DOI article:
Artykuły i komunikaty
DOI article:Zarębska, Teresa: Wielkie osie urbanistyczne XVIII-wiecznej Warszawy a kreacje André Le Nôtre'a
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.49351#0096
90
Małgorzata Szafrańska
Andre Le Notre - Master of Illusion and Splendour
This article presents the basie artistic question of the
works of Andre Le Notre.
Genesis. Born in 1613, AndreLe Notre belonged
to a generation which had experienced violent
disturbances and a period imposing chaos on the
world view. Historians are in agreement that the
reaction and creating of a harmonious and elear,
unparallelled culture in 17th-century French
classicism was produced by Zeitgeist. The great
classicist, Le Notre, like any classicist, was not a
revolutionary. He was a genius of form which he gave
to the searches and discoveries of his predecessors.
Le Notre was a porte-parole of the so-called French
garden. This kind of garden had already begun to
crystallise in the 16th century. At the beginning of
the 17th century all elements of the new garden were
already known and applied with inereasing freąuency.
All that was needed was to combine these elements
into an inseparable whole and create out of them a
theoretical principle. In the first half of the 17th
century these objectives were simplified'by that
distinguished dynasty of gardeners, the Mollets,
working mainly on royal gardens. The author of the
most richly ill ustrated treatise on the new garden was
Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie.
Profession. Andre Le Notre, the son, and possibly
grandson, of a royal gardener, before he became the
‘first gardener’ of the king’s brother, Gaston
d’Orleans, studied painting at the studio of Simon
Vouet at the Louvre. There he befriended another
student, Charles Le Brun, who until his death was to
work with him in garden planning. Here, Le Notre
encountered representations of Italian gardens which
were to prove so important to his creative work.
Above all else, however, it was among painters that
his specific and new creative postulation took shape.
Until that point, the authors of gardens were architects
or gardeners. Le Notre, coming from a family whose
members and friends had been employed by kings
and princes in the superbest gardens of France, were
in the best case specialists in laying out parterres,
designers of floral decoration, arbours and cabinets
in boskets. Andre Le Notre was conscious of the
specific naturę of his metier. He was the first creator
of gardens that were genuinely shaped, both
artistically and from the point of view of gardening.
Great works. The occupational acti vity of Le
Notre began on a large scalę on 26th January 1637
when, as a young man of 24 following his father’s
resignation from the post, he was nominated as royal
gardener of the Tuileries. From then on he was
referred to in documents, preseiwed from 1645, as
the royal garden designer.
Le Notre redesigned the garden of the Tuileries
almost from scratch. The series of Renaissance
garden beds was transformed into a garden that
successively unfolded along the axis. It was here that
the creator’s love of endless garden axes of the
surrounding environs found an outlet.
The phenomenon of Le Notre expressed itself in
fuli for the first time in the residence of Nicolas
Fouquet, the superintendent for finance, at Vaux-le-
Yicomte (1655-61). However, his name came to be
symbolically attached to Yersailles. The garden at
Versailles was not the best work of Le Nótre’s at all.
The garden at Yersailles affects other spheres:
historical, political and court life. Those who do not
like gardens laid out in the French style point to its
rigidness, stiffness, monotony, sadness and
unnaturalness. With all certainty these traits do not
relate either to Yersailles or the other gardens of Le
Notre, which in their simplicity, freeness and spatial
vigour created from enormous lawns, woods and the
immeasurability of the skies above are enchanting.
Illusion. Le Notre was undoubtedly a master of
illusion. His accomplishments, among others the axis-
cum-avenue traversing gardens and disappearing into
the distance, went hand in hand with
contemporaneous French metaphysics, mathematics,
physics, optics, widely discussed not only in closed
circles of the learned, but also at the royal court and
in the salons. Le Nótre’s mastership in the sphere of
illusion also included the ingenious handling of the
terrain, elevating or lowering of garden beds,
narrowing or widening of avenues and closing of
hedge or tree rows in the depths of the perspective.
These were optical artifices, such as the the famous
Hundred Steps by the orangery at Yersailles. This
masterful handling of light reflected in the
Teflections’ of pools and canals, concentrated in the
water in distant, disappearing and fading perspectives.
Philosophers and academics were as equally
impassioned as the creators themselves by the
problems posed by the mechanical, automatic and
hydraulic systems introduced to water dry places in
such a superb manner. Descartes, a lover of gardens,
drew on analogies and comparative pictures from the
garden grottos, fountains and their mechanisms when
he wrote about the human body as a machinę
functioning by means of ‘pipes’; i.e. nerves. With
wonder John Locke analysed the hydraulic systems
seiwing the shimmering fountains at Yersailles. The
technical innovations on an equal level with artistic
intuition built an illusory reality in the gardens, the
world was deformed in accordance with the needs of
symbolic sense.
Małgorzata Szafrańska
Andre Le Notre - Master of Illusion and Splendour
This article presents the basie artistic question of the
works of Andre Le Notre.
Genesis. Born in 1613, AndreLe Notre belonged
to a generation which had experienced violent
disturbances and a period imposing chaos on the
world view. Historians are in agreement that the
reaction and creating of a harmonious and elear,
unparallelled culture in 17th-century French
classicism was produced by Zeitgeist. The great
classicist, Le Notre, like any classicist, was not a
revolutionary. He was a genius of form which he gave
to the searches and discoveries of his predecessors.
Le Notre was a porte-parole of the so-called French
garden. This kind of garden had already begun to
crystallise in the 16th century. At the beginning of
the 17th century all elements of the new garden were
already known and applied with inereasing freąuency.
All that was needed was to combine these elements
into an inseparable whole and create out of them a
theoretical principle. In the first half of the 17th
century these objectives were simplified'by that
distinguished dynasty of gardeners, the Mollets,
working mainly on royal gardens. The author of the
most richly ill ustrated treatise on the new garden was
Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie.
Profession. Andre Le Notre, the son, and possibly
grandson, of a royal gardener, before he became the
‘first gardener’ of the king’s brother, Gaston
d’Orleans, studied painting at the studio of Simon
Vouet at the Louvre. There he befriended another
student, Charles Le Brun, who until his death was to
work with him in garden planning. Here, Le Notre
encountered representations of Italian gardens which
were to prove so important to his creative work.
Above all else, however, it was among painters that
his specific and new creative postulation took shape.
Until that point, the authors of gardens were architects
or gardeners. Le Notre, coming from a family whose
members and friends had been employed by kings
and princes in the superbest gardens of France, were
in the best case specialists in laying out parterres,
designers of floral decoration, arbours and cabinets
in boskets. Andre Le Notre was conscious of the
specific naturę of his metier. He was the first creator
of gardens that were genuinely shaped, both
artistically and from the point of view of gardening.
Great works. The occupational acti vity of Le
Notre began on a large scalę on 26th January 1637
when, as a young man of 24 following his father’s
resignation from the post, he was nominated as royal
gardener of the Tuileries. From then on he was
referred to in documents, preseiwed from 1645, as
the royal garden designer.
Le Notre redesigned the garden of the Tuileries
almost from scratch. The series of Renaissance
garden beds was transformed into a garden that
successively unfolded along the axis. It was here that
the creator’s love of endless garden axes of the
surrounding environs found an outlet.
The phenomenon of Le Notre expressed itself in
fuli for the first time in the residence of Nicolas
Fouquet, the superintendent for finance, at Vaux-le-
Yicomte (1655-61). However, his name came to be
symbolically attached to Yersailles. The garden at
Versailles was not the best work of Le Nótre’s at all.
The garden at Yersailles affects other spheres:
historical, political and court life. Those who do not
like gardens laid out in the French style point to its
rigidness, stiffness, monotony, sadness and
unnaturalness. With all certainty these traits do not
relate either to Yersailles or the other gardens of Le
Notre, which in their simplicity, freeness and spatial
vigour created from enormous lawns, woods and the
immeasurability of the skies above are enchanting.
Illusion. Le Notre was undoubtedly a master of
illusion. His accomplishments, among others the axis-
cum-avenue traversing gardens and disappearing into
the distance, went hand in hand with
contemporaneous French metaphysics, mathematics,
physics, optics, widely discussed not only in closed
circles of the learned, but also at the royal court and
in the salons. Le Nótre’s mastership in the sphere of
illusion also included the ingenious handling of the
terrain, elevating or lowering of garden beds,
narrowing or widening of avenues and closing of
hedge or tree rows in the depths of the perspective.
These were optical artifices, such as the the famous
Hundred Steps by the orangery at Yersailles. This
masterful handling of light reflected in the
Teflections’ of pools and canals, concentrated in the
water in distant, disappearing and fading perspectives.
Philosophers and academics were as equally
impassioned as the creators themselves by the
problems posed by the mechanical, automatic and
hydraulic systems introduced to water dry places in
such a superb manner. Descartes, a lover of gardens,
drew on analogies and comparative pictures from the
garden grottos, fountains and their mechanisms when
he wrote about the human body as a machinę
functioning by means of ‘pipes’; i.e. nerves. With
wonder John Locke analysed the hydraulic systems
seiwing the shimmering fountains at Yersailles. The
technical innovations on an equal level with artistic
intuition built an illusory reality in the gardens, the
world was deformed in accordance with the needs of
symbolic sense.