garmatter, Friedrich Christian Glume, Siméon Godeau, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Peter Joseph Lenné, Antoine Pesne, Prince Hermann von Pückler- Muskau, Georg Potente, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Sello brothers, and Antoine Watteau – picked from a whole cornucopia of names – indicate the spectrum of artistic forces that created the Prussian garden realm. Impatient with his royal client, who had once again cut his funding, Lenné alluded to the high standard of princely landscape art: ‘Your Majesty still does not understand how ingenious my idea is.’ The present volume is an attempt to examine the ‘ingeniousness of the idea’ specifically inherent in the gardens of the Hohenzollerns in Prussia. Until his retirement, Hillert Ibbeken was professor of geology at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has been involved in architecture and landscape photography throughout his life. His book Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Das architektonische Werk heute / The architectural work today, edited in cooperation with Elke Blauert, was published by Edition Axel Menges in 2001. Later there followed, in the same format, this time with him as sole editor, his monographs on Ludwig Persius (2005) and Friedrich August Stüler (2006), and, among others, Schlösser der Weserrenaissance / Castles of the Weser Renaissance (2008), edited in co-operation with Michael Bischoff, as well as Das andere Italien / The other Italy. Geschichten und Bilder aus Ligurien und Kalabrien / Stories and pictures from Liguria and Calabria (2011). Katja Schoene is an art historian and museologist. She was formerly on the staff of the National Trust in the landscape gardens at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, and of the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin- Brandenburg. As a freelance author she has written about Schloss Sanssouci, Friedrich August Stüler, and the ‘Pomeranian Curiosity Cabinet’.