Palace of Versailles

The Château de Versailles — often called the Court of Versailles, or simply Versailles — is a royal château, outside the gates of which the village of Versailles, France, has grown to become a full-fledged city.

The Would-Be Versailles

The most lasting monuments to the past glories of Versailles are not in France but in the other countries of continental Europe. When Louis XIV had Versailles constructed, France was the most powerful and the richest state on the continent. Versailles ignited a competitive spate of building palaces in fountain-filled gardens among the power elite of Europe, not all of them kings.

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In the small courts of Germany, echoes of Versailles sprang up, as ambitious as local funding permitted: at Bonn, Schloss Augustusburg, Brühl for the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, at Mannheim, at Ludwigsburg, at Schwetzingen near Heidelberg and at Karlsruhe; both the New Palace (Neues Palais) in Sanssouci Potsdam and the palace in formerly rural Charlottenburg near Berlin; Herrenhausen in Hanover; Neues Schloss Schleißheim near Munich; Schloss Nordkirchen near Coesfeld for the Archbishop of Münster, and the Residenz for the Archbishop of Würzburg.

Related Topics:
Bonn - Schloss Augustusburg, Brühl - Elector of Cologne - Mannheim - Ludwigsburg - Schwetzingen - Karlsruhe - Sanssouci - Potsdam - Palace - Charlottenburg - Herrenhausen - Munich - Coesfeld - Münster - Residenz - Würzburg

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One of the great German imitations of Versailles is the Wilhelmshöhe at Kassel, built in 1786 by Wilhelm IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.

Related Topics:
Wilhelmshöhe at Kassel - Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel

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In the north there was Drottningholm, Stockholm. To the east there were Schönbrunn in Vienna; Eszterháza in Hungary.

Related Topics:
Drottningholm - Schönbrunn - Eszterháza

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In Italy, the "would-be Versailles" include Caserta near Naples, (by Luigi Vanvitelli, from 1752 onwards), Colorno and Stupenigi outside Turin, which had begun as a hunting lodge as Versailles had.

Related Topics:
Caserta - Luigi Vanvitelli - Colorno - Stupenigi

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In the Iberian peninsula two competitors for Versailles stand out:, La Granja near Madrid, and Queluz in Portugal.

Related Topics:
La Granja - Queluz

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That the several "Polish Versailles" are aristocratic as well as royal is a sign of where true power lay where the great aristocrats elected their king. The royal version, Wilanów, begun in the late 17th century as the "New Villa" just south of Warsaw erected for Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, then, as Versailles was, extended in several building campaigns. Wilanow is symmetrically ranged round a cour d'honneur with two patterned parterres on stepped levels. Wilanow was inherited by a series of Polish aristocrats, and it inspired other great Polish magnates to imitation, as at Lazienki so that Italian and French architects and garden planners were drawn to Poland for employment.

Related Topics:
Wilanów - Jan Sobieski, King of Poland - Cour d'honneur - Parterre - Lazienki

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Wilanow had a rival in the aristocratic Branicki Palace in Bialystok.

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In England, even more than in Poland, the "would-be Versailles" tell of the final success of an aristocracy in curbing a monarchy. Royal palace projects of Late Stuart kings came to naught: Charles II envisaged a palace at Winchester that never left paper. St James's Palace in London remained a Tudor rabbit-warren. Renovations at Hampton Court for William III could not compare to an all-but-royal Chatsworth, and other Whig magnates built almost as grandly. The direct British answer to Versailles is Blenheim Palace, built as a national monument for Louis' nemesis, the Duke of Marlborough.

Related Topics:
Charles II - Winchester - Hampton Court - William III - Chatsworth - Blenheim Palace

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The grandest, most impressive effort was perhaps that made by Peter I of Russia. In addition to Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk, he had the Peterhof complex of buildings in gardens and parks built in the outskirts of Saint Petersburg (small illustration, right). The great palace of the complex is a spectacular building, set atop a hill above a cascade outdoing its model, Louis XIV's cascade at the Chateau of Marly.

Related Topics:
Peter I of Russia - Tsarskoe Selo - Pavlovsk - Peterhof - Saint Petersburg - Chateau of Marly

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The last shot in this war of sumptous architecture was probably fired by Ludwig II of Bavaria when he asked for a nearly identical copy of Versailles, Herrenchiemsee, to be built on an island on the bucolic Chiemsee lake in the countryside of Bavaria. His funds ran out too soon but the central portion was finished, along with its hall of mirrors, and formal French gardens were planted around it.

Related Topics:
Architecture - Ludwig II of Bavaria - Herrenchiemsee - Bavaria

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