Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Knobelsdorff in 1738
Knobelsdorff in 1732

Georg Wenceslaus von Knobelsdorff (* 17th February 1699 on Good Kuckädel at Crossen an der Oder ; † 16th September 1753 in Berlin ) was first a soldier, then a portrait and landscape painter , theater intendant , landscapers and interior decorator , but first and foremost architect in Services of Frederick II of Prussia . He became one of the most important builders of the Frederician Rococo .

His personal relationship with the Crown Prince and later King was characterized by a harmonious, almost amicable beginning, increasing tensions and a halfway conciliatory end. In only about two decades he produced numerous designs for palaces, town houses, colonnades , obelisks , parks, etc., which had a strong influence on the appearance of the royal cities of Berlin and Potsdam . Much of it was changed or destroyed, some remained or could be restored.

Life and works

Military time and ways to art

Georg Wenzeslaus Knobelsdorff was born as the eldest son of Silesian noblemen on February 17, 1699 on the Kuckädel estate (now in Polish Kukadło) near Crossen on the Oder. His father Georg Sigismund von Knobelsdorff and his mother Ursula Barbara von Haugwitz had a total of five sons and three daughters. After the early death of his father, he grew up with his godfather, chief forest master Georg von Knobelsdorff. In keeping with family tradition, he began his professional career in the Prussian army. As a 16-year-old he participated in the campaign against King Charles XII. of Sweden and in 1715 participated in the siege of Stralsund , which belonged to Sweden. At the age of 29, meanwhile promoted to second lieutenant (according to other sources: captain or captain ), he ended his military service for health reasons.

As a soldier, he had further developed his artistic skills on an autodidactic basis. After he had quit military service, he trained in various painting techniques from the Prussian court painter Antoine Pesne - to whom he remained lifelong friendly. He acquired additional knowledge in geometry and anatomy . He saw his professional future in painting. His pictures and drawings have always been recognized, even when the focus of his work has long been elsewhere.

He came to architecture through a detour, namely through the representation of buildings in his pictures. The painterly perception of his architectural designs was noted several times later and evaluated differently. Heinrich Ludwig Manger, a master builder more a technician than an artist, wrote in his “Building History of Potsdam” in 1789 with a reproachful undertone that Knobelsdorff had “ only designed his buildings in a perspective and painstaking way ”, but praised his paintings. Frederick the Great, on the other hand, spoke appreciatively of the architect's " picturesque taste (gout pittoresque)" . Nor is there any evidence that the loose nature of the drawings was ever a serious obstacle to the execution of the constructions.

After a short training with the architects Kemmeter and von Wangenheim, Knobelsdorff acquired the necessary knowledge for his new profession , again mainly through self-study. “Cavalier architects” like him were nothing unusual in the 16th and 17th centuries and enjoyed professional and social esteem. They were formed through direct observation on extended journeys and through the study of copper engraving collections with views of classical and contemporary buildings. Knobelsdorff's role models, the Englishmen Inigo Jones (1573–1652) and William Kent (1684–1748) as well as the French Claude Perrault (1613–1688) also found their way to their profession in a roundabout way and were no longer young men when they turned to architecture .

Neuruppin and Rheinsberg

King Friedrich Wilhelm I (the soldier king ) became aware of Knobelsdorff and in 1732 delegated him to the environment of his son, Crown Prince Friedrich, later King Friedrich II (Friedrich the Great). After an unsuccessful escape attempt and imprisonment in Küstrin, his strict father had just given him a little more freedom of movement. Apparently, the king of Knobelsdorff, as a sensible, artistically gifted nobleman, expected himself to have a moderating influence on his son. (The reasons for Knobelsdorff's first meeting with Friedrich are presented differently in other sources; it is consistently dated to the year 1732.)

At that time, the Crown Prince, had at twenty to Colonel appointed a regiment in the garrison town of Neuruppin taken. Knobelsdorff became his interlocutor and advisor on questions of art and architecture. Immediately before the walls arose after their joint programming of Amalthea -Garten therein a monopteros , a small Apollotempel by antique example, since antiquity the first structure of this kind on the European continent and Knobelsdorffs first sample as an architect Frederick the Great. Music was played, philosophized and celebrated there, and even after the Crown Prince had moved to the nearby Rheinsberg Castle in 1736 , he frequently visited the temple garden during his stays as a commander in the Neuruppin garrison.

In 1736 Knobelsdorff received the opportunity to go on a study trip to Italy from the Crown Prince , which lasted until the spring of 1737. She led him u. a. to Rome , to the Naples area , to Florence and Venice . His impressions are recorded in a travel sketchbook with almost one hundred pencil sketches, but only for part of the trip: on the way back he broke his arm in a car accident between Rome and Florence. He could not carry out a secret assignment - the Italian opera singers he was supposed to bring to Rheinsberg could not be paid for with the available funds. " The local castrates hardly decide to go away, [...] the steady bread, even if they keep it in a poor state, are a matter of the watch that they get 100 Rthlr. prefer in Rome to foreign thousands. “Wrote Knobelsdorff to the Crown Prince. In autumn 1740, shortly after Friedrich took office, the king sent him on another study trip. In Paris he was really only impressed by the work of the architect Perrault - the facade of the Louvre and the garden front of the Palace of Versailles . In the field of painting, he named the pictures of Watteau , Poussin , Chardin and others. On the way back through Flanders he saw the paintings by van Dyck and Rubens .

Rheinsberg Castle with the small court of the Crown Prince became a place of cheerful community and artistic creativity - an alternative to the dry, dry Berlin court of the soldier king. Here Friedrich and Knobelsdorff discussed architecture and town planning and developed the first ideas for the extensive building program that was to be implemented after the Crown Prince ascended the throne. Knobelsdorff found his first major job as an architect in Rheinsberg. At that time the castle consisted of only one tower and one wing. In a painting from 1737 Knobelsdorff had depicted the situation before the renovation, seen from the opposite bank of the Grienericksee. After preliminary work by the master builder Kemmeter and in constant consultation with Friedrich Knobelsdorff gave the ensemble its current form. He added the second tower and the associated wing of the building and the colonnade that connects the two towers.

  • Draft for the Temple of Apollo in Neuruppin

  • View of Rheinsberg 1737. Painting by Knobelsdorff. Cutout.

  • Rheinsberg Castle around 1740

Forum Fridericianum

This facility had already been planned in Rheinsberg as a major building project for the beginning of the Frederician reign. The king wanted a new city palace for Berlin that could withstand comparison with the splendid residences of major European powers. Knobelsdorff designed an extensive complex with inner courtyards, a front courtyard and semicircular colonnades immediately north of Unter den Linden , in front of which a spacious square with two free-standing buildings - an opera house and a ball (game) house. Soon after Friedrich took office in May 1740, soil investigations and negotiations about the purchase and demolition of 54 houses that stood in the way of the project began. Already on August 19, 1740 all preparations were canceled again, allegedly the planned building site was not suitable. In truth, distant relatives of the king had refused to sell their palace, which was located in the middle of the planned Residenzplatz.

Frederick II tried to save the situation with hand-sketched changes to the site plan. When the First Silesian War (1740–1742) began shortly afterwards , the decision on the forum had to be postponed. However, King von Knobelsdorff demanded that the building of the opera house, today's State Opera Unter den Linden , begin during the war . Even after the end of the war, the forum's development stagnated. At the beginning of 1745 Friedrich's increased interest in Potsdam as the second residence became clear, the original plans faded into the background. The development of the square at the opera house, as it was then called (today: Bebelplatz ), developed in a different direction. Construction of St. Hedwig's Cathedral began in 1747 , the Prinz-Heinrich-Palais was built in 1748, and the Royal Library was built between 1775 and 1786 . The finished square hardly resembled the original plan, but was already highly praised by contemporaries and in this form also did the royal builder credit. The terms Forum Friedrichs, Friedrichsforum and Forum Fridericianum did not find their way into German specialist literature until the 19th century. Officially, they were never used for the place.

  • Knobelsdorff's plan sketch with the corrections of Friedrich II.

Opera house and St. Hedwig's Church

Knobelsdorff was involved in the construction of St. Hedwig's Church, it remains unclear to what extent. Friedrich II donated the finished building plans to the Catholic community in Berlin, which were probably largely inspired by himself and carried out by Knobelsdorff. The opera house, on the other hand, was designed by Knobelsdorff in its original form and is considered one of his main works. For the facade of the externally simply structured building, the architect based himself on two views from Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus , one of the most important collections of architectural engravings with works of English Palladianism . For the interior, he designed a series of three important rooms that had different functions, were on different levels and were equipped differently: Apollo hall, auditorium and stage. Thanks to technical precautions, they could be combined into a common ballroom. Knobelsdorff described the technical features in a Berlin newspaper, but also proudly remarked: "This theater is one of the longest and broadest in the world". In 1843 the house burned down to the ground. During the Second World War , it received heavy bomb hits several times. Each time, the reconstruction was based on Knobelsdorff's intentions, but there were also significant changes to both the facade and the interior. The opera house and Hedwig's church were included in architecture textbooks and manuals soon after their completion.

Zoo and dairy

Knobelsdorff had already designed gardens in the French style together with the Crown Prince in Neuruppin and Rheinsberg. On November 30, 1741, a decree was issued by the now King Friedrich II, who initiated the transformation of the Berlin zoo into the "Parc de Berlin". The letter stated that Baron Knobelsdorff had received precise instructions for this. The zoo, once the electoral hunting ground and severely neglected under Friedrich's father, was to be transformed into the public park and pleasure garden of the royal seat. In order to protect new plantings, it was initially prohibited to continue driving cattle onto the site with immediate effect. Friedrich's interest in the project could also be seen in a later decree, according to which it was forbidden to remove larger shrubs or trees without the express permission of the king.

As a prerequisite for the redesign of the zoo, large parts first had to be drained. Knobelsdorff often had the necessary drainage ditches given the shape of natural watercourses, a solution that was later praised by Friedrich II. The actual work began with the beautification of the existing main axis, the street that extended the street Unter den Linden through the zoo to Charlottenburg (today: Straße des 17. Juni ). The street was bordered with hedges, the " Big Star ", the confluence of eight avenues, decorated with 16 statues. To the south of it, Knobelsdorff had three so-called labyrinths (actually: mazes ) built on the model of famous French parks - partial areas with artistically intricate hedge paths . Particularly in the eastern part of the park, near the Brandenburg Gate , a dense network of often crossing paths was created, filled with numerous “salons” and “cabinets” - small squares that were furnished with benches and fountains. Knobelsdorff's successor, the Royal Planteur Justus Ehrenreich Sello, began to change the late Baroque grounds of his predecessor in line with the new, England-oriented ideal of a landscape park . Towards the end of the 18th century, apart from the main features of the path system, von Knobelsdorff's measures were hardly recognizable. The fact remains that he designed the first park in Germany that was open to the public from the start.

At the beginning of 1746 Knobelsdorff had bought an extensive property on the edge of the zoo at an auction. It was located between the Großer Stern and the Spree, roughly where Bellevue Palace stands today. The property included a mulberry plantation , meadows and arable land, vegetable patches and two dairy buildings . Knobelsdorff had a new main building erected, an outwardly unadorned garden house. The wall and ceiling paintings in several rooms were considered a gift from Antoine Pesne to his student and friend. In 1938 the house was demolished. Various biographers took the view that Knobelsdorff only used his property in the zoo to spend idyllic summer months there with his family every year. In truth, the dairy was farmed intensively as a fruit and vegetable garden and thus proved to be a useful investment. Knobelsdorff himself read books about the care of fruit trees and the cultivation of vegetables. One of these works ( L'Ecole du Jardin potager ) contained a system of different types of vegetables, classified according to their healing powers. Hence the assumption that Knobelsdorff expected the plants in his garden to alleviate his constant health problems.

  • The Berlin Zoo in 1765

Monbijou, Charlottenburg, Potsdam City Palace

The structural changes to these three castles were also part of the extensive program that Knobelsdorff tackled on behalf of Frederick II immediately after his accession to the throne or a few years later.

Monbijou Castle , created as a single-storey pavilion with gardens on the Spree, was the summer residence and, since 1740, the widow's seat of Queen Sophie Dorothee of Prussia, mother of Frederick the Great. With only five rooms and a gallery, the pavilion soon proved to be too small for the queen's need for representation. Under the direction of Knobelsdorff, the building was expanded in two phases between 1738 and 1742 to form an extensive symmetrical complex with side wings and smaller pavilions. Brightly colored surfaces, gilding, ornaments and sculptures should structure the elongated building. This version was lost as early as 1755. Until the castle was largely destroyed in World War II, the facade was white and smoothly plastered. The remains of the structure were completely removed in 1959/60.

Charlottenburg Palace was hardly used under Friedrich Wilhelm I. His son thought of taking up his residence there and had it enlarged by Knobelsdorff at the beginning of his reign. This is how the new part of the building, the New Wing or Knobelsdorff Wing, adjoining the castle to the east, was created. It contains two festive rooms famous for their furnishings. The White Hall, as the dining and throne room of Frederick the Great, with a ceiling painting by Pesne, makes an almost classical, austere impression. On the other hand, the Golden Gallery, with its extremely rich ornamentation and its green and gold color scheme, can be considered the epitome of the Frederician Rococo . The contrast between the two directly adjacent halls illustrates the range of Knobelsdorff's artistic forms of expression. The king's interest in Charlottenburg waned when he considered Potsdam as a second residence, had it built there and finally lived there too. The castle was badly destroyed in the Second World War and was largely reconstructed in great detail after 1945.

The Potsdam City Palace . The baroque building was completed in 1669. After the plans to build a new residence in Berlin were dashed, Frederick the Great had the Knobelsdorff Castle rebuilt between 1744 and 1752 and furnished with rich rococo-style interiors. His changes to the facade were aimed at giving the massive structure a lighter appearance. Pilasters and figures made of light sandstone standoutclearly from thered-colored plastered surfaces. Numerous decorative elements were added, the blue lacquered copper roofs crowned with ornate decorative chimneys. Many of these details were quickly lost and never updated. The structure suffered severe damage in the Second World War and was completely removed in 1959/60. According to a resolution by the Brandenburg State Parliament , the city palace was rebuilt, at least in its external form, by 2011. As early as 2002, a copy of a section, the so-called Fortunaportal , stood at a historical location.

  • Monbijou Castle 1739

  • Charlottenburg Palace: Knobelsdorff wing

  • Potsdam City Palace with Fortunaportal and obelisk

  • The reconstructed Fortuna portal in 2006

Sanssouci

On January 13, 1745, Frederick the Great ordered the construction of a " Lust House in Potsdam ". For this he had drawn very specific draft sketches, which he gave Knobelsdorff for execution. They envisaged a one-story, ground-level building on the vineyard terraces on the southern slope of the Bornstedter Heights in northwest Potsdam. Knobelsdorff objected to the concept, he wanted to raise the building with a basement, build a basement and move it forward to the edge of the terraces - otherwise it would appear sunk into the ground when viewed from the foot of the vineyard. Friedrich insisted on his ideas. Even by pointing out the increased likelihood of gout and colds, he could not be changed; later he experienced exactly this inconvenience and endured it without complaint.

The construction manager Friedrich Wilhelm Diterichs and the master builder Jan Bouman were responsible for realizing the designs . After only two years of construction, the Sanssouci Palace (" My Vineyard House", as the king called it) was inaugurated on May 1, 1747. Frederick the Great lived there from May to September, and spent the winter months in the Potsdam City Palace.

  • Sanssouci Palace with the large fountain

Decorative art

Evidence of Knobelsdorff's artistic versatility are his decorative designs for garden vases, mirror frames, furniture and carriages. Such activities culminated in the design of representative interiors, such as the auditorium of the Unter den Linden opera and the halls of Charlottenburg Palace. Decorative ornamentation was a significant category in European Rococo. Three French masters of this art, Antoine Watteau, Jules Aurele Meissonier and Jacques de La Joue, had created templates for it, which were widely used as copperplate engravings and etchings . Knobelsdorff was obviously particularly influenced by Watteau's work, whose motifs he adopted and varied for mirror and picture frames in Rheinsberg.

This influence proved to be decisive in the design of the Golden Gallery in the New Wing of the Charlottenburg Palace, a masterpiece of the Frederician Rococo , which was created between 1742 and 1746. It was destroyed in World War II and later restored. The lifelong nature-loving artist created an art space here that was supposed to quote and glorify nature. At the same time, the scenery of the real palace park was transferred into the room through mirrors. The hall is 42 meters long, the walls are clad with chrysoprase green stucco marble , ornaments, benches and consoles are gilded. Walls and ceilings are covered with ornamentation, which is based mainly on plant motifs. The principle of the ornamental grotesque Watteau - a frame of imaginative plant and architectural motifs enclosing a scene of trees and figures enjoying rural amusements - has obviously served as a stimulus in many cases.

  • Charlottenburg Palace, Golden Gallery. detail

The French Church in Potsdam

The French Church is a late work by Knobelsdorff. In 1752 he designed a small central building for the Huguenot community with echoes of the Roman pantheon . The execution was in the hands of Jan Boumann, whose skills as a master builder Knobelsdorff did not appreciate, but who had been preferred to him several times in recent years for orders. The church has an oval floor plan of about 15:20 meters and a free-swinging dome , which Karl Friedrich Schinkel still 80 years later described as statically very daring. The plain interior looked like an amphitheater thanks to a surrounding wooden gallery ; in accordance with the French Reformed order of worship, it was free of ecclesiastical ornamentation - there were no crosses, no baptismal fonts, no figurative decorations. On September 16, 1753, the anniversary of Knobelsdorff's death, Friedrich II gave the completed church to the Potsdam community.

In the 19th century, Schinkel changed the now damaged interior. The building had been erected on damp subsoil, so damage occurred in rapid succession, the church had to be closed for several years, but ultimately survived the Second World War undamaged. A last, extensive repair took place in the years 1990 to 2003.

  • The French Church in Potsdam

Sickness and death

In 1753 Knobelsdorff's longstanding liver disease became more noticeable. A trip to the Belgian spa spa brought no improvement. On September 7, 1753, only a few days before his death, Knobelsdorff wrote to the king “during a break in my pain”. He thanked him "for all the kindness and all the good deeds with which Your Majesty showered me during my life". At the same time he asked him to recognize his two daughters as legitimate heirs. That was problematic because the girls came from an inappropriate relationship. The long-time bachelor Knobelsdorff had entered into a partnership with the "bourgeois" Sophie Charlotte Schöne, daughter of the Charlottenburg sexton Schöne, in 1746 and thus aroused displeasure in court society. Frederick II complied with the terminally ill's request, but with the restriction that the title of nobility must not be inherited.

Knobelsdorff died on September 16, 1753. Two days later the Berlinische Nachrichten reported : “On the 16th of the current month, the very well-bored gentleman, Mr. George Wentzel, Freyherr von Knobelsdorff, sur-director of the Königl. All castles, houses and gardens, directeur en chef of all buildings in all the provinces, also secret finance, war and domain framework, after a protracted illness in the 53rd year of his glorious age, the temporal blessed ”. On September 18, the burial took place in the crypt of the German Cathedral on the Gendarmenmarkt . Four years later, his friend Antoine Pesne was buried next to him. When the church was rebuilt in 1881, the remains were moved to one of the cemeteries at Hallescher Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg ; the grave was marked by a marble tablet and a putto . This was either destroyed during a bombing raid in World War II or was lost during construction work to relocate Blücherstrasse. Today only an unadorned tombstone on a grave of the city of Berlin near the cemetery entrance to Zossener Straße reminds of the artist. The grave was dedicated to the city of Berlin as an honorary grave until 2014 .

  • Gravestone for Knobelsdorff and Pesne in Berlin

role models

As an architect, Knobelsdorff was strongly influenced by the buildings and architectural theoretical writings of Andrea Palladio . This important Italian master builder of the high renaissance published the authoritative work "Quattro libri dell'architettura" in 1570 with his own designs and numerous illustrations of ancient architecture. An architectural style was derived from Palladio's suggestions, which was widespread in the 17th century in Protestant and Anglican Northern Europe, especially in England. Unlike the contemporary Baroque with its moving silhouettes and concave-convex facade reliefs , the so-called Palladianism used classically simple and clear forms. Knobelsdorff felt obliged to this principle in almost all of his buildings, at least as far as the external form was concerned. The models were not simply copied by him, but transferred into his own formal language (only after his death did direct copies of foreign facades accumulate in Berlin and Potsdam). In a broader sense, he was already a representative of classicism, which in the narrower sense of the word only began in Prussia in the late 18th century and reached its climax in the early 19th century with Karl Friedrich Schinkel. In interior decoration, on the other hand, Knobelsdorff followed the mainstream of the time from the start and with his Frederician Rococo, which was trained on French models, provided excellent examples of late Baroque decorative art.

The art collection

Knobelsdorff was a dedicated art collector, a fact that was unknown until recently when old inventory lists were discovered. He left his friend, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Christoph Carl von Keith (1711–1756) an extensive collection of paintings and graphics for which there were few parallels in 18th century Berlin. The administrators of the estate counted and estimated 368 pictures worth around 5,400 Reichstalers and well over 1000 graphic sheets for 400 Reichstalers. It remains unclear how Knobelsdorff was able to acquire such a remarkable collection - there was no regulated art market in Berlin at that time, at most individual sales or estate auctions, which occasionally also included individual pictures. Presumably contacts to Amsterdam and Rotterdam were helpful, to the centers of the flourishing Dutch art trade. The main focus of the art collection was landscape painting, especially Dutch painting from the second half of the 17th century. Portrait art formed another important complex, plus some battle pictures, according to the taste of the time. Contemporary painters were hardly represented. There were 37 copies of Knobelsdorff's own pictures. Soon after the owner's death, the collection was torn apart and sold.

Knobelsdorff and Friedrich II.

Knobelsdorff's relationship with Friedrich II was a central theme in his life. A shared interest in art and architecture resulted in an almost amicable familiarity in Neuruppin and Rheinsberg. At Friedrich's instigation, Knobelsdorff was accepted into the Loge du Roi or Loge première , the very first Prussian Masonic lodge , in Rheinsberg Castle in 1739 . This almost constant personal closeness, the concentration on a few things that were important to both, naturally came to an end after the Crown Prince had ascended the throne as Frederick II in 1740 and had to prove himself in new areas such as warfare and state administration, which is why contacts were made established and maintained a much larger group of consultants and employees.

Since Friedrich knew the qualities of his Knobelsdorff and expected a lot from him, he immediately overwhelmed him with work, but also provided him with titles and honors and in 1741 assigned him a stately home in Leipziger Strasse as his official residence. He was given the overall supervision of all royal buildings, in addition he was director of the theater and music (until 1742). In addition to his actual work as an architect, he had to do administrative work and various other things, such as arranging fireworks in the Charlottenburg palace garden, designing opera decorations and looking after horse stables in Berlin. Although Knobelsdorff usually only provided plan sketches and view drawings and left the execution to experienced builders and technicians, the work occasionally grew over his head. The impatient king then reacted irritably. In 1742 he warned that I should work faster, “so that I don't have a cause to show my sensitivity and to make a change with the house that I gave you in Berlin as an apartment ... He doesn't do anything as I want it to be and is lazy like an artillery horse ”. Such differences were initially exceptional.

However, a fundamental contradiction existed from the beginning and gradually became more apparent. For Knobelsdorff, a serious artist, architecture and painting were the focus of his existence. Frederick the Great was keenly interested in both, had also acquired knowledge in them, but remained an outsider for whom the preoccupation with architecture could not be the main thing. On one occasion he compared his interest in it with a child's playful pleasure in his dolls. Both the king and his architect were indomitable, sometimes gruff characters. Different views on factual issues increasingly turned into personal tensions. After Knobelsdorff had very decidedly contradicted the king in the planning for Sanssouci Palace, he resigned in April 1746 - officially for health reasons - as responsible for the construction of the palace. In 1747, the accounts of the construction clerk Fincke, who had worked on large projects for years under Knobelsdorff's direction, found enormous disorder. Friedrich then wrote his architect a letter with the “expression of extreme displeasure” about the fact that he “no longer kept order and correctness”.

This was the beginning of a permanent alienation. Knobelsdorff continued to be entrusted with the most varied of construction tasks - he designed the deer colonnade and the Neptune Grotto for the Sanssouci Park , the Neustädter Tor in Potsdam, several town houses, the French church, the obelisk on the market and many other things - but remained with the royal court away for years. Attempting to get closer then ended in failure. The king ordered him to Potsdam in the summer of 1750, but was soon annoyed by a remark by the architect and instructed him to return to Berlin. Knobelsdorff set off immediately, but was overtaken halfway by a field hunter who asked him to turn around and return to the court. According to tradition, he replied: “The king himself ordered me to go to Berlin. I know too well whether I have to obey his or a field hunter's orders ”- and continued on his way. After that he never saw the king again.

Friedrich II apparently contributed his own draft sketches to all of the larger buildings in which Knobelsdorff was involved. The extent of his contributions cannot always be determined. Anyone who wants to judge his creative part must also take into account that the king's sketches can often have been the result of joint deliberations with his architect. At first, the young Crown Prince accepted the 13-year-old senior as his mentor in matters of art and architecture and followed his suggestions. Later he insisted more often on his own views on individual points and enforced them with the authority of his superior position. Basically, however, the artistic conceptions of the king coincided with those of Knobelsdorff throughout his life. After his death, for example, he had the theater and marble hall of the Potsdam City Palace, both designed by Knobelsdorff, rebuilt in the New Palais in Sanssouci - an indication that the last tensions that arose were not primarily based on artistic differences, but on personal sensitivities.

  • Sketch of Frederick the Great for Sanssouci Palace

  • The deer garden colonnade in the park of Sanssouci. Not received

  • The Neptune Grotto in Sanssouci Park. draft

Personal judgments

Jakob Friedrich von Bielfeld , who temporarily belonged to the Rheinsberg circle of the Crown Prince, wrote in 1739: “Herr von Knobelsdorff is a gentleman of serious demeanor and a somewhat sinister expression, solely of essential merit. His outward appearance is neither polite nor courtly; but he is no less worthy of admiration for that reason. I compare it to a beautiful oak, and you know it is not necessary that all trees in a garden should be arched as gracefully as in Marly's. If you wanted to portray the mind as a person, Herr von Knobelsdorff could provide the picture. His interaction is instructive and he has excellent dexterity in architecture, drawing and painting. [...] he paints the most beautiful landscapes one can imagine and meets the portraits of his best friends with an astonishing resemblance. "

Heinrich Ludwig Manger mentions Knobelsdorff in his “Building History of Potsdam” (1789/90). After listing 30 architectural works that were carried out in Potsdam alone based on his drawings, he also writes about Knobelsdorff as a painter, “regardless of the fact that it does not actually belong to any building history. - He drew a lot and everything from nature. He used every little thing that occurred to him that he thought he might need in the future, and wrote it down in his paperback, which had a special place in his dress. These drawings are free, light, and masterfully thrown in his own manner. […] The same can be said of his landscape paintings, because everything in them is based on nature and with a beautiful mixture of colors, without falling into hard or colorful. "

Frederick the Great wrote a commemorative speech (Éloge) in French on Knobelsdorff and had it read out on January 24, 1754 at the Academy of Sciences , of which the deceased had been an honorary member since 1742. In it he indicated the tensions that had arisen between the two of them in recent years, but above all showed his basically unchanged appreciation: “[...] Knobelsdorff earned general respect for his honest and honest character. He loved the truth and believed it didn't hurt anyone. He regarded courtesy as compulsion and fled everything that seemed to impair his freedom. You had to know him well to fully appreciate his merit. He promoted talent, loved artists and preferred to be searched for rather than pushing ahead. Above all, one must say to his praise: he never confused competition with envy, feelings that are very different […] ”(translation by Volz, 1913).

Important buildings - chronology

  • 1734 - Temple of Apollo in the Amaltheagarten in Neuruppin .
  • 1737 - Remodeling of the Rheinsberg Castle (until 1740).
  • 1740 - plans to rebuild the burned down town of Rheinsberg . Planning and construction of the Berlin Opera House (until 1743). Extension buildings for Monbijou Castle in Berlin (until 1742). New wing at Charlottenburg Palace (until 1742, interior until 1746).
  • 1741 - start of the redesign of the Berlin zoo .
  • 1744 - Work on the reconstruction of the City Palace in Potsdam (until 1752) and plans for the Sanssouci Park.
  • 1745 - Designs for the columned portal of the Sanssouci Park. Plans for the Sanssouci Palace (completed 1747).
  • 1748 - Plans to rebuild the Dessau Palace . Not executed.
  • 1749 - Drafts for the marble hall of the Potsdam City Palace.
  • 1750 - Completion of the "Kleistensitz" castle in Zützen (Golßen) (burned down in 1945)
  • 1751 - Drafts for the deer garden colonnade and for the Neptune grotto in the park of Sanssouci.
  • 1752 - Construction of the French Church in Potsdam.
  • 1753 - Drafts for the obelisk on the market in Potsdam and for the Neustädter Tor in Potsdam.

Appreciations

Postage stamp depicting Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff

On the occasion of his 275th birthday, the Deutsche Bundespost Berlin issued a special stamp in 1974.

An asteroid discovered in 1994 was named after him, see (29329) Knobelsdorff .

literature

  • Alfred Woltmann : The building history of Berlin up to the present, Chapter V: Frederick the Great and Knobelsdorff. Publishing house Gebrüder Paetel, Berlin 1872.
  • Hans Joachim Kadatz: Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff. Master builder Friedrich II . Munich 1983.
  • Tilo Eggeling, Ute-G. Weickardt (Ed.): Born to be a painter and a great architect. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, 1699–1753 . Exhibition catalog. Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg, 1999.
  • Wilhelm Kurth: “The classicism in the work of Knobelsdorff”, in: Deutsche Architektur Heft 5, 1953, pp. 212–217
  • Wilhelm von Knobelsdorff : Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff , Berlin, in December 1859, in: Wilhelm von Knobelsdorff history of the von Knobelsdorff family , pp. 239–330
  • Lionel von Donop :  Knobelsdorff, Georg Wenceslaus Freiherr von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1882, pp. 305-307.
  • Hans Reuther :  Knobelsdorff Georg Wenceslaus, from. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , pp. 191-193 ( digitized version ).

Web links

Commons : Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ bb-evangelisch.de ( Memento from July 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Tilo Eggeling, Ute-G. Weickardt (Ed.): Born to be a painter and a great architect. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, 1699–1753 , p. 15
  3. ↑ a b c d Martin Engel: The Forum Fridericianum in Berlin and the monumental residence places of the 18th century . (PDF) Diss. FU Berlin, 2001
  4. ↑ a b Helmut Koch: The King and his Architect . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 2, 1999, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 78 ( luise-berlin.de ).
  5. ↑ Martin Engel: The Knobelsdorff art collection . In: Tilo Eggeling, Ute-G. Weickardt (Ed.): Born to be a painter and a great architect. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, 1699–1753 . Pp. 150-163, 294-295.
  6. ^ Karlheinz Gerlach: The Freemasons in Old Prussia 1738–1806. The boxes between the middle Oder and the Lower Rhine . Part 1. Studienverlag, Innsbruck / Vienna / Bozen 2007, p. 25. ( digitized version )
  7. ^ Alfred Woltmann: The building history of Berlin up to the present . Gebrüder Paetel, Berlin 1872, p. 112
  8. ^ Tilo Eggeling, Ute-G. Weickardt (Ed.): Born to be a painter and a great architect. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, 1699–1753 . P. 8
personal data
SURNAME Knobelsdorff, Georg Wenzeslaus von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German builder, painter and architect in Prussia
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1699
PLACE OF BIRTH Kuckädel near Crossen on the Oder
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1753
Place of death Berlin