Inhalt:

Hermitage

Tour of the Old Palace

 

The original purpose of this building as a place of spiritual purification is reflected in the highly unusual approach to the palace. What is first seen from the original access road is a rough facade made of tuff stone, which looks more like part of a natural cliff face.

 

 

 

 

Instead of ascending a grand staircase, which would be the normal way of entering a palace, the visitor to the Old Hermitage Palace is obliged to descend into a gloomy corridor below the stairs. At the end of this dark corridor there is an abrupt transition into an interior of an entirely different kind.

The passage opens into the high domed central room of the grotto, the walls of which are covered entirely with slag glass. The mythical creatures made of shells – local river mussels – identify this unique interior as a grotto.

Here the prince’s guests were treated to an elaborate water display. The pipe system, which has largely been preserved in its original condition, enabled water to be sprayed with varying degrees of force from almost 200 jets hidden in the floor.

From the grotto a staircase leads up to the inner courtyard, which, following the comprehensive restoration of the Hermitage, now once again looks much as it did in Georg Wilhelm’s day. The interplay of contrasting architectural elements that was already evident on entry into the grotto is repeated in the courtyard. The three sides roughly clad with tuff stone, which echo the natural appearance of the exterior, contrast with the fine masonry of the Festival Hall on the short side of the courtyard.

 

 

 

The hermits’ retreat took place in the two side wings between the grotto and the Festival Hall, which were each fronted with a passage made of rough stone with a trellis roof. In each of the  wings there were four small hermits’ cells, consisting of a spartanly furnished living room with a stove and an anteroom.

After leaving the hermit rooms, the visitor enters the part of the palace which was altered substantially by Margravine Wilhelmine. Once the building passed into her possession, it lost its original function as a hermitage. Wilhelmine transformed it into a representative summer residence, retaining the Festival Hall, grotto and inner courtyard. In addition, from 1736 a pavilion with five rooms was added to each end of the original Festival Hall tract and the rooms between the Festival Hall and the extensions were fundamentally altered under her direction.

The apartments of the margrave and margravine were located in two wings opposite one another, as was usual for a Baroque palace. The rooms in the west wing of the palace, the so-called Gentlemen’s Wing, were reserved for the margrave. By contrast with Wilhelmine’s apartment in the east wing, the interior of these rooms was only partly completed. This was taken into account during restoration – and the original condition of the rooms was reconstructed on the basis of the old inventories and Wilhelmine’s memoirs.

The antechamber in the Gentlemen’s Wing originally had a textile wall covering painted with scenes from the life of Alexander the Great. This wall covering has not been preserved.

Today the walls are hung with blue protective coverings. This type of covering was used in Wilhelmine’s day when the apartment was not being lived in. A section from an engraving shows what the original painted wall covering was like. It depicts Alexander the Great pardoning the Indian king Poros.

The Audience Room which follows is the centre of the margravial apartment. The original ceiling painting by Wilhelm Ernst Wunder shows the Persian king Artaxerxes receiving Themistocles, the successful  Athenian commander, after his own countrymen have exiled him from his home city. The picture is typical of Wilhelmine’s selection of rarely portrayed themes from antiquity for the rooms of the Hermitage that she redesigned. Her preference is for themes revolving around exile – Wilhelmine considered herself to be in exile in provincial Bayreuth through her marriage.

 

 

The corner room, now presented as a cabinet in the neoclassical style of around 1800, has not been preserved as it was in Wilhelmine’s time.

The Garden Hall which follows was originally intended to serve as a porcelain cabinet. In 1759 its ceiling picture was replaced with stucco-work of exceptional artistry by Jean Baptiste Pedrozzi. With its park scenes and fountains and imaginative Chinese creatures, this ceiling is one of the best examples of stucco-work from the Rococo period.

 

 

An adjoining room, the walls of which were originally decorated with 900 engravings, leads into the margrave’s bedroom. In accordance with the function of the room as a bedroom, the decoration celebrates Zephyr, god of the west wind, which was associated with fertility. The bed and the precious material covering the walls have not been preserved.

The Marble Hall, the Festival Hall of the Old Palace, is the central room, located between the wings of the margrave and margravine. When the palace was redesigned under Wilhelmine the decor of this room was hardly altered at all, and dates back to the time when the palace was originally built. The walls are clad with local marble.

 

 

 

In accordance with the original function of the palace as a hermitage, the star of the Bayreuth palace order founded by Georg Wilhelm, the »Ordre de la Sincérité«, is the theme of the decoration. It appears as a pattern in the ceiling stucco-work, features in the four corner cartouches and is also worn by the Brandenburg eagles above the music galleries. The ceiling painting by Gabriel Schreyer shows the sun god Apollo as an allegory of absolute rule.

The references to Wilhelmine are much more numerous in her own rooms than in those of the margrave. Above the three doors of the antechamber in her apartment are cartouches bearing her initials SFW (Sophie Friederike Wilhelmine). The unusual black of the stucco marble and the silver of the stucco-work, as the heraldic colours of Prussia, are also a reference to Wilhelmine. The motif of the ceiling painting alludes to the virtuous sacrifice Wilhelmine claimed to have made. It shows the Roman women who for the good of the state – to prevent plundering –  voluntarily gave jewellery and money to the enemies.

 

Ceiling painting in the margravine’s Audience Room (detail)

 

 

The finest ceiling painting in the Hermitage has been preserved in the margravine’s Audience Room. The picture, featuring the story of Chelonis and Cleombrotos, also reflects Wilhelmine’s own fate: Chelonis follows her husband Cleombrotos, who has quarrelled with her father Leonidas, into exile – just as Wilhelmine married the Bayreuth margrave Friedrich at the wish of her father, and, as she saw it, thus accepted exile for the good of the state. Even more conclusive proof that this is a reference to Wilhelmine is provided by the depiction of her dog Folichon at Chelonis’s feet.

Wilhelmine was not however someone to give up in such a  situation. On the contrary, the margravine was determined to turn her Bayreuth court into an earthly paradise. This is evident in the next room, the Japanese Cabinet. The dramatic event depicted in the Audience Room is followed by oriental serenity.

 

 

The walls are clad with Asian lacquered panels, which portray all the aspects of the carefree life of a Chinese court, as Europeans envisaged it. The decoration was inspired by two original East Asian lacquered panels with shallow reliefs, which Frederick the Great had presented to his sister.

The extent to which the margravine – in accordance with the enlightened philosophy of the 18th century – identified with China as the idea of a well-ordered state governed on the basis of reason, is demonstrated by the ceiling picture in the Japanese Cabinet. The features of the empress of China enthroned beneath a baldachine are unmistakably those of Wilhelmine.

 

 

Wilhelmine’s Music Room is one of the most outstanding examples of a court Rococo interior. From antiquity to the Rococo era, music was the symbol of divine and cosmic harmony. The ceiling stucco-work introduces the overall theme of the room. It shows Orpheus, the mythical singer, who so enchants the wild animals with the music of his lyre that they lie down peacefully next to the beasts that are normally their prey. This theme is taken up by the decoration of the walls, which features a combination of stucco-work representations of various musical instruments and portraits of friends and confidants of the margravine. This is intended to show that an affinity for music leads to the highest form of human co-existence, true friendship.

The magnificent Chinese-style Mirror Cabinet is not actually part of the suite of state rooms. This intimate room is strikingly decorated with irregularly shaped mirrors of various sizes which cover the walls in random order – in complete contrast to traditional European taste – and suggest ruin and fragmentation. The irregular shapes are a metaphor for nature, which presents a contrast to the strictly ordered feudal sphere.

 

 

 

 

This important suite of rooms is followed by several simply furnished chambers, including the margravine’s writing cabinet and bedroom, and the tour ends with the kitchen, which has a working stove from the 19th century.