Nicodemus Tessin the Elder: Architecture in Sweden in the Age of Greatness (Architectura Moderna) 9782503528267, 2503528260

Citation preview

NICODEMUS TESSIN

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ARCHITECTURA MODERNA Architectural Exchanges in Europe, 16th-17th Centuries

Vol.7

Series Editors: Krista De Jonge (Leuven) Piet Lombaerde (Antwerp)

Advisory Board: Howard Burns (Vicenza/Pisa) Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Princeton) Jean Guillaume (Paris) John Newman (London) Konrad Ottenheym (Utrecht) Ulrich Schütte (Marburg)

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NICODEMUS TESSIN ARCHITECTURE OF GREATNESS

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IN THE

AGE

Kristoffer Neville

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Cover illustration: Ållonö Manor, from Erik Dahlbergh, Suecia antiqua et hodierna (Stockholm, 1715), from a private collection.

© 2009, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2009/0095/102 ISBN 978-2-503-52826-7 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

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TABLE

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CONTENTS

Editor’s Preface Foreword Chapter I - New Prospects in Northern Europe

VII IX 1

Chapter II - Nicodemus Tessin the Elder. A Career in the Making

23

Chapter III - Architect to the Crown

61

Chapter IV - Architect to the Nobility

93

Chapter V - The Builder and the Draftsman

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Chapter VI - The Architect at Work and at Rest

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Chapter VII - Architectural Theory I: Adoption and Adaptation

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Chapter VIII - Architectural Theory II: Synthesis

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Conclusion - A Family Enterprise

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Appendices

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Index

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Bibliography

255

Abbreviations

273

Photo Credits

275

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EDITOR’S PREFACE

The series Architectura Moderna focuses on the phenomena of exchange which link together the architecture of Northern and Central Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at the heart of which stood the Low Countries. It particularly wants to bring the European “periphery” to the front; i.e. the architectural production of those lands which, primarily for reasons of geographical distance from the FrancoItalian “center” and because of accidents of historiography, do not belong to the canon of early modern buildings commonly found in surveys. The series editors thus hope to arrive at a more richly-crafted image of early modern European architecture as a cultural phenomenon. This study is a particularly apt addition to the collection which to date comprises six volumes. The historian of early modern architecture who addresses the broader European perspective (and beyond) inevitably has to face problems of influence and reception, center and periphery, spread and diffusion, tradition and innovation, and theories of cultural hegemony. Kristoffer Neville’s profound analysis of Nicodemus Tessin the Elder’s career and oeuvre in its wider ramifications comes to grips with all of the above. Born in Stralsund, Northern Germany, in a time of war, Tessin the Elder’s career spanned several pivotal decades in the development of modern, antiquity-based architecture in Sweden. The end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 indeed marked the beginning of the internationalisation of Sweden’s cultural scene through its court, part of which came by way of the Dutch Republic, an important hub in the cultural traffic of Northern Europe at the time. Tessin can rightly be compared to pioneering figures such as the architects Simon and Jean de la Vallée, the painter David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, and the sculptor Nicolaes Millich, who found patronage and even new careers in the North. The architect’s travels – partly funded by the Swedish royal house – took him across Europe to France and Italy. In his work he managed to weave together his manifold experiences with architecture from South to North, thus demonstrating the eclecticism which also informed the writings of noted contemporaries such as Leonhard Christoph Sturm. In this he tried to respond to the particular demands of his patrons, who had profited by the incessant wars of the early seventeenth century by integrating themselves into the European élite – an élite who actually read writings on art and who collected art works and antiquities. Tessin’s history cannot be separated from this particular milieu, which was also described – though from another perspective – in the second volume of this series, Badeloch Noldus’s study on Trade in Good Taste. Architectural Relations between the Dutch Republic and the Baltic in the Seventeenth Century (2005). On a European plane his architecture is truly modern, in the sense that it culls the best features from Roman church building, NorthItalian villa architecture, French hotels and palaces, German fashions and Dutch town houses to arrive at the best synthesis possible. Tessin the Elder was eclipsed by his son, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, in twentieth-century historiography, but it was the father who was lauded in early chronicles such as Joachim von Sandrart’s famous Teutsche Academie (1675) and André Félibien’s Lives of the Artists (German augmented edition by Marperger, 1711). The son’s name is also a byword in the European canon of the early eighteenth century, not least because of the fabulous drawings collection amassed on his travels, still conserved in Stockholm and recently studied. But the son trod in his father’s footsteps on all these counts, and one of the merits of Kristoffer Neville’s study lies in the careful unraveling of their

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conflated history. We hope that this book on the “forgotten Tessin” will prove to be a valuable addition to Swedish architectural history, too, quite apart from its considerable European appeal.

Krista De Jonge, Series Editor Catholic University of Leuven

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FOREWORD

Nicodemus Tessin the Elder has long been recognized as a major architect – perhaps the outstanding architect of his generation – in the kingdom in which he spent nearly his whole professional life. For various reasons, he has never received full recognition for his achievements, which are significant.1 He was among the best-travelled architects active anywhere in Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century, and brought this range of experience to a broad array of buildings for the crown, various municipal bodies, and many of the outstanding private individuals in Sweden in an age of tremendous growth and ambition. To some degree, Tessin’s work can be seen as a first attempt to digest the remarkable range of developments in European architecture up to the 1650s – a process that was continued and refined by the architects of the following generation, among whom his son, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, figures prominently. He may be equally significant for his determination to introduce a well-organized architectural practice, which allowed him to take on far more projects than his colleagues, both at home and at many other courts in northern Europe, and which brought a coherence and discipline to building that had previously been lacking in the kingdom. He can thus be considered the first truly professional architect in the kingdom, and a leading figure in this regard in a large swath of Europe. Although Tessin has not received the attention that he deserves, and has generally remained in the shadow of his son, he has long been recognized as an interesting and important figure. Over the last century there have been occasional articles and book chapters on his work, though Osvald Sirén’s book on the buildings in Stockholm, published in two volumes in 1911 and 1912, remains the only longer study. This book is intended to build substantially on this limited literature and to establish Tessin’s significance in the kingdom of Sweden and also, in a more general way, to show how his work is essentially related to architecture in Europe more generally. This project was initially conceived within two rather different contexts. The first was that of an academic exercise, a dissertation, submitted to the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 2007.2 The dissertation took a rather different form, ranging more widely from the work of Tessin the Elder to explore numerous other aspects of the culture of seventeenth-century Sweden within the broader context of the deep problems in the understanding of Germanic culture in this period. The second context for this text was a more thorough exploration of Tessin’s architecture than any available, intended as part of a project hosted by the Department of Art History at the University of Uppsala to document the life and work of this understudied figure. This project, which was to complement the extended research program on Tessin the Younger then nearing conclusion, never took root. A team of local scholars was to contribute essays on the various buildings associated with Tessin, while I was to provide a more synthetic overview and international perspective. With a few exceptions, these focused studies did not materialize.3 While I have dealt in some depth with a number of the structures, I have largely held myself to the original task. I have not 1

This is explained further in the conclusion. Kristoffer Neville, Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and Architecture in Sweden in the Age of the Thirty Years’ War (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2007). 3 The exceptions are Johan Eriksson and Peter Liljenstolpe, Sjöö slott. Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och 2

Johan Gabriel Stenbock som aktörer vid ett stormaktstida slottsbygge (Uppsala, 2001); and Torbjörn Fulton, “Det karolinska Strömsholm” Strömsholm slott, ed Rebekah Millhagen (Stockholm, 2005), 42–93, which appeared as part of a series of publications on the various royal palaces in Sweden.

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tried to provide comprehensive documentation for each building – an impossible task, given the breadth of Tessin’s activity and the state of research on many of the less-studied works. A handlist of his oeuvre as it currently appears is provided at the end, with suggestions for further reading, where possible. Because of the many gaps in the literature and my broader focus, this frequently required judgment calls that may be reversed with future discoveries. Because the anticipated accompanying publications have fallen away, this book now has another context: that of the Architectura Moderna series published by Brepols, which specializes in northern European architecture, and particularly that of the Low Countries. I have adopted the conventions of the series, most particularly the use the term “Low Countries” to refer to the northern and southern provinces (thus “southern Low Countries” refers to what is otherwise often called the “Spanish Netherlands”). The “Netherlands” refers only to the northern provinces, which became the Dutch Republic with the Peace of Münster in 1648. I have also generally used “Tessin” to refer to Tessin the Elder, while specifying more precisely where Tessin the Younger enters the discussion. *

*

*

Work on the project was funded by the Jacob Javits fellowship program of the U.S. Department of Education, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the AmericanScandinavian Foundation, the Academic Senate Research Funds of the University of California, Riverside, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, which permitted two years of concentrated study at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. As with any extended project, I have accumulated debts in many areas. The following have saved me much time and frustration by pointing me in the right direction on innumerable questions. My sincere thanks to (more or less in order of geography): Professor Allan Ellenius (†) and Dr Anna Nilsén, Uppsala; Drs Janis Kreslins, Martin Olin, Wolfgang Nittnaus, Lars Ljungström, and Nils Ahlberg, Stockholm; Dr Badeloch Noldus, Copenhagen; Professor Michael North, Greifswald; Martin Pozsgai, Berlin; Professor Konrad Ottenheym, Utrecht; Professor Krista De Jonge, Leuven, who read the whole manuscript with a very sharp eye and caught many problems that would otherwise have made it into to the final version; Professor Piet Lombaerde, Antwerp; Professor Claude Mignot, Paris; and Dr Friedrich Polleroß, Vienna. In the States, I have received excellent criticism from Professors Nicholas Adams and Jeffrey Chipps Smith. My deepest thanks, however, go to Professors John Pinto and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, who have been with this project since its inception, and who have seen it through. Finally, Pam Bromley has shown endless patience as this project developed. She has been a companion on many expeditions to see Tessin’s works, and has put up with endless conversations on him over the years, always with interest and humor. Perhaps in spite of herself, she has become something of an expert on the Tessins. My thanks to her for all of this and so much more.

Riverside, California March, 2009

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Map 1 – Sweden and the Baltic, 1560–1720.

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Map 2 – Major Projects in Stockholm Designed by or Associated with Nicodemus Tessin. 1 – Wrangel Palace 2 – Rosenhane Palace 3 – Caroline Burial Chapel 4 – State Bank 5 – Tessin House 6 – Fleming House 7 – Maria Magdalena Church (Alterations) 8 – Royal Stables 9 – Södermalm Courts 10 – Axel Sparre Palace 11 – Bonde Palace 12 – Bååt Palace 13 – Douglas House 14 – Stenbock Palace A – Project for the Royal Palace B – Project for the Town Hall C – Project for the Finnish Church D – Project for a Bourse E – Project for the de la Gardie Palace

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CHAPTER I NEW PROSPECTS

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NORTHERN EUROPE

In the summer of 1648, during the last days of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish troops took the Malá Strana, the small side of Prague. For two days without interruption the troops plundered the HradČany palace and the adjacent Belvedere, where the remains of Emperor Rudolf II’s famous collection were kept. Within days nearly all of the objects had been packed in crates and sent down the Elbe to Stockholm. Even though what Hans Christopher von Königsmarck’s troops found was only a portion of the former imperial collection, and some pieces were lost in transport, what arrived was nonetheless a fabulous treasure.1 The inventory made for Königsmarck in Prague listed 470 paintings, 69 bronze sculptures, 179 ivory objects, and much more. The inventory made after the troops left listed only empty frames, ruined paintings and a few other objects considered worthless. Forty Titians were supposed to be among the paintings, as were masterpieces by Veronese, Correggio, Adriaen de Vries, and Leone Leoni. Excellent works by Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein the Younger and others were taken from Munich in the 1630s, and all of these prizes joined a small royal collection accumulated in the sixteenth century.2 In 1620 the royal collection comprised a few paintings by Cranach and other northerners, and a handful of royal portraits by German and Netherlandish painters. In 1652 it was a growing collection of 780 pieces, many by great masters.3 It was only with the acquisition of the Munich and Prague collections that we find a sudden cosmopolitan awareness in the small northern court, and it was at this time that Queen Christina took a serious interest in collecting. By 1652 she had purchased 73 marble sculptures, most of them antique, to complement her pictures. Within a very short time, then, Stockholm had become a place where artworks of the highest quality could be seen and studied, and word of this spread quickly; in the 1650s the Barberini family in Rome wrote of the treasures in Stockholm.4 The court had acquired a cultural legitimacy impossible a century earlier, when King Gustaf Vasa, ever short of money, is supposed to have paid for a Madonna by the Haarlem painter Jan van Scorel with a ring, a sleigh (which never arrived), a chest of marten skins and a 200-pound cheese.5 A persistent myth has it that Christina impoverished the collections when she abdicated in 1654 and subsequently moved to Rome. In fact she took only about seventy pictures. Of these, about twenty-five were portraits of family members and her favorite intellectuals, and about forty-five pictures, mostly Venetian, came from the collection of Rudolf II.6 This accords perfectly with her own melancholy view of the treasure. It included 1

See Eliška Fučíková, “Das Schicksal der Sammlungen Rudolfs II. vor dem Hintergrund des Dreißigjährigen Krieges” 1648: Paix de Westphalie. L’art entre la guerre et la paix/Westfälischer Friede. Die Kunst zwischen Krieg und Friede, ed Jacques Thuillier and Klaus Bussmann (Paris, 1999), 273–293. 2 Görel Cavalli-Björkman, “La collection de la reine Christine à Stockholm” 1648: Paix de Westphalie. L’art entre la guerre et la paix/Westfälischer Friede. Die Kunst zwischen Krieg und Frieden, ed Jacques Thuillier and Klaus Bussmann (Paris, 1999), 295–317. 3 This figure is given by Olof Granberg, La galerie de tableaux de la reine Christine de Suède (Stockholm, 1897), 7.

4

Hans Erik Brummer, “Minerva of the North” Politics and Culture in the Age of Christina, ed Marie-Louise Rodén (Stockholm, 1997), 77–92. 5 This is recounted by Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, ed Hessel Miedema, vol 1 (Doornspijk, 1994), fol 236r–236v. 6 Per Bjurström, “Queen Christina and Contemporary Art” Docto Peregrino. Roman Studies in Honor of Torgil Magnuson, ed Thomas Hall et al. (Stockholm, 1992), 24; Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, “Königin Christina als Sammlerin und Mäzenatin” Christina Königin von Schweden, ed Ulrich Hermanns (Bramsche, 1997), 211–225.

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“an infinite number of items, but apart from 30 or 40 original Italians, I care nothing for any of the others. There are some by Alberto Dürer and other German masters whose names I do not know, and anyone else would think very highly of them, but I swear that I would give away the whole lot for a couple of Raphaels.”7 She also took two volumes of Italian master drawings assembled by the painter and writer Joachim von Sandrart and purchased through her agent in Amsterdam, a number of tapestries, the coin collections and a large portion of the library: about 3700 printed books and 2000 manuscripts. Of the almost 470 paintings from Prague, the booty from Munich and elsewhere, and important supplemental purchases of paintings and sculptures made throughout the later seventeenth century, a great deal remained in Stockholm. The naturalia collection, in which she apparently had little interest, remained intact, as did the significant collection of classical sculptures. Although the picture collections incurred some significant losses in Christina’s departure – nine Titians, eleven Veroneses and three Correggios are listed in a 1656 inventory of her post-abdication collection8 – the Stockholm collections were otherwise largely intact until the end of the seventeenth century. An Italian visitor to the palace in 1674 noted a room filled with pictures from Prague.9 The truly devastating losses came at the end of the century when fires ravaged the palaces in Stockholm (1697) and Uppsala (1702). The kingdom, locked in a war that would end its strong position in European affairs, could not easily replace them. Some pictures were given as gifts to foreign courts and local favorites, and thus escaped the fires. Christina gave Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve, now in the Prado, to Philip IV of Spain. Many other first-rate works went to court favorites in Stockholm and the generals who had seized the works, and could be seen in various collections in and around the city.10 Thus, early in the nineteenth century the imperial ambassador in Stockholm, Count Franz Lodron-Laterano, could buy bronze busts by Leone Leoni and Adriaen de Vries for the imperial collections in Vienna.11 Likewise, many of the works now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm were not inherited directly from the royal collections, but were acquired from

7 Quoted in Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters (New Haven, 1980), 97–98. 8 An inventory of the works Christina took with her was taken in Antwerp in May, 1656, which shows very clearly the limited scope of the works she took with her, particularly in comparison with the 1652 inventory taken in Stockholm. For the 1656 inventory, see J. Denucé, De Antwerpsche “konstkamers.” Inventarissen van kunstverzamelingen te Antwerpen in de 16e en 17e eeuwen (Antwerp, 1932), 176–192; for the 1652 inventory, see Olof Granberg, La galerie de tableaux de la reine Christine de Suède (Stockholm, 1897). 9 Lorenzo Magalotti, Relazioni di viaggio in Inghilterra Francia e Svezia [MS 1674] (Bari, 1968), 291. 10 StSA Rep 33, Nr 556a contains two nearly identical lists of paintings that could be seen in private collections in Stockholm after 1714, in which a number of paintings by the Prague court painters Bartholmäus Spranger, Hans von Aachen, and various other Netherlandish and Italian painters are listed. 11 Leoni’s 1555 bust of Charles V, de Vries’s 1603 bust of Rudolf II, and the same sculptor’s allegory of the campaign against the Turks in Hungary came

to Vienna through Lodron-Laterano’s 1803 purchase. For the Leoni, see Leo Planiscig, Die Bronzeplastiken. Statuetten, Reliefs, Gerätte und Plaketten (Vienna, 1924), 128; for the de Vries, see Frits Scholten, ed, Adriaen de Vries 1556–1626. Keizerlijk beeldhouwer (Amsterdam, 1998), 140–143, 159–161. Other works by de Vries noted in the 1652 Stockholm inventory later turned up in London and Windsor, and at least one of them (Rudolf II as protector of the arts, now in the royal collections at Windsor) was evidently in a Swedish aristocratic collection until the later eighteenth century. See Scholten, ed, Adriaen de Vries 1556–1626. Keizerlijk beeldhouwer (Amsterdam, 1998), 172–178. Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that paintings by Giulio Romano and Otto van Veen were among the works purchased by Lodron-Laterano, but no tenable candidates are to be found in the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, Princes and Artists. Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts 1517–1633 (New York, 1976), 157n19; cf. Martina Haja, ed, Die Gemäldegalerie des Kunsthistorischen Museums in Wien (Vienna, 1991), 101.

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private collectors between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.12 Even today, little-known but important works remain in private collections, among them a monumental Mercury by Giambologna.13 While the court’s riches were diminished substantially in the palace fire of 1697, there was still considerable artistic wealth in the city through the eighteenth century. Imported Talent in a New Place Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, around the same time that booty began to flow into the kingdom, hundreds of painters, sculptors, and masons/architects came to Sweden. This was far more than in the previous century, and they were generally more distinguished than their predecessors as well. It is true that many of these were craftsmen known only from ledger books, who had no distinctive artistic personality. A smaller number were significant artists who left a series of important monuments in the kingdom, however. Together, they made the court an important center of cultural production, which enriched the collections brought in from elsewhere. Sébastien Bourdon (1616–1671) was already an established master when he accepted an offer to become Christina’s court painter in 1652. He had been, with Charles Le Brun and a few others, a founding member of the French Académie in 1648. His popularity with the Parisian elite and ecclesiastical patrons gave him a fairly secure place in the French artistic sphere. The uncertainties of the time of the Fronde surely encouraged him to take Christina’s offer more seriously than he might have otherwise, but it is also fairly clear that he regarded a position in her court as a significant opportunity. André Félibien, the biographer of the French painters and a friend of Bourdon, wrote that the queen “drew around her from all parts of Europe men who were among the most excellent in the arts and sciences, who wished to work in that part of the north. [Her] reputation for loving beautiful things, and for being very free, brought many people of merit to seek their fortunes with her.”14 The queen’s general reputation as a cultural patron was clearly well known in France, but this was to be expected, as René Descartes had spent his last months in 1649–1650 in her court. Bourdon may have had other reasons for going north as well. Félibien noted that Bourdon had influential friends in Christina’s circle who would protect him and nurture his career there.15

12

See, e.g., the provenances given in Carl Nordenfalk, ed, Christina, Queen of Sweden. A Personality of European Civilization (Stockholm, 1966), 505–528. 13 Previously attributed to the young Adriaen de Vries by Lars Olof Larsson, this statue, possibly from Rudolf’s collection in Prague, was reattributed to Giambologna by Charles Avery, and recently accepted as such by Dorothea Diemer. It is now in the gardens at Rydboholm estate near Stockholm. See Lars Olof Larsson in the exhibition catalogue Bruegels tid. Nederländsk konst 1540–1620 (Stockholm, 1984), 35–36; Charles Avery, Giambologna. The Complete Sculpture (Oxford, 1987), 256; and Dorothea Diemer, “Giambologna in Germania” Giambologna. Gli dei, gli eroi, ed Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi and Dimitrios Zikos (Florence, 2006), 107–125. Three other works by Giambologna can also be traced to Stockholm collections in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, two of which are now in the Nationalmuseum: an equestrian bronzetto of Rudolf II; Neptune with a

Wind Putto (possibly by a follower); and a marble Psyche (or Bathsheba), in Sweden until 1981 but now in the J. Paul Getty Museum. See Avery, 154, 261, 168. For the provenance of the Getty piece, see Avery, “Giambologna’s ‘Bathsheba’: An Early Marble Statue Rediscovered” The Burlington Magazine 125 (1983): 328, 340–349. 14 André Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes [1685–1688], vol 4 (Trévoux, 1725), 243. “La Reine de Suede attiroit auprès d’elle de tous les endroits de l’Europe, ceux d’entre les excellens hommes dans les Sciences & dans les Arts, qui vouloient bien aller dans cette partie du Nord: & la réputation qu’elle avoit d’aimer les belles choses, & d’être fort liberale, porta plusieurs personnes de merite à chercher quelque fortune auprès d’elle.” 15 André Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes [1685–1688], vol 4 (Trévoux, 1725), 243.

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There was a distinguished group of French intellectuals in Stockholm, but Félibien may have referred more specifically to Raphaël Trichet Du Fresne, the keeper of Christina’s collections. Du Fresne was a competent amateur painter, and he and Bourdon probably knew each other in Rome in the 1630s, when they had been part of the French colony there.16 Bourdon stayed in Stockholm for only slightly over a year, but this short period is often regarded as the high point of a very successful career. Certainly it dominates both the early biographies by Félibien and Guillet de Saint-Georges and the first modern monograph.17 It is possible that it enhanced his reputation at home as well, for he was named Recteur of the Académie the year after his return to Paris. Christina has been so closely associated with French and Italian culture that it is often forgotten that she was deeply impressed with Netherlandish arts as well. Although Flemish painters in particular are often understood as substitutes for Italian painters in places where they were unavailable, this may not have been true in Christina’s case. She asked her agent, Michel Le Blon, to secure a good Netherlandish sculptor for her, and seems to have turned to the Romans Nicolas Cordier and Giuseppe Peroni only when he could not provide one.18 In April of 1648 she turned to Jacob Jordaens in Antwerp for a series of thirty-five large-scale canvases depicting the story of Psyche. These were originally intended for the hall of state in the castle at Uppsala, but the request for permission to export ten pictures in October of that year notes that they were for her apartment. Another seventeen pictures were shipped the following May, but the lack of further documentation makes it unclear whether the remaining eight were completed.19 David Beck from Delft (1621–1656) came to Stockholm around 1646, two years before the Jordaens commission.20 He was raised in Rotterdam and must have trained initially in the Low Countries, but he showed enough promise to study with van Dyck in London. His first biographer, the Delft chronicler Dirck van Bleyswijk, wrote in 1667 that he made such an impression on Charles I that the king had him teach painting to his sons, the future Charles II and the dukes of York and Gloucester.21 According to van Bleyswijk, the painter worked for the French and Danish courts after the fall of the Stuart monarchy, before arriving in Stockholm in 1646 or 1647. He seems to have painted only portraits during his stay in Sweden, which lasted until the end of 1651. He remained on the crown’s payroll even after leaving the kingdom, however, and it appears that Christina sent him off to paint portraits of

16 Charles Ponsonailhe, Sébastien Bourdon. Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1886), 45. 17 André Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes [1685–1688], vol 4 (Trévoux, 1725), 240–268. Guillet de Saint-Georges’s recollections are published in L Dussieux et al, Mémoires inédits sur la vie et les ouvrages des membres de l’académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, vol 1 (Paris, 1854), 87–103; Charles Ponsonailhe, Sébastien Bourdon. Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1886). This has survived to some degree in the modern literature, which is dominated by the catalogue of the exhibition held in Montpellier and Strasbourg in 2000. Michel Hilaire, for example, speaks of “le séjour glorieux en Suède.” Michel Hilaire, “Bourdon et Montpellier” Sébastien Bourdon 1616–1671, ed Jacques Thuillier (Paris, 2000), 92.

18

Karl Erik Steneberg, “Le Blon, Millich, and the Swedish Court ‘Parnassus’” Queen Christina of Sweden. Documents and Studies, ed Magnus von Platen (Stockholm, 1966), 343–344. For Le Blon, see Badeloch Noldus, “A Spider’s Web. Artist and Agent Michel le Blon (1587–1654) and His Network” Double Agents. Cultural and Political Brokerage in Early Modern Europe, ed Marika Keblusek and Badeloch Noldus (Leiden, 2008). 19 R-A d’Hulst, Jacob Jordaens (London, 1982), 29–30. 20 The basic source for Beck is Karl-Erik Steneberg, Kristinatidens måleri (Malmö, 1955), 129–154. 21 Dirck van Bleyswijk, Beschryvinge der Stadt Delft … (Delft, 1667), 854. Van Bleyswijk is best known for his comments on Rembrandt’s protégé, Carel Fabritius, which is comparable in length and character to the biography of Beck.

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NEW PROSPECTS “famous men,” which he sent to her periodically.22 He was still abroad when she abdicated, and evidently remained in her service in Italy. He was still in her entourage during a trip to France in 1655, and died the following year in Holland. Beck was a court painter in the model of Rubens and van Dyck, his teacher, both of whom died before Christina reached maturity. (He also represents the continuation of a line of Netherlandish painters who had worked in Stockholm from the mid-sixteenth century, though he was a much more significant artist than any of his predecessors.) He was greatly admired by his contemporaries, and was praised particularly by Netherlandish writers, among them the leading poet Joost van den Vondel, who wrote poems based on Beck’s portraits.23 As these poems were invariably ekphrastic exercises on portraits of Christina, her successor Carl X Gustaf, and other court figures, they could only tie Beck more closely to the court in the eyes of the broader public. This is without doubt how he wished to be seen, which hints at the prestige associated with a post in Christina’s court. The engraving in Jan Meyssens’s compendium of contemporary painters, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime (1649) and its derivative copy, Cornelis de Bie’s Het gulden cabinet van de edel vry schilder const (1661), show Beck in refined, courtly costume, standing in front of an easel with Christina’s portrait, fingering a golden chain given to him by the queen (figure 1).24 22

Jean Meyssens, Image de diverses hommes d’esprit sublime … (Antwerp, 1649), 18, contains the following inscription under the engraved portrait of Beck: “Peintre, et Valet, de Chambre de la Serenissime Reyne de Sweede, enuoié de Sa Ma: pour peindre les personnes Illustres de la Chrestienté. natif de Delft en Hollande.” As this information is included in the first edition, which apparently appeared before Beck departed in 1651, the trip must either have been projected when Meyssens sought his information, or added to later printings without changing the stated date of publication. We do not know exactly what the queen planned to do with these portraits – we cannot place them in the palace, for example – but we know that most of the pictures she took with her to Rome were portraits, many of them painted for her, rather than acquired as booty or purchase. The Renaissance tradition of decorating studies with portraits of writers and scholars comes inescapably to mind, however.

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1. David Beck, Engraved Portrait. From Cornelis de Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet, 1661.

23

E.g., Joost van den Vondel, Poëzy, of verscheide gedichten (Franeker, 1682), 207. For Beck generally, with specific emphasis on his work for Christina, see Karl Erik Steneberg, Kristinatidens måleri (Malmö, 1955), 129–155. For the relation between painting and poetry in the Netherlands, see Jan Emmens, Apelles en Apollo: Nederlandse gedichten op schilderijen in de 17de eeuw (Amsterdam, 1981). 24 Jean Meyssens, Image de divers hommes d’esprit sublime … (Antwerp, 1649), 18; Cornelis de Bie, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vry schilder const inhovdende den lof van de vermarste Schilders, Architecte’, Beldtho:wers, ende Plaetsnyders van dese eeuw (Amsterdam, 1661), 160–161. Although the print is not reproduced there, Sandrart also stressed the close connection to Christina – including the notion that he followed her to Italy – in the Teutsche Academie. Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, vol 1 (Nuremberg, 1675), 310–311.

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Van den Vondel wrote a number of poems on figures in the Swedish court, but his most intriguing statement may well be one that appears to be false. He believed that the sculptor Artus Quellinus (1609–1668) was among the Netherlanders active in Stockholm around 1645, a notion expressed clearly in one of his verses: Fortuin won Amsterdam in ‘t bouwen gunstigh zijn, Toen zy, ter goeder tijt, hier Fidias Quellijn, Van ‘t Schelt aen d’oevers van den Aemstel, nederzelte, Op dat hy zijn vernuft op ons cieraeden welte; Toen Koningin Christine, in ‘t bloejenst van haer tijt, Hem, als een perle, had haer kroone toegewijt.25 Although Quellinus’s whereabouts in the later 1640s are not well documented, it seems that he never went to Stockholm. These hints in verse may rather suggest that Christina particularly hoped to engage Quellinus through Le Blon, but could not offer the scale of work that was available in the Low Countries, particularly once he began work on the decoration of the Amsterdam town hall in 1648. Van den Vondel was not entirely wrong, however. From a 1649 letter by Le Blon, we learn that Quellinus sent clay models for statues of Apollo and nine muses to Stockholm, and this is confirmed in another poem by Jan Vos, in which Quellinus’s figures were sent to a living Minerva: Christina herself. Quillinus toont aan ‘t IJ de Zweedtsche Hofparnas. Hy schept Apollo met de nege zanggodessen Om over zee te gaan, naar ‘t koude Noorderas. Vraagt gy waar Pallas is met haar beroemde lessen? Men hoeft haar niet in ‘t Noordt: de Koningin Kristijn Zal op het nieuw Parnas de schrandre Pallas zyn.26 Christina was increasingly associated with the Greco-Roman goddess of wisdom and learning from the mid-1640s, and so this symbolic association suited her well.27 Christina imported massive quantities of marble from Amsterdam (at an inflated price, since there was great demand for the material in the decoration of the town hall there) and brought the sculptors Nicolas Cordier and Giuseppe Peroni to Stockholm from Rome, but this project was never carried out. Cordier remained until his death in 1667, but it is very unclear what he did during his sixteen years in the kingdom. The only work that has been tied to him with any certainty is a portrait-bust of Anna Regina Khevenhüller, the wife of Matthias Palbitzki, a Pomeranian courtier, diplomat and purchasing agent.28 We must assume that he produced a great deal more, which either has not turned up or which was destroyed. Peroni, a student of Alessandro 25

Joost van den Vondel, Poëzy, of verscheide gedichten (Franeker, 1682), 251. This volume contains a number of other poems on other figures in the Stockholm court. Drawing on van den Vondel’s poems, but perhaps also on his acquaintance with the Stockholm court painter David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Sandrart noted that there were many of Quellinus’s statues in England, Sweden and Denmark. “Von seinen Statuen sind viel in Engelland/Schweden/Dennemark/und anderwartshin zu denen Potentaten gesandt worden/ darum ihn billich der sinnreiche Voondel zu seinem großen Lob den heutigen Phidias benamset.” He seems to have understood – correctly – that Quellinus sent works north without himself going. This however did not trouble him, and the connection is instead used to show the good taste of both Quellinus and

the court. Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, vol 1 (Nuremberg, 1675), 351. 26 Quoted from Karl Erik Steneberg, “Le Blon, Millich and the Swedish Court ‘Parnassus’” Queen Christina of Sweden. Documents and Studies, ed Magnus von Platen (Stockholm, 1966), 332–364, where there is also important commentary. 27 See Jochen Becker, “’Deas supereminet omneis’: zu Vondels Gedichten auf Christina von Schweden und der bildenden Kunst” Simiolus 6 (1972–1973): 177– 208 for Christina’s iconography and its literary basis. 28 Görel Cavalli-Björkman, “Christina Portraits” Politics and Culture in the Age of Christina, ed MarieLouise Rodén (Stockholm, 1997), 93–105. The statue is in the Södermanlands länsmuseum in Nyköping.

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Algardi, is rather better known, though still mysterious. Most of the early information comes from a chapter devoted to him in Giambattista Passeri’s Vitè de’ pittori scultori ed architetti.29 Passeri attributes several works to him, but his text is generally unenlightening.30 He notes that Christina’s court was the subject of a great interest in Italy, but that Peroni was ultimately unhappy there and returned to Rome after a short time. He made a bust of the queen, but the Minerva and the Muses remained unexecuted. Quellinus’s models, or bozzetti, likely remained in the royal palace until the devastating fire of 1697. They were thus available as models when the Flemish sculptor Nicolaes Millich (ca 1630-after 1687) arrived in Stockholm in 1669 (perhaps as a replacement for the recently deceased Cordier) and in effect continued Quellinus’s project in a somewhat different context. The intended setting of the first Parnassus project is unknown, but Millich’s statues were made for the central staircase of Drottningholm palace, designed by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and built for Dowager Queen Hedwig Eleonora (1636–1715). The Parnassus project thus represents the continuation of the cultural milieu established by Christina into the following generation. It was transformed by a different set of patrons, artists, and interests, but was no less significant. David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl Many relatively high-profile artists were engaged in one way or another by the court from the middle of the seventeenth century. Many of these, such as Quellinus and Jordaens, took on isolated projects in their studios. Bourdon and Beck held court posts, but only for a limited time. Another group of outsiders saw Stockholm as the best opportunity for a longterm career. David Klöcker (1628–1698), a painter ennobled with the name Ehrenstrahl in 1674, illustrates brilliantly the driving careerism evident in so many of those who went to Sweden, for every major step he took appears to have been carefully calculated to advance his position. He was born into a tailor’s family in Hamburg, which suffered relatively little in the Thirty Years’ War. Thanks to exceptionally strong fortifications, the Hansa city was never taken, and the fabric of the city survived intact. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hamburg was the largest and the richest of the Hansa cities. (Although the Hansa is usually considered a late-medieval consortium, its last meeting was held in 1669.) Although the cultural and artistic life may have been dampened during the war, it was not shattered as it was elsewhere in the Empire. Rather, Hamburg was a bourgeois trade town, wealthy, but with an unremarkable artistic tradition. Painting never flourished there as it did in nearby Amsterdam. The influence of the Netherlandish classical architects – particularly the Amsterdam-based Philips Vingboons – could be seen in some imposing and high-quality residences, but there were few of these.31 Nor did the city have a reputation as a desirable place for artists and architects to work; Leonhard Christoph Sturm, the leading German architectural theorist of the early eighteenth century, wrote that he would sooner work for Hottentots than in Hamburg.32 29

Giovanni Battista Passeri, Vitè de’ pittori scultori ed architetti che anno lavorato in roma morti dal 1641 fino al 1673 [MS 1679; first published 1722] (Rome, 1772), 339–340. 30 Passeri attributes the figure of Liberality on the tomb of Pope Leo XI from the early 1640s, but this is disputed by Filippo Baldinucci, in which case the known oeuvre of Peroni is reduced to a life-sized St Eugenia in SS Apostoli, two stucco reliefs in Sta Maria del Popolo and likely the relief medallion of Ghino Spada in the Spada chapel of S Girolamo della Carità, all in Rome. See Jennifer Montagu, Alessandro Algardi, vol 1 (New Haven, 1985), 48 and 218.

31

For architecture in Hamburg in the seventeenth century, see Hermann Heckmann, Barock und Rokoko in Hamburg. Baukunst des Bürgertums (Stuttgart, 1990). For the reception of classicism there, see Jörgen Bracker, “Renaissance und Palladianismus in Hamburg und Norddeutschland” Palladio. Bauen nach der Natur - Die Erbern Palladios in Nordeuropa, ed Jörgen Bracker (Ostfildern, 1997), 147–169. 32 Cited in Hermann Heckmann, Baumeister des Barock und Rokoko in Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Lübeck, Hamburg (Berlin, 2000), 316. For Sturm in Hamburg, see Hermann Heckmann, Barock und Rokoko in Hamburg. Baukunst des Bürgertums (Stuttgart, 1990), 93–95.

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While some well-known architects, including Hans Vredeman de Vries and Charle Philippe Dieussart, passed through the city, none settled there for any significant period. Its painting tradition was likewise limited to an increasingly antiquated guild system. The opportunities for an ambitious young painter were therefore severely limited. There were few opportunities to distinguish oneself, and few opportunities for reward. Ehrenstrahl was not content to work within these constraints. Rather, he studied in Amsterdam with the animal painter Juriaen Jacobsz, who was himself born in Hamburg, and then returned to Germany to seek his fortune. The defining moment in Ehrenstrahl’s career was his attachment to the retinue of field marshal Carl Gustaf Wrangel. Wrangel was the last of the great Swedish generals of the Thirty Years’ War and commander of all troops in Germany at its end. He, more than any of his predecessors, was therefore in a position to profit from the spoils of war. His commissions in and around Stockholm were impressive, but he was rarely there after his appointment as general governor of Pomerania in 1648. He lived primarily in Wolgast, Stettin and Stralsund (the first two the former residences of the Pomeranian dukes) in a manner resembling other German dukes and barons, except that he was directly responsible to and representative of the Swedish crown. The comparison to local ruling nobility is instructive, however, for Wrangel quickly set about establishing a court with the requisite splendor. He and his wife, Anna Margareta von Haugwitz, purchased a vast amount of Augsburg silver and other luxury goods. This complemented goods taken as war booty – which was never as widespread as is often imagined33 – and gifts from various rulers, who may thus have recognized a new peer.34 Ehrenstrahl entered Wrangel’s service in 1651 in Germany, and in the following year returned with him to Stockholm. Christina, who employed both David Beck and Sébastien Bourdon at this point, had little use for an unpolished painter from Hamburg. He found support instead from Gustaf II Adolf’s widow, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, a remarkable woman who was evidently a competent painter herself, but who had more modest representational needs. His precise position in these years is unclear, however, for even while he worked for the widowed queen, he is mentioned in the documents as “field marshal Wrangel’s portraitist.”35 Nonetheless, it was with her financial support that he left early in 1654 for a seven-year study period, spent primarily in Venice and Rome. Ehrenstrahl arrived in Rome early in 1656 after about two years in Venice. He benefited immediately from the presence there of Christina, who would serve as a point of contact for a generation of northern European artists in Rome.36 We know that he was on good terms with the Bernini workshop, but it is unclear whether this was through Christina or some other means, such as the Tirolean painter Johann Paul (or Giovanni Paolo) Schor, who worked regularly for Bernini in the 1650s and 1660s.37 Ehrenstrahl freely admitted that he drew more 33

Arne Losman, “Carl Gustaf Wrangel, Skokloster and Europe. A Display of Power and Glory in the Days of Sweden’s Dominance” 1648. War and Peace in Europe, vol 2, ed Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (Münster, 1999), 639–648, emphasizes that the great majority of the cultural goods imported during the Thirty Years’ War were purchased peacefully. 34 Among these gifts was Philipp Hainhofer’s last collector’s chest, given to Wrangel by Duke August of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. For the representative nature of Wrangel’s position as General Governor, see Ivo Asmus, “Carl Gustav Wrangel - Schwedischer Generalgouverneur und ‘pommerscher Fürst’” Unter der schwedischen Krone. Pommern nach dem

Westfälischen Frieden, ed Ivo Asmus (Greifswald, 1998), 53–75. 35 Axel Sjöblom, David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (Malmö, 1947), 17. 36 Much of this information comes from Lars Olof Larsson, “David Klöcker in Rom” Docto peregrino. Roman Studies in Honor of Torgil Magnuson, ed Thomas Hall et al (Stockholm, 1992), 122–151. 37 Lars Olof Larsson has suggested Schor as a point of introduction for Ehrenstrahl to the world of Roman painting. Lars Olof Larsson, “David Klöcker in Rom” Docto peregrino. Roman Studies in Honor of Torgil Magnuson, ed Thomas Hall et al (Stockholm, 1992), 132.

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than he painted, but most of the surviving drawings are landscapes and views of ancient monuments. He doubtless copied contemporary works as well, which would have helped us to orient him in the world of Roman painting, but these drawings are lost.38 On the basis of a large ceiling painting from the 1670s that reflects the vaulted ceiling in the gallery of the Barberini Palace, it is often proposed that Ehrenstrahl worked under Pietro da Cortona. Parts of the Barberini Palace were in fact open to the public, and Nicodemus Tessin probably visited it in January, 1652.39 Some of Ehrenstrahl’s other paintings, particularly the allegories of Carl XI’s destiny in Drottningholm, also appear to reflect Cortona’s influence, however.40 The possible friendship with Schor may also have helped Ehrenstrahl to gain access to Cortona’s studio, since Schor worked under Cortona in the decoration of the Quirinal Palace in 1656, the year that Ehrenstrahl arrived in Rome.41 We do not know precisely when Ehrenstrahl left Rome. By April of 1659 he was in Paris, where he seems to have stayed for over a year. In the following year he painted Henrietta Anna, duchess of Orléans, and the image was immediately engraved by Peter Williamson in London, showing a level of success in England.42 By the summer of 1661 he was back in Stockholm. Seven years abroad had transformed him completely. He had expanded enormously on his early training in animal painting with Jacobsz, and was now equipped to undertake commissions for monumental histories and allegories. Ehrenstrahl returned to a court he could hardly have recognized. His first patron, Carl Gustaf Wrangel, still lived primarily in Pomerania. His second patron, Maria Eleonora, had died in 1654, and Christina abdicated in the same year. Christina’s successor, Carl X Gustaf, died suddenly in 1660, and the kingdom was again ruled by a regency, led by Dowager Queen Hedwig Eleonora, the widow of Carl X Gustaf. He was a well-trained painter who, given the new queen’s love of art, had no cause to worry. But he found himself with few contacts and little money. It was almost certainly out of paranoia and self-promotion that he criticized in the harshest terms the work of Abraham Wuchters, a visiting Netherlandish portraitist who worked primarily at the Danish court: “… It is the same man whose extraordinarily bad portrait of the queen I saw at Mr Friesendorf’s …” and “… the man can neither draw nor compose [a picture]. All he does is copy fairly, but so that the pictures are uglier than the people [they represent].”43 Wuchters was a fine portraitist, but probably no real threat to Ehrenstrahl’s future success. He did not deserve to be humiliated by a younger painter 38

For Ehrenstrahl’s drawings in Italy, see Wilhelm Nisser, Die italienische Schizzenbücher von Erik Jönson Dahlberg und David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (Uppsala, 1948). 39 John Beldon Scott, Images of Nepotism. The Painted Ceilings of Palazzo Barberini (Princeton, 1991), 193–197; Patricia Waddy, “Inside the Palace: People and Furnishings” Life and the Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome. Ambiente Barocco, ed Stefanie Walker and Frederick Hammond (New Haven, 1999), 21–26. 40 Allan Ellenius has pointed to a painting of the guardian angel by Cortona, dated 1656 and now in the Galleria nazionale in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome, as a comparison piece for Ehrenstrahl’s allegories in the formal bedroom in Drottningholm. Allan Ellenius, Karolinska bildidéer (Uppsala, 1966), 69–71. An allegory on the rewards of virtue, on view at Strömsholm palace, also seems to reflect Cortona’s manner.

41

For Schor, see Christina Strunk, ed, Un registra del gran teatro del barocco. Johann Paul Schor und die international Sprache des Barock (Munich, 2009). 42 The print was made in 1661 for John Williams at the Crowne in St Paul’s churchyard. 43 Ehrenstrahl’s letters are published in Otto Wilhelm Lagerholm, Ehrenstrahl och Allegorien (Uppsala, 1883), 39–49; the excerpts here are from Martin Olin, Det karolinska porträttet. Ideologi, ikonografi, identitet (Stockholm, 2000), 274n40, 274n42. “Ich sehe dass mans für lautere Wunderwerke helt, wass der Mahler zu hoffe hier machet. Er ist aber derselbige man von dehme Ich der Konigin Conterfeit bey herrn Friesendorf so extraordinarie schlecht gesehen. Etzliche Conterfeiten welche Ich von Ihme gesehen gleichen zimblich woll aber sehr schlecht Gemahlet;” and “… dan der Kerl kan nicht zeichnen noch etwas ordeniren, alles dass Er thut ist dass Er etwas geleichnet, doch allezeit dass die Mahlerey hesslicher ist, alls die Persohnen.”

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willing to slander perceived rivals to get ahead. Nonetheless, in the fall of 1661 Ehrenstrahl presented himself to Hedwig Eleonora and showed one of his best portraits to date, and perhaps evidence of his success as a portraitist elsewhere.44 Wuchters returned to Denmark soon thereafter, and Ehrenstrahl was named court painter on December 17, 1661.45 Ehrenstrahl’s career was everything he could have hoped for. He dominated his artistic milieu and was well known in parts of Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1674 he was ennobled, in his eyes surely making him a peer of Rubens, van Dyck, Velázquez, and Le Brun, and in 1690 he was given a more dignified position as court steward (Hof-Intendent).46 He was very much aware of his position, and worked hard to increase his profile in a European context. He supplied autobiographical information to Joachim von Sandrart for inclusion in the Teutsche Academie of 1675–1679, which comprised a sort of canon of artists.47 Two decades later, he published a pair of books explaining his own paintings that could be seen in the royal palaces.48 His career in Stockholm far exceeded the opportunities for a painter in Hamburg. Architecture in the Kingdom Awareness within the kingdom of standards of living and representation at other courts grew through the tours of the continent provided both as part of elite education and in the course of military service. As the spoils of war and works commissioned elsewhere filtered down and were displayed in rural parish churches and the heavy, irregular stone houses of the aristocracy, the disparity between the refinement of the objects and the coarseness of their new context must have been jarring and unsettling. The crown was painfully aware that the old royal palace, a jumble of medieval wings and towers, was not at all suitable for a great power, and there were various efforts to rebuild it during the second half of the seventeenth century (figure 2). This was felt at a more individual level as well, and numerous private patrons built or rebuilt their residences in the same period. Count Johan Gabriel Stenbock, for instance, found himself in possession of works by Gerrit van Honthorst, Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt, and Adriaen de Vries, as well as Ehrenstrahl and Millich.49 These were hardly compatible with an unrefined setting, and around 1670 he set 44 The portrait (of Lorens von der Linde) is preserved in the Uppsala University Art Musem. Uppsala University Art Collections – Painting and Sculpture (Uppsala, 2001), 96. 45 Axel Sjöblom, David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl (Malmö, 1947), 30; Doris Gerstl, Drucke des höfischen Barock in Schweden (Berlin, 2000), 33. 46 Already during his Roman study period he had noted with satisfaction – and rather over-assuredly – that only four or five other painters in Europe could claim his standing. It is possible that he was thinking only of painters in similar court positions, such as Charles Le Brun. Allan Ellenius, “David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl – svensk och europé” David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, ed Bengt Dahlbäck (Stockholm, 1976), 14. He celebrated his elevation to court steward with an allegorical self-portrait that hung in Hedwig Eleonora’s private apartment. For discussion and interpretation, see Allan Ellenius, Karolinska Bildidéer (Stockholm, 1966), 11–28. 47 Doris Gerstl, “Joachim von Sandrarts Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste - zur

Genese” Künste und Natur in Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit, vol 2, ed Hartmut Laufhütte (Wiesbaden, 2000), 883–898. He also supplied Sandrart with biographical information on Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and Nicolaes Millich. 48 David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Die vornehmste Schildereyen/ welche in denen Pallästen des Königreiches Schweden zu sehen sind/ Inventiret/ verfertiget und beschrieben von David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl/ Königlichem Hoff-Intendanten (Stockholm, 1694); idem, Explication öfwer the twenne stora schilderier, som hoffintendenten David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl hafwer inventerat och förfärdigat uti choret, af Kongl. Slotz Kyrkian i Stockholm (Stockholm, 1695). These texts were requested by Carl XI, who also had a stake in enhancing the reputation of his court painter. 49 These works are listed in Johan Eriksson and Peter Liljenstolpe, Sjöö slott. Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och Johan Gabriel Stenbock som aktörer vid ett stormaktstida slottsbygge (Uppsala, 2001), 53–55, 70.

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2. Royal Palace “Three Crowns,” Stockholm. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

Nicodemus Tessin to work rebuilding his Stockholm residence and designing a new country residence, where the de Vries statue of Psyche served as the centerpiece of a modern parterred garden. Architecture provided quite a different set of problems and circumstances from painting, sculpture, and other crafts. Architects working elsewhere with little knowledge of the kingdom, its resources, traditions, and materials, could not easily provide workable plans from a distance, and it was quite impossible to take on the more complex urbanistic work of expanding the city into a true capital.50 Smaller projects could be taken on by local building masters, but the major architectural projects had long been taken on by builders from outside the kingdom, who came for shorter or longer stays. In the sixteenth century Heinrich von Cölln and Willem Boy from Mechelen were responsible for many of the royal works.51 This tendency to bring in builders from the the Low Countries and the German lands continued into the seventeenth century. In the first third of the seventeenth century, we find, 50

Architectural plans sent from abroad are quite rare, and only in one case – Finspong manor – were they built with little modification. It was in any case only in this period that architecture for export became a significant part of the building profession. See Badeloch Noldus, “De introductie van het Hollands classicisme in Zweden, aan de hand van twee woonhuizen van de familie De Geer” Bulletin KNOB 98 (1999): 152–164; idem, “Frågan om arkitekten till Finspångs slott, ett exempel på den holländsk klassicistiska arkitekturen i 1600-talets

Sverige” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 69 (2000): 7–17. See also Claes Ellehag, “Fem franska 1600-talsritningar för Ekolsunds slott” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 52 (1983): 111–120. 51 For Willem Boy, see Christopher Eichhorn and Herman Odelberg, Guillaume Boyen (Wilhelm Boy), peintre, sculpteur et architecte Belge: étude biographique (Brussels, 1872); August Hahr, Studier i Johan III:s renässans 2: Villem Boy, bildhuggaren och byggmästaren (Uppsala, 1910); Nils Sundquist, Willem Boy i Uppsala (Stockholm, 1971).

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3. Caspar Panten, Wibyholm Manor. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

for instance, the three de Besche brothers from Liège, Caspar Panten from Amsterdam, and Hans Jakob Christler from Strassburg working in Sweden on various projects.52 There were surprisingly many builders active in what was a rather small court and city, but most were essentially transitory, or masons who took responsibility for various projects on an ad-hoc basis. Christler’s work in the kingdom came between stays in Riga and Moscow. Panten died relatively young after ten years in Sweden. In his decade of work in the kingdom, he undertook a very limited number of projects. His masterpiece, which was never finished and subsequently partially destroyed, would have been the royal residence at Wibyholm. More than any other building in the kingdom, it approaches the Netherlandish Renaissance style popular in Denmark under Christian IV in the first half of the seventeenth century (figure 3). Around the middle of the century, a more coherent group of builders emerged from this hodge podge, establishing themselves as leading figures who would, as a group, control architecture in the kingdom for three generations. Four men – Simon and Jean de la Vallée (ca 1590–1642; ca 1624–1696), and Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and Younger (1615–1681; 1654–1728), all of whom can be called architects with more conviction than the earlier building masters – took the leading position.53 Matthäus Holl (1620–1679) had evident promise, but for various reasons was unable to fulfill his potential. Two others – Matthias Spihler (ca 1640–1691) and Johann Tobias Albinus (d 1678) – worked somewhat in the shadow of the leading builders. Each of these careers took a quite different character, making it difficult to 52 For the Netherlandish builders, see Badeloch Noldus, Trade in Good Taste. Relations in Architecture and Culture between the Dutch Republic and the Baltic World in the Seventeenth Century (Turnhout, 2004); for Christler,

see Barbro Flodin, “Hans Jakob Kristler, Några rön och synpunkter” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 45 (1976): 94–100. 53 The significance of this distinction is discussed more fully in chapters five and six.

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discuss their work collectively. Moreover, the differences in their approaches and working habits defined them to a large extent, and helped determine their long-term success, which, as we shall see, varied greatly according to circumstances both within and beyond their control. As in any court, skill in negotiating these uncertainties was as important as actual talent in the construction of a lasting career. Simon de la Vallée Simon de la Vallée came to Sweden from the court of stadholder Frederik Hendrik in The Hague. He grew up in Paris, however, where his father was a master mason involved in the construction of the hôtel de ville and the Luxembourg Palace (begun 1615) under Salomon de Brosse. Although his father, Marin de la Vallée, was probably never an essential figure in the building works and contributed little to the design of the projects he worked on, he received the impressive title of “architecte des bâtiments de la Reine mère de sa Majesté” in 1631.54 We may wonder if it was this title that brought Simon to the attention of the stadholder in The Hague soon thereafter. He was one of several relatively prominent Frenchman invited to the northern Netherlands by the stadholder in 1633, and he became the first official court architect in The Hague, a position for which he would hardly seem to be qualified unless he could demonstrate significant experience in Paris.55 (De la Vallée’s moves were closely shadowed by André Mollet, Designateur des plants et jardins du roi at the Tuileries, who left Paris for The Hague around the same time. He also later worked in Stockholm, where he designed several gardens and, more importantly, published an important treatise on gardening in 1651.)56 Jacob van Campen and then Pieter Post worked for the stadholder after de la Vallée’s departure for Stockholm in 1637, but it was the Frenchman who introduced several of the latest Parisian fashions to the Netherlands.57 His designs in the Netherlands and in Sweden tend to reflect the work of Salomon de Brosse, which is only natural since he must have spent a great deal of time with his father at the worksite of the Luxembourg Palace. 54

The basic work on Simon de la Vallée is Tord O:son Nordberg, De la Vallée. En arkitektfamilj i Frankrike, Holland och Sverige/ Les De la Vallée. Vie d’une famille d’architectes en France, Hollande et Suède (Stockholm, 1970). See also F.A.J. Vermeulen, “Simon de la Vallée, architect van Frederik Hendrik 1633–1637” Jaarboek “Die Hagh” 1933: 9–23; and D.F. Slothouwer, De paleizen van Frederik Hendrik (Leiden, 1945). 55 For the rise of the court architect in the Low Countries, see Annemie De Vos, “Hof van Den Haag en hof van Brussel (1590–1630). Structurele organisatie van de bouwprojecten tijdens de regering van prins Maurits en van de aartshertogen Albrecht en Isabella” Bulletin KNOB 98 (1999): 198–213. For de la Vallée in these years, see Tord O:son Nordberg, De la Vallée. En arkitektfamilj i Frankrike, Holland och Sverige/ Les De la Vallée. Vie d’une famille d’architectes en France, Hollande et Suède (Stockholm, 1970), 67–88. 56 André Mollet, Le jardin de plaisir (Stockholm, 1651), facsimile with introduction Paris, 1981. See Sten Karling, “The Importance of André Mollet and his Family for the Development of the French Formal Garden”

The French Formal Garden [Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture], ed Elizabeth B Macdougall and F Hamilton Hazlehurst (Washington, DC, 1974), 1–25. 57 For de la Vallée and van Campen in the service of the stadholder, see Konrad Ottenheym, “Architectuur” Jacob van Campen. Het klassieke ideaal in de Gouden Eeuw, ed Jacobine Huisken, Konrad Ottenheym, Gary Schwartz (Amsterdam, 1995), 173. Among the ideas imported to the Netherlands by de la Vallée was the lantern-lit staircase, used by François Mansart in the Orléans wing at Blois and at the château Maisons around the same time. See J.J. Terwen and Konrad Ottenheym, Pieter Post (1608– 1669) Architect (Zutphen, 1993), 27, 134; Konrad Ottenheym, “’Possessed by Such a Passion for Building.’ Frederik Hendrik and Architecture” Princely Display. The Court of Frederik Hendrik of Orange and Amalia van Solms, ed Marika Keblusek and Jori Zijlmans (Zwolle, 1997), 105–125; and Guido Steenmeijer, Tot cieraet ende aensien deser stede. Arent van ‘s-Gravesande. Architect en ingenieur ca. 1610– 1662 (Leiden, 2005), 17–21.

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4. Simon de la Vallée, Tessin and Others, Ekolsund Manor, Begun ca 1637.

Simon de la Vallée did not initially come to Sweden to work for the crown. He was first engaged to undertake the country estate at Ekolsund for a nobleman, Åke Tott (figure 4).58 As with so many projects in the kingdom, though, work at the estate was drawn out over many decades and reconceived by various architects before it took its final form. De la Vallée was named builder to the court in March of 1639, and around the same time he resigned from the nobleman’s service. Tott died in the following year, and work on Ekolsund stopped. Two decades later his son, Claes Tott, returned to the site, and had an unknown French architect draw up a series of plans for a remarkably innovative complex, with twin L-shaped structures joined by a series of lower structures.59 Responsibility for this general plan passed to Simon’s son, Jean de la Vallée, and landed with Nicodemus Tessin, who had worked under Simon in the early 1640s. The project was never finished as intended before the estate passed to the crown around 1680. In the eighteenth century the two wings were reclad to suit contemporary taste by Carl Hårleman, the leading architect of the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1641, de la Vallée took on the commission for the House of the Nobility in Stockholm. This was a palace to serve as a meeting point for the nobility at large, and it was the grandest of his projects in Sweden. The driving force behind it was the chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, who also had de la Vallée put together plans for a private residence for him. Like Ekolsund, the House of the Nobility would take decades and the contributions of various architects to reach a finished form. At some level this was evident from the very beginning, for de la Vallée’s presentation drawing for the building was extremely optimistic in its expanse and richness – particularly since Tessin’s project to continue the project in 1647 was criticized for the excessive expense of the cut stone he envisioned (figures 5, 6). The building’s ultimate form was decided largely by the Amsterdam architect Justus Vingboons, who visited Stockholm 1653–1656, but the building was finally finished in 1674 by Simon’s son, Jean. 58 For the building history of Ekolsund, see Claes Ellehag, Fem svenska stormanshem und 1600-talet (Stockholm, 1994), 32–67, 86–114. 59 No elevations or sections for Ekolsund by the unidentified French architect are known. See Claes

Ellehag, “Fem franska 1600-talsritningar för Ekolsunds slott” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 52 (1983): 111–120.

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5. Simon de la Vallée, House of the Nobility, Stockholm, 1641.

6. Simon de la Vallée, Justus Vingboons, and Others, House of the Nobility, Stockholm.

Simon de la Vallée worked in Sweden for only five years before he was murdered in 1642; he worked for the crown for only three of those years. It is therefore no surprise that he did not see any major projects through completion. His architectural significance in the kingdom is minimal if we consider only standing buildings. Rather, his most significant contribution to architecture in the Swedish kingdom was the early training of Nicodemus Tessin and Jean de la Vallée, bringing them to the point that they could benefit from study trips to France, Italy and Holland, and become modern, professional, and independent architects.

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Despite his early death and rather ephemeral presence in built works, Simon de la Vallée was recognized at court as a remarkable figure, with a more sophisticated background in the French and Dutch courts than the other building masters from the Low Countries and Germany. His son Jean profited from this in the early stages of his career. Jean was the first architect to spend an extended study period abroad, travelling in France and Italy from 1646–1650 at the court’s expense. He returned to Stockholm in time to help with the preparations for Christina’s coronation in 1650, and in January of the following year she made him a sort of chief architect in the kingdom, with broad oversight over building affairs.60 Everything seemed to fall in place for de la Vallée throughout the 1650s. His four years abroad gave him a training and legitimacy that no other architect in the kingdom could match, and he received more work than he really could handle. In 1656 he designed a centrally-planned church for the southern 7. Jean de la Vallée, Catherine Church, Stockholm, Begun district of Stockholm at the direct request of 1656. King Carl X Gustaf, who signed the contract drawing (figure 7).61 He was to build an enormous new royal palace nearby, but this project never left the planning stage. At the same time, de la Vallée took on an almost complete rebuilding of the old royal palace in the older part of Stockholm, for which he made carefully-measured drawings and began the foundations, but for which work stopped very early on, before any substantial changes had been made to the older fabric. Beyond these major palace projects for the crown, he took on a major revision of the royal sepulchral church in Stockholm and significant projects for the major noble families, most especially the de la Gardies. De la Vallée saw relatively little of this ambitious workload to completion. To some extent this was not his fault. Carl X Gustaf became preoccupied with war, which put a strain on the treasury, and then died after fewer than six years on the throne, after which there was no further interest in a palace in the southern part of the city. His project for the older palace also stalled, but other efforts to modernize or rebuild the structure also failed before Tessin the Younger pushed through his plans in the 1690s. Other projects, such as the Catherine Church, were finished more or less according to plan. Nonetheless, unfinished projects are something of a recurring theme in de la Vallée’s career. He was often slow in producing acceptable drawings or models, and frustrated patrons who had approached him for private residences or other projects with his inability to see these obligations through to completion. 60

Robert Swedlund, At förse Riket med beständige och prydlige Byggnader. Byggnadsstyrelsen och dess föregångare (Stockholm, 1969), 29–30.

61

For these and other projects commissioned by Carl X Gustaf (r 1654–1660), see Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 48–67.

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This ongoing issue in de la Vallée’s work will be taken up again in more depth, but it is hard not to relate it to a slow but very perceptible decline in his architectural career at least from the 1670s, and very probably already earlier. This, too, had many causes, and cannot be attributed only to his own shortcomings. Apart from Carl X Gustaf, de la Vallée was most closely tied to Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, the wealthiest magnate in the kingdom and potentially the most important private patron of the arts. De la Gardie was handicapped by two circumstances, however. One was his own lack of focus. He tried to build simultaneously on many of his estates, rather than concentrating his resources on one or two magnificent projects that could more reasonably be completed at a high level.62 Not surprisingly, projects under other architects also remained unfinished. The other crippling problem was the reduction of lands to the crown. There were periodic moves in this direction from the middle of the century, but in the 1670s it became very clear that the crown would reclaim much of the territorial and financial resources it had earlier granted to the nobility. This came to a head in 1680, and de la Gardie in particular was effectively ruined.63 De la Vallée’s problems were not tied entirely to de la Gardie’s fortunes, however. Other patrons regularly complained about his reliability, and this almost certainly contributed to the declining number of commissions he received from the later 1660s. By the later 1670s de la Vallée was largely retired from active work as a builder, and pursuing a second career as an administrator within the bureaucracy. It is true that the nobility as group no longer had the resources available twenty years earlier, but Tessin the Elder and his circle still received occasional commissions for private residences in these years; de la Vallée did not. Matthäus Holl Of all German cities, Augsburg and Nuremberg embraced the Renaissance most profoundly. Nuremberg has garnered somewhat more interest, but Augsburg’s artistic tradition is hardly less rich. The city produced Hans Holbein in the sixteenth century, and it is this period that is best known. The city’s distinguished artistic tradition carried through the seventeenth century, however.64 Augsburg’s most prominent builder of the first half of the seventeenth century was Elias Holl (1573–1646).65 He was the city building master (Stadtbaumeister), responsible for the town hall, the arsenal, and other essential buildings, often developed in collaboration with the city council and other colleagues.66 These buildings, and the town hall in particular, show a definitive rejection of gothic forms, and 62

This was apparent already in the 1670s to a visiting Florentine. Lorenzo Magalotti, Relazioni di viaggio in Inghilterra Francia e Svezia [1674] (Bari, 1968), 323. 63 For the reduction, see Anthony F Upton, Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism (Cambridge, 1998). 64 For Augsburg in the seventeenth century, see Christina Thon, ed, Augsburger Barock (Augsburg, 1968); Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden. Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg zwischen Kalenderstreit und Parität, 2 vols (Göttingen, 1989), and the reduced edition Als wollt die Welt schier brechen. Eine Stadt im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Munich, 1991); Gode Krämer, “Augsburg as a Centre of Art During the Thirty Years War. Painting and Drawing” 1648. War and Peace in Europe, vol 2, ed Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (Münster, 1999), 227–234.

65

For Holl, see Bernd Roeck, Elias Holl. Architekt einer europäischen Stadt (Regensburg, 1985). 66 The Arsenal was built in collaboration with the painter Joseph Heintz. Some of the problems in determining the degree of autonomy enjoyed by Holl have been pointed out by Bernd Roeck, “Kollektiv und Individuum beim Entstehungsprozeß der Augsburger Architektur im ersten Drittel des 17. Jahrhunderts” Elias Holl und das Augsburger Rathaus, ed Hanno-Walter Kruft et al (Regensburg, 1985), 37–54. Thomas Fichtner and Kai Wenzel, “Elias Holl” Die Baumeister der “Deutschen Renaissance.” Ein Mythos der Kunstgeschichte? ed Arnold Bartetsky (Beucha, 2004), 213–236 have argued that Holl more closely resembled a building master responsible for executing the plans of others than an independent architect.

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it has even been argued that the plan for the town hall was directly derived from an early interpretation of the ideal basilica described by the Roman architect and theorist Vitruvius.67 Holl’s place in the history of architecture is secure, but his place in contemporary Augsburg was much less so: he was dismissed from his post twice. His father had been the city building master, and by all accounts he was proud to occupy the position. He also came from a Protestant family, however, and after the proclamation of the Edict of Restitution by the emperor in 1629 he found himself at a great disadvantage. The Edict of Restitution was in principle to enforce the terms of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, by which an uneasy coexistence of Catholicism and Protestantism within the Holy Roman Empire was achieved. In the Catholic view, this compromise was to stop the spread of Protestantism. In practice, however, there was continued Lutheran growth, and a number of bishoprics, such as Bremen and Magdeburg, were secularized after 1555. The Edict of Restitution amounted to a reclamation of Catholic lands and an expulsion of Protestants from these regions. The conversion of Augsburg 8. Gustaf II Adolf Before Augsburg, 1632. St Anne’s, Augsburg. was a point of pride for the Emperor, not only because the divided city was considered a blight on otherwise Catholic Bavaria, but also because the conversion of the city that gave its name to the Augsburg Confession and the Peace of Augsburg would be a considerable symbolic victory.68 Elias Holl was forced to choose between his earnest Lutheranism and his post as city building master. He chose his faith, and was dismissed in January, 1631. Early in 1632 Gustaf II Adolf entered Augsburg with his troops. The king celebrated the Lutheran mass in St Anne’s immediately upon taking the city, and the shift of balance to the Protestant side was joyously celebrated by those who shared his faith. A painting still in St Anne’s shows the king with a sword and a Bible, inscribed “pro libertate” and “pro religione,” and accompanied by the notation “Augsburg, conquered by accord, 2 April 1632” (figure 8).69 67

Jürgen Zimmer, “Das Augsburger Rathaus und die Tradition” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 28 (1977): 191–218 compares Holl’s plan to that published in Cesare Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruuio Pollione De architectura libri dece, traducti de latino in vulgare affigurati, comentati, & con virando ordine insigniti … (Como, 1521). Holl visited Italy only once – a two-and-a-half-month stay in Venice in 1600–1601 – and most of his knowledge of classical

and Italian sources came from Palladio, Serlio, and other source books. Hanno-Walter Kruft, “Vorbilder für die Architektur von Elias Holl” Elias Holl und das Augsburger Rathaus, ed Hanno-Walter Kruft et al (Regensburg, 1985), 20–28. 68 Bernd Roeck, Als wollt die Welt schier brechen. Eine Stadt im Zeitalter des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Munich, 1991), 230–238. 69 “Augspurg mid acord erobert den jj Aprilis A° 1632.”

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Matthäus Gundelach painted a full-length portrait of the king, and the Lutheran city councilors gave him one of Philipp Hainhofer’s most magnificent ebony collectors’ chests.70 Elias Holl wrote in his family chronicle that “God, through special grace and the strong arm of the Swedish king … freed us again.”71 Gustaf Adolf did his part to support the artistic community as well. He commissioned a portrait bust from Georg Petel, the leading sculptor in the city, and Elias Holl reclaimed the position of building master.72 But even though Holl was reinstated in his post, he did not encourage his sons to continue in what had been in effect a family trade, as he had previously assumed they would do.73 When the Catholic League again seized Augsburg in 1635, he arranged for his three oldest sons to leave with the departing Swedish troops.74 Matthäus, born in 1620, was perhaps too young to seek his fortune in an uncertain world, and instead stayed in Augsburg and began an apprenticeship with a clockmaker.75 Certainly the king’s presence in Augsburg and his relationship with the city’s artistic community made it clear to painters and sculptors in southern Germany that there were opportunities in Sweden that were unavailable to German Protestants. Thus, it was by a circuitous but also rather goal-oriented course that Matthäus Holl came to Sweden. As Sten Karling has somewhat tentatively reconstructed the path, after the death of Elias in 1646, young Matthäus made his way to Danzig, where his brother Hieronymus had worked as a goldsmith since 1644. In 1647 the Augsburg master gardener Hans Georg Kraus signed a contract with the Swedish general Jakob de la Gardie, the father of Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, for a landscaped garden at Jakobsdal estate (now called Ulriksdal). The garden was to include a grotto with fountains and running water, which demanded significant competence in hydraulics and mechanics. The contract stipulated that Kraus should come to Sweden in the spring of 1648 by way of Danzig with his assistants and his plants. Although documentary evidence has never emerged, Karling suggested with good reason that Holl may well have been among the assistants, and have had special responsibility for the grotto. Elias had been an especially good technical engineer, and mechanics would prove to be Matthäus’s strength as well in the course of his career.76 The question is of course how someone apparently trained as a clockmaker could show such skill in architectural engineering. Holl most likely learned privately from his father, who spent the last eleven years of his life in quiet retirement. His technical and drafting skills could have come only from study with Elias Holl. His project for Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie’s palace at Hapsal (in modern Estonia, ca 1653) is known through drawings made by the building master, Andreas Bretzel, who led work while Holl was called away to 70

Hans-Olof Boström, Det underbara skåpet. Philipp Hainhofer och Gustav II Adolfs konstskåp (Uppsala, 2001). 71 “Wie ich nun nach meiner Beurlaubung in das 3te Jahr wieder mein Handwerk, wie ein anderer Privat=Meister das Mauren, wieder getrieben bis Ao. 1632, da uns Gott durch sonderbare Gnad und starken Arm der königl. Majestät in Schweden aus der grausamen Gewissens=Bedrangnuß wieder befreyet. …” Christian Meyer, ed, Die Hauschronik der Familie Holl (1487–1646) insbesondere die Lebensaufzeichnungen des Elias Holl, Baumeisters der Stadt Augsburg (Munich, 1910), 88. 72 Bernd Roeck, Elias Holl. Architeckt einer europäischen Stadt (Regensburg, 1985), 14. 73 A notebook by Holl, recording his experience as a builder and compiled between 1620 and 1644, contains

several notations that the observations should help his sons in architectural problems. See Hanno-Walter Kruft and Andres-René Lepik, “Das Geometrie- und Meßbuch von Elias Holl” Architectura 15 (1985): 1–12. 74 Christian Meyer, ed, Die Hauschronik der Familie Holl (1487–1646) insbesondere Die Lebensaufzeichnungen des Elias Holl, Baumeisters der Stadt Augsburg (Munich, 1910), 36. 75 The basic source for Matthäus Holl is Sten Karling, Matthias Holl från Augsburg och hans verksamhet som arkitekt i Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies tjänst i Sverige och Balticum (Gothenburg, 1932), to which very little has been added. 76 Sten Karling, Matthias Holl från Augsburg och hans verksamhet som arkitekt i Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies tjänst i Sverige och Balticum (Gothenburg, 1932), 34–35.

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9. Andreas Bretzel after Matthäus Holl, Project for Hapsal Estate, ca 1653.

other projects.77 These drawings show a rigorous classicizing façade and regular courtyard (complete with pilaster orders) combined with five towers on the main structure and a freestanding one nearby (figure 9). The drawings for the courtyard seem crowded with an excess of details and are somewhat hard to read. This is due primarily to extra information regarding the color scheme of the façade and the roof (added by Bretzel?), which distracts from the rather simpler structural scheme. When this is accounted for, it becomes clear that the building is actually composed of a few large blocks articulated with pilasters, and is similar to Elias Holl’s Town Hall (figure 10). Holl worked for de la Gardie his whole career. This must have seemed a promising situation, as de la Gardie was by far the richest private individual in the kingdom. He had some twenty palaces and estates spread over Sweden and its territories in the eastern Baltic and northern Germany. Better still, early in 1650, soon after Holl’s arrival, de la Gardie conceived a plan to renovate and enlarge many of these.78 Yet Holl’s career never flowered as we might have expected. De la Gardie was an important patron, but even he was unlikely to be able to support a major architectural career on his own, or to provide a multi-year travel period. There is in principle no reason why Holl should not have moved from de la Gardie’s service to that of the court, which might then have sponsored further study. As we shall see, Nicodemus Tessin 77

The known drawings by Bretzel after Holl are in the graphic collection of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, THC 4402–4415.

78

Sten Karling, Matthias Holl från Augsburg och hans verksamhet som arkitekt i Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies tjänst i Sverige och Balticum (Gothenburg, 1932), 146.

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moved into a court position through his work for the chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, and David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl began as a painter to the field marshall, Carl Gustaf Wrangel. But when Holl arrived in 1648–1649, de la Vallée and Tessin were already fairly secure in their positions. De la Vallée was studying abroad when Holl came to Sweden, and Tessin was offered support for a study period of his own in 1649. Perhaps the small court had no need for a third architect, and declined to bring him into its service. Unlike Oxenstierna and Wrangel, who were well respected and filled essential roles within the court, de la Gardie’s place was less certain. His relationship with the monarchy was occasionally strained, and it is not clear that his recommendation would secure a place for a protégé at court. Moreover, de la Gardie’s commitment to Holl was also incomplete; many of his important projects did not go to Holl, but 10. Elias Holl, Town Hall, Augsburg, 1615–1620. to Jean de la Vallée, while his resources simultaneously dwindled in the face of the reduction. In short, Holl was unlucky. Hapsal palace was the closest he came to a breakthrough. Work slowed frequently because of de la Gardie’s financial problems, however, and by the 1670s stopped altogether. Matthäus Holl died, apparently around 1679, with few possessions, owed money by de la Gardie and having never had a real chance to prove his talent.79 Hapsal burned in 1688 and was taken by the Russians in 1710. Today it is nothing more than an impressive ruin.

79

SSA Bouppteckningar, 14 October, 1681, fol 914r– 918v. A death inventory for Holl made in 1681 specifies that he died two years earlier, and that de la Gardie owed him 1300 Riksdalers.

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CHAPTER II NICODEMUS TESSIN

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Nicodemus Tessin the Elder faced circumstances significantly different than the others we have encountered so far. While all came to Sweden in search of new opportunities, Tessin fled a region devastated by war. He was born and raised in Stralsund, in the duchy of Pomerania on the Baltic coast of Germany (figure 11). It was not the seat of a ducal residence, but a Hansa merchant city. The main palace of the Pomeranian dukes lay to the east in Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland), with a secondary residence in Wolgast. The seats of the dukes of Mecklenburg lay in Güstrow and Schwerin, equally far to the west. There was no palace or court structure in Stralsund, which was governed independently by a council of merchants and local patricians. Although Duke Philipp Julius wrested away some of the city’s independence in the second decade of the seventeenth century, most decisions regarding defense, expansion, trade, and religious and cultural life remained the responsibility of the town council and a handful of other civic organizations.1 The council accordingly had a great deal of freedom, but also enormous responsibility for the stewardship of the city. In the third decade of the seventeenth century this task became an almost impossible mission. In 1625 Christian IV of Denmark had postured and then moved against what he considered imperial excesses in the Lower Saxon circle, of which he was the leader in his capacity as the Duke of Holstein.2 This ended disastrously for Christian, and within a few months the imperial armies under Count Tilly and Albrecht von Wallenstein had overrun Jutland, the Danish peninsula. Emperor Ferdinand II stripped the Duke of Mecklenburg of his title as punishment for his support of Christian, and named Wallenstein duke of the province. Duke Bogislav XIV of Pomerania submitted to Wallenstein in the same year, and promised him a garrison in Stralsund. The city’s fiercely independent Protestant burgers, who were already on bad terms with Bogislav, resented this, and refused to submit.3 This was a bold stance taken against formidable odds. Stralsund was by this point the only patch of land on the southern Baltic coast not controlled by imperial forces. By the end of 1627 two-thirds of the entire imperial army – 100,000 troops – was amassed in these occupied lands, with Stralsund alone left to conquer.4 Wallenstein’s troops gathered around the city, and in May of 1628 the siege began. Stralsund had no hope of resisting such a powerful force without help. But where could help be found? All of the German Protestant rulers in the area who might have been sympathetic had already capitulated, and those farther south were preoccupied with their own troubles. Denmark had promised aid to the city, but the kingdom was itself now largely occupied by imperial troops, and could hardly spare a soldier. The city accordingly looked

1

This is described in Herbert Langer, Stralsund 1600– 1630. Eine Hansestadt in der Krise und im europäischen Konflikt (Weimar, 1970), 180–211; and idem, “Innere Kämpfe und Bündnis mit Schweden. Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts bis 1630” Geschichte der Stadt Stralsund, ed Herbert Ewe (Weimar, 1984), 149–155. For a general history of Pomerania, see Hans Branig, Geschichte Pommerns, 2 vols (Cologne, 1997–2000); and Jan Piskorski, ed, Pommern im Wandel der Zeiten (Stettin, 1999).

2

For Christian IV’s role in the war, see Paul Douglas Lockhart, Denmark in the Thirty Years’ War, 1618– 1648. King Christian IV and the Decline of the Oldenburg State (Selinsgrove, 1996). 3 Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (London, 1997), 86–89. 4 Figures cited in Herbert Langer, Stralsund 1600– 1630. Eine Hansestadt in der Krise und im europäischen Konflikt (Weimar, 1970), 223.

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11. Stralsund Town Hall and St Nicholas’s.

north to Stockholm. Sweden was not yet involved in the war, but it was a logical source of aid. It was already a rising power in the region, and had just signed a truce in its war with Poland, freeing its military resources. Wallenstein recognized the threat that Swedish interference posed to imperial domination of the northern coast of Germany, and lobbied the Swedish crown to remain neutral.5 His pleas to Sweden not to interfere were hardly likely to convince the testy Gustaf II Adolf, however, for he was simultaneously openly challenging Scandinavian control of the Baltic Sea. In May of 1628 Wallenstein used his new imperial title “General of the Oceanic and Baltic Seas” in a letter to the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna.6 Denmark and Sweden had struggled over this point for a generation, but neither wanted to see the emperor take control, and in the following month Gustaf Adolf signed a treaty with Denmark and Stralsund to defend the city. Because of the king’s intervention, Wallenstein’s siege failed. More important, it set the stage for Sweden’s formal war on the emperor.7 Wallenstein never took Stralsund, but the war took an enormous economic and social price nonetheless. The physical defenses of the city were in ruins after the siege, and the winter quartering of the imperial troops had devastated the agriculture resources around the 5

Pekka Suvantu, Die deutsche Politik Oxenstiernas und Wallenstein (Helsinki, 1979). 6 Pekka Suvantu, Die deutsche Politik Oxenstiernas und Wallenstein (Helsinki, 1979), 25. 7 Almost all books on the Thirty Years’ War discuss the imperial attempt to control the Baltic region. The

one to do so most directly is Hans-Christoph Messow, Die Hansestädte und die habsburgische Ostseepolitik im 30 jährigen Kriege (1627/28) (Berlin, 1935).

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city. The desperation of these years was felt deeply by the Tessin household. Nicodemus, born on December 7, 1615, and probably the oldest of five brothers, was not yet twelve years old when Wallenstein’s troops gathered in Pomerania. He was the son and grandson of councilmen, also named Nicodemus, and the Tessin family belonged to the patrician class in Stralsund.8 The responsibility for the city’s survival rested in part on decisions made by his family and its peers, and the boy must have been keenly aware of the situation. Despite the difficulties of the 1620s, Tessin attended school. The German painter and biographer Joachim von Sandrart, who received his information on Tessin from Ehrenstrahl, was very specific about this, commenting that “his parents held him to his studies.”9 Not surprisingly, the records for the Stralsund Gymnasium from these years are very haphazard, and those from 1632–1657 are missing entirely. In the spring of 1631, however, two Nicodemus Tessins were enrolled, one in class 4 (quarta) and one in class 2 (secunda).10 The full curriculum comprised eight classes, with students beginning in the higher-numbered classes (the octava and the septima) and progressing toward the prima. In the spring of 1631 Tessin was 15 years old. If he were the more advanced of the two students listed under that name, he would have started school at the age of nine years. If he is the other student listed, he would have started at eleven, assuming that he progressed through the academic program at a pace of one class per year. Given what we know of Tessin’s earnest industriousness later in life, and that he was the son of relatively well-off councilmen who were likely to support his education (the council oversaw the operation of the Gymnasium and set its curriculum), it is very likely that our Nicodemus Tessin is in fact the one who reached the secunda, if not the prima, for which the records are missing. The curriculum of the Stralsund Gymnasium survives, and it is possible to examine the content of Tessin’s education in some detail.11 The requirements for all beginning students were basic reading, writing and mathematical skills, and knowledge of the Lutheran catechism, which had to be recited from memory. Latin grammar was introduced in the third year, and by the sixth year students were expected to translate Cato’s distichs and to read Erasmus’s De civitate morum and discuss its literary style. By the seventh year (the secunda, in which Tessin is probably recorded), students read Terence, Cicero’s letters, and Virgil’s Bucolia, and began the study of Greek, which was developed by reading Aesop’s fables. In the final year heavy emphasis was placed on rhetoric, and students read Virgil’s Georgics and the Aeneid, as well as selected works by Cicero and Horace. Greek instruction was tied to readings selected from Isocrates, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Homer and Hesiod. Each week students prepared exercises in Greek and Latin and took part in monthly disputations in Latin. What students actually learn is of course not always what they are taught, but it is very likely that

8

The genealogy of the Tessin family is laid out in Eric von Born, “Ätten Tessins härkomst” Genos 5 (1934): 1–12. See also Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 9–13. Nicodemus Tessin does not turn up in the Stralsund baptismal records, as the first eight pages of the relevant book are missing, and with them any possible older siblings. The given birthday comes from his later statement recorded in the House of the Nobility in Stockholm. 9 Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey Künste, vol 1 (Nuremberg, 1675), 347. Doris Gerstl has shown that Ehrenstrahl

sent Sandrart the information for the biographies of Tessin and Millich, and very likely composed them as well. Doris Gerstl, “Joachim von Sandrarts Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und MahlereyKünste – zur Genese” Künste und Natur in Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit, vol 2, ed Hartmut Laufhütte (Wiesbaden, 2000), 888. 10 StSA Schulerverzeichnis, Rep 22, Nr 207. 11 Ernst Heinrich Zober, “Zur Geschichte des Stralsunder Gymnasiums - Dritter Beitrag. Die Zeit von 1617 bis 1679” Urkundliche Geschichte des Stralsunder Gymnasiums von seiner Stiftung 1560 bis 1860 (Stralsund, 1848), 7–16, 44–48.

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Tessin absorbed much of this material and entered adulthood with a solid grounding in the classics, as well as basic mathematics and Lutheran theology.12 Even after he left the classroom, Tessin was evidently interested in classical authors and their importance for modern building. Some years later, probably in the 1640s, he made notes on Euclid and the ways in which his geometry could be applied to bridge building.13 The foundation for this was provided by the Stralsund academy, even if it would be another decade or two before he began to apply his literary background to the art of architecture. The curriculum as it has come down to us records the names of the classical authors read by the students, but not the works. But with some care, we can nonetheless piece together enough of the canonical texts to outline his earliest introduction to artistic thought. If Tessin did in fact reach the final year of the Stralsund academic program, he would have read both Horace and Cicero. From the Ars poetica of the former, he would have picked up two of the founding ideas of early modern artistic theory: that the role of art is to instruct and delight, and that painting is at heart similar to poetry.14 The second principle, even though it purports to treat painting rather than architecture, would have been the more important of the two in his work, since it directly related literary examples and principles to his profession as an architect. It provided justification to relate, for instance, Cicero’s famous story in De inventione of Zeuxis who overcame the challenge to represent the beautiful Helen by selecting the most beautiful aspects of five virgins from Croton and combining them in one figure. The principle of imitation is everywhere in Tessin’s work, and it was established in Stralsund, where the students read not only Horace and Cicero, but also Terence, with the curriculum specifying particular attention to style and imitation. The conceptual bases of Tessin’s work were laid as a young boy in Stralsund, though it would be decades before they took architectural form.15 Ruin and Resolve We do not know whether Tessin finished the academic program. On July 29, 1632 – just as Tessin would have finished his last year at the Stralsund academy – a Nicodemus Tessin is recorded in the death register of St Nikolai. This is almost certainly his father, and it accords well with his later comment that his father died “very young.” In conjunction with this remark, he wrote that from a young age he was forced to make his own way, as “through the war his parents [were] much ruined.”16 His life thus became significantly more difficult at just about this time, and it was his response to these challenges that opened so many future opportunities for him once he began his career as a builder. We can describe the general conditions in which Tessin found himself upon the death of his father in 1632, but we do not know precisely how his life path changed from a local civic patrician and future councilman to a builder. Certainly his choices were closely dependent on circumstances. Tessin’s knowledge of Horace and Terence was of little use in a city with a broken economy, and he was instead employed in the essential task of rebuilding the city walls, which was undertaken soon after Wallenstein’s siege was lifted in 1628. Nearly the whole fortifications system needed repair, and this project may well have been the greatest 12 A Nicodemus Tessin (very possibly our Tessin’s father, although we have seen that there were others with the same name) wrote to a local church “superintendens” on March 12, 1610 in regard to his absence from church. Much of the letter is in Latin, and shows comfortable familiarity with the language and with church law. GLA Rep 35, Nr 725, fol 75–79. 13 See chapter seven.

14

Horace, Ars poetica 333–334 (Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae) and 361–362 (Ut pictura poesis: erit quae, si propius stes, te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes). 15 For further discussion of the legacy of these readings, see chapter eight. 16 RA Stockholms Stads Acta 8, Nicodemus Tessin, Kort och oförgrijpeligh opsatz. ... See Appendix Four.

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opportunity for employment available. Much of the labor was done by soldiers, but many local day laborers were also involved.17 Tessin very likely fell into his profession by accident. There is no evidence that he had any interest in a building career before suddenly joining the Swedish fortifications corps as a twenty-year-old in 1636. We must then ask if Tessin was at this point at all interested in artistic matters, in style and fashion. Was his knowledge and experience of the arts in Pomerania and Germany that of a passive observer, or that of an untrained enthusiast, a dilettante? We have very little to go on in this question, but it is likely that the answer lies somewhere between these two poles. Sandrart later wrote that Tessin’s love of drawing was well known among his friends, who consequently recommended him to the fortifications corps.18 This is not at all supported by his earliest drawings, however, which are very schematic and dry.19 Indeed, Tessin was never a particularly gifted draftsman. Even at the height of his career he struggled with the human figure, and always relied heavily on the straight edge and compass. His drawings after the 1650s have a certain rigorous elegance, but one that comes of diligent practice rather than natural talent. Sandrart’s comment seems rather to reflect a common topos in artists’ biographies of talent discovered through untutored drawings.20 If Tessin was an interested observer of artistic life in Pomerania, he had two main sources of artistic reference: the ducal court and the merchant city. The Pomeranian court was more deeply engaged in cultural affairs than is generally recognized.21 The Stettin palace was an impressive structure, with a large open courtyard (figure 12). The palace housed important collections, centered around the Pomeranian Kunstschrank (collector’s chest) made in Augsburg in 1610–1616 by Philipp Hainhofer, with the contributions of a number of other figures.22 Hainhofer was a presiding figure in the Augsburg art world, an agent and connoisseur associated with many of the most important collectors and patrons in northern Europe. Duke Philipp II had met him in Augsburg in 1610, and they corresponded regularly thereafter. Hainhofer encouraged the duke to develop a collection on the model of Emperor Rudolf II and Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, further developing an interest that had already been aroused by a stay at the court of Christian IV of Denmark. Indeed, the Kunstschrank can be seen as the capstone of Philipp’s Kunstkammer, or chamber of arts and curiosities. Hainhofer considered it one of his greatest achievements, and personally delivered it to the duke in Stettin in 1617.23 17

StSA Rep 33, Nr 698 and Rep 33, Nr 554 (both for the years 1633–1634). The document entitled Gewiße Abrede undt Verabscheidigung der Wergke vmb die Stadt Stralsundt reparation vndt verbeßerung betreffendt gives a thorough description of the necessary repairs to the defensive structure. The work appears to have been overseen at first by an engineer named Johannes Ladislaus Melbitz. Tessin is mentioned nowhere in the records. 18 Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild-, und Mahlerey Künste, vol 1 (Nuremberg, 1675), 347. 19 Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 178, has proposed a 1641 plan for Axel Oxenstierna’s Fiholm estate (figure 17) as Tessin’s earliest known drawing. 20 To the degree that Sandrart’s comments on this point are valid, they were probably based on Ehrenstrahl’s opinions of Tessin’s mature draftsmanship, which was the painter’s only point of reference. Tessin and Ehrenstrahl could have met for the first time in 1653, in the window between Tessin’s return to Sweden and

his move to Borgholm and Ehrenstrahl’s subsequent departure for Italy. If they missed each other in this narrow window or a few short visits to Stockholm, they would have met for the first time around 1661. Although Ehrenstrahl supplied Sandrart with biographical information on Tessin, he would have been unfamiliar with the awkward early drawings and have known only the much more accomplished style in place after his return from Italy, from which either he or Sandrart may have supposed a longstanding interest in draftsmanship. 21 Hellmuth Bethe, Die Kunst am Hofe der pommerschen Herzöge (Berlin, 1937); Barbara Januszkiewicz, ed, Sztuka na dworze książąt Pomorza Zachodniego w XVI-XVII wieku (Warsaw, 1986). 22 Julius Lessing and Adolf Brüning, Der Pommersche Kunstschrank (Berlin, 1905); Hellmut Hannes, “Der Pommersche Kunstschrank. Entstehung, Umfeld, Schicksal” Baltische Studien NS 76 (1990): 81–115. The chest was destroyed in the Second World War. 23 The delivery was recorded in a small painting made in Augsburg around 1615 by Anton Mozart, now in the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum.

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Hainhofer kept a journal of his stay in Pomerania, which contains rich observations on the Pomeranian collections. It is very anecdotal, however, and descriptions of the ducal art collections are mixed in with notes on the quality of local fish and other comments that one would not expect from someone as artistically oriented as the Augsburg impresario. Nonetheless, Hainhofer noted a fine Madonna and child in the palace church by the Munich painter Christoph Schwartz, with two pendant angels, which seem to have been a gift from the Bavarian duke, and a pair of paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Younger.24 Cranach the Elder had painted a portrait of Philipp I in 1541, and Saxony lay behind the artistic life of the Pomeranian court more generally. It was not entirely dominant, however, for it was complemented and mediated by the work of artists from elsewhere in Germany, as well as the Low Countries and Italy. The structure of the palace chapel, for example, was derived from the palace chapel in Torgau (Saxony), consecrated by Luther himself, but it is reported by Hainhofer to have been designed by an Italian.25 The altarpiece was likely the work of the court painter Giovanni Baptista Perini, a Florentine who also worked in Berlin and Königsberg. Likewise, Philipp commissioned a large silver altar with reliefs from the Passion made by the Braunschweig sculptor Johann Körver after prints by the Haarlem engraver Hendrick Goltzius. The ensemble was framed in dark wood with classical motifs typical of Augsburg workshops. Philipp himself selected the prints to be used as source images. 12. Stettin Residence. From Merian, Topographia The Pomeranian dukes maintained a secBrandenburgici, 1652. ondary residence closer to Stralsund at Wolgast.26 The building was the outgrowth of a medieval fortress with components from many different periods, but Tessin would have known it largely as a mid-sixteenth-century structure with four wings of unequal height framing a central courtyard and two towers. The scrolled gables were consistent with the Netherlandish-German 24

Freiherr L Baron von Medem, ed, “Philipp Hainhofers Reise-Tagebuch, enthaltend Schilderungen aus Franken, Sachsen, der Mark Brandenburg und Pommern im Jahr 1617” Baltische Studien 2 (1834): 1–160. The notes on the arts at the court are summarized in Julius Mueller, “Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der Kunst und ihrer Denkmäler in Pommern” Baltische Studien 28 (1878): 39–62. 25 For the Stettin palace chapel, see Marcin Wisłocki, “’Im übrigen erinnere ich mich/ das Vitruvius solche

Art zu bauen nennet formam jonicam’ – The Dukes’ Chapel of the Castle in Szczecin” The Problem of Classical Ideal in the Art and Architecture of the Countries around the Baltic Sea, ed Krista Kodres et al (Tallinn, 2003), 85–99. 26 For the Wolgast palace, see Norbert Buske and Sabine Bock, Wolgast. Herzogliche Residenz und Schloß Kirchen und Kapellen Hafen und Stadt (Schwerin, 1995).

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type found throughout the Baltic. The residence was severely damaged in 1675 by the troops of the elector of Brandenburg. Its destruction makes it difficult to speak of the palace in detail, but some sculptural details have survived that suggest an interest in a more directly Italianate taste. An impressive large cast bronze epitaph for Philip I from the 1560s survives in the church of St Peter in the town. It employs Latin characters within a consistently classical formal vocabulary. It is framed by pilasters with candelabra set under an entablature with putti frolicking in scrollwork and an egg-and-dart motif. It was cast by Wolfgang Hilliger from the workshop that cast the memorial tablet in the Schloßkapelle in Torgau in 1545, the year after it was consecrated by Martin Luther. As we have seen in the chapel in Stettin, it appears that the Pomeranian dukes looked to Saxony for leadership in the arts – both for modern taste, which was in this case the classical or Italianate tradition, and for the iconography of a Lutheran court. As would later be even more evident in Tessin’s Stockholm, these two qualities were hardly in opposition. Most of the fruits of court patronage remained in the ducal residences and inaccessible to Tessin. A more likely reference point is therefore what he could see in the churches in and around Stralsund. The best of these works came from around the turn of the seventeenth 13. Pulpit, St Nicholas’s, Stralsund, 1611. century, such as the marble and alabaster pulpit made by an anonymous master with the initials M.H.B. and installed in 1611 in St Nikolai church, where Tessin was baptized and where he presumably attended services throughout his youth (figure 13). There were also many painted and carved epitaphs from the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth centuries, as well as baptismal fonts, pews, and other furnishings. Although these are of very uneven quality, many made use of classical themes and ornament. Farther west, there was a remarkable arcaded funeral loggia of Duke Adolf Friedrich I of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in Doberan, begun ca 1630, just as Tessin began to think about a career in architecture. Tessin could also have seen significant sculptural works by Philipp Brandin in Güstrow and Wismar, where he also built a public well in a fully classical manner with herms and friezes; a smaller series of herms in the lantern-like roof structure feature Ionic scrolls on their heads in the manner of Cornelis Floris of Antwerp (figure 14).27 This very self-conscious classicism is also evident in the façade of the Wismar Fürstenhof from the 1550s, where terracotta pilasters and arcaded window dressings are brought together by 27

The kneeling priant in Güstrow of the duke of Mecklenburg and his wives was repeated in a more

provincial variant in nearby Semlow by the workshop of Claus Midow for Christoph von Behr and his wife.

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a running frieze of scenes from the Trojan war.28 But although these decorative works could introduce the young Tessin to elements of classical principles in the columns and gables of epitaphs, the fact remains that, with the exception of the well in Wismar, these were all ornamental additions to gothic churches. St Nikolai is a spare thirteenth-century brick structure, and the other major churches in Stralsund and elsewhere in the region are not significantly different. If Tessin ever entertained thoughts of a career as a builder or architect in Pomerania, these were probably quickly crushed. Life was difficult for everyone, but those dependent on patronage of the arts may have been among the first to flee. The Stettin sculptor Hermann Höfing left Germany and reestablished himself in Sweden around mid-century. He attributed his ruination entirely to the war, “so that I as a pauper had to flee with wife and children.”29 Likewise, in 1626 Jacob Wilde, the Stralsund city building master, left for Kalmar in southern Sweden, a city that traditionally recruited most of its skilled builders and sculptors from the southern coast of the Baltic.30 The Pomeranian court offered no promise. Bogislav XIV had no heir, a fact that was obvious to all observers, and control of the duchy was disputed by Brandenburg and Sweden well before his death in 1637. The situation was no better in neighboring Mecklenburg. In 1627 Wallenstein took over the 14. Philipp Brandin, Fountain in Wismar, Finished 1602. court at Güstrow. Had he become well established, he might have created a viable court there, and with it the accompanying creative opportunities for artists. This possibility ended suddenly with his murder in February of 1634, however.31 Danzig (now Gdańsk in Poland) had flowered 28

The interest in classicism appears to have been primarily a court affair, however. In 1569–1571 the merchant and councilman Hinrich Schabbell built a large house in brick with scrolled gables more in keeping with what could be seen elsewhere in northern Germany and around the Baltic. Philipp Brandin evidently served as the building master. See Klaus-Dieter Hoppe, “Das Schabbellhaus – Stadtgeschichtliches Museum” Museum und Denkmalpflege in Wismar 1 (1979): 9–26. 29 Quoted in Göran Axel-Nilsson, Dekorativ stenhuggarkonst i yngre vasastil (Lund, 1950), 403. “Ich endesbenanter, der bild und steinhauer kunst zugethan und in meinen jungen Jahren eine heraume Zeit in der Welt herummer gezogen bin, nachdem ich nun durch Gottes schidung meine Wohnung zum Dam beij alten Stetin bekommen und vermeinet meine Kunst allder zugebrauchen, und mit ehren mich zu ernehren, so bin ich leider von den brandenburgischen und keijserlichen Kriesgsvolchen bis auf den grund ruiniret und

verderbet worden, dass ich also alls armuth mich mit Weib und Kindern die Flucht habe gehen müssen, und welches mein grössestes Elend ist, so habe ich durch grosse und schwere Kranckheit, Gott dem allmächtigen seij es geklaget und heimgestellet, mein Gesichte dermassen verlohren, dass ich meine ehrlich gelernte Kunst nicht mehr exerciren und brauchen kan.” 30 Manne Hofrén, Kalmar. Karolinska borgarhus i sten (Stockholm, 1970), 184–186. 31 For the effects of the war on Mecklenburg, see Ernst Münch, “Die Folgen des 30jährigen Krieges für Mecklenburg” Der Westfälische Frieden von 1648 – Wende in der Geschichte des Ostseeraums (Hamburg, 2001), 267–287. For the arts in Mecklenburg at the end of the sixteenth century, see Carsten Neumann, Die Kunst am Hofe Ulrichs zu Mecklenburg (Kiel, 2008), and, more generally, the catalogue 1000 Jahre Mecklenburg. Geschichte und Kunst einer europäischen Region (Rostock, 1995).

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early in the seventeenth century, but by the 1630s this city, too, was in decline.32 Thus, with the exception of Schleswig, there were in effect no centers of courtly patronage on the Baltic coast of Germany. Nor did the Hansa cities offer much promise. The league had long been in decline, and most of its cities could not undertake the ambitious projects that they had in the later Middle Ages; even the most prosperous, such as Hamburg, were not great centers of patronage, as Ehrenstrahl discovered. The opportunities simply were not there, and the best hopes for a prosperous career for someone like Tessin lay elsewhere.33 With the extinction of the Stettin court, Stockholm became the most relevant power center for Pomeranians. This was in many ways an obvious choice: Sweden occupied the duchy from 1630, and ruled it officially and in perpetuity after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (but in reality only until 1815, by which point most of the territory had already been seized by a militant Brandenburg-Prussia). The governors who resided in Stralsund and Stettin created a limited court milieu, but this paled in comparison to that in Stockholm, which was funded in part by tax revenues from the German provinces. Nicodemus Tessin realized this very early on, and he and two of his brothers seized the opportunity to move to Sweden.34 Oxenstierna and Örnehufvud – Civil and Military Work in Sweden Tessin entered the Swedish fortifications corps in 1636, but there is no trace of him in the documents in the following years. The record is in fact so bare that some have assumed that he did not leave Pomerania until 1639.35 Tessin himself wrote later in life that he entered Christina’s service in 1636 as a “copio conducteur” and “ingenieur” (building leader and engineer) with the military.36 This would seem to solve the problem, unless, of course, he meant that he entered the queen’s service in Pomerania at that date. His text is oddly silent on where he entered the Swedish service, however, and this is itself instructive: we get the impression that it was the most natural thing in the world that a Pomeranian would pursue a career elsewhere in the Swedish domains around the Baltic, just as if he had been born in Gothenburg, Kalmar, or Riga. There is a very appealing reason to believe that Tessin might in fact have left Pomerania in 1636. On July 4 of that year, Axel Oxenstierna, the state chancellor and leader of the regency, and Olof Hansson Örnehufvud, the head of the new fortifications corps, formally established only in the previous year, sailed from Stralsund to Stockholm. If Tessin was on board, he would have spent the trip with the head of the nascent fortifications corps, and 32

Netherlandish Artists in Gdańsk in the Time of Hans Vredeman de Vries (Gdańsk, 2006). 33 Hans-Joachim Hacker, “Städtische Kultur des 17. Jahrhunderts in Pommern. Das Beispiel der Hansestadt Stralsund” Pommern in der Frühen Neuzeit. Literatur und Kultur in Stadt und Region, ed Wilhelm Kühlmann and Horst Langer (Tübingen, 1994), 305–311, gives an unremittingly bleak view of cultural life in Stralsund in the seventeenth century. 34 Of the five brothers, Nicodemus, Georg and Philipp came to Stockholm, although it is impossible to say if they all came together. Nicolaus evidently moved to southern Germany, and the youngest, Ernst, who was not yet ten years old, stayed in Stralsund, perhaps with godparents. Georg later appears as an assistant in Tessin’s workshop (he is documented there from 1669 to 1674). A Philipp Tessin, almost certainly-though not indisputably-Tessin’s younger brother, petitioned the

crown to leave royal service and return to Pomerania. The youngest brother, Ernst, was still in Stralsund, where he met Nicodemus in the fall of 1651. For an overview of the Tessin genealogy, see Eric von Born, “Ätten Tessins härkomst” Genos 5 (1934): 1–12. Georg Tessin is documented in Nicodemus’s studio in RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 61 series B. Philippe (Philipp) Tessin’s petition is in RA Biographica, Tessin fol 260v–261v (undated). For Ernst Tessin, see below. 35 Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 326. 36 RA Stockholms Stads Acta 8. The terms used to describe these various activities are somewhat difficult to define too rigorously, as they might be used more or less interchangeably and one person might be described variously by any number of these terms.

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with one of the most important aristocratic patrons of the decade, who was also the most influential figure at court.37 Fully aware that he had left Pomerania in search of a career, he had about two weeks on board the ship to impress his trustworthiness and industry upon Oxenstierna and Örnehufvud. He was in an unusual position to do so, however, for although he worked in the crafts and hoped for greater success in this line in Sweden, he was also well educated and from a patrician background. This allowed him to discourse with Oxenstierna at a more elevated level than would have been normal for someone in his position. He was fully at home both in the world of builders and masons and also in the world of aristocratic patrons. He evidently impressed both Örnehufvud and Oxenstierna, and in the short boat ride across the Baltic he laid the foundation for his entire career in military and civil architecture, the twin responsibilities of the architect in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Tessin’s activities in the 1630s and 1640s are very poorly known, and can be reconstructed only with significant gaps. In 1639, in the first record of his presence within the kingdom, he was sent to the provinces northwest of Stockholm, probably on Oxenstierna’s account.38 Two years later, in 1641, he appears on the first rolls of the corps of military engineers as one of eight “conductors” (building leaders or foremen), but because the records for this post were kept only from that year, it is possible that he held this position earlier. The fortifications corps was a new institution, incorporated in 1635 as a branch of the military with Örnehufvud in charge.39 Tessin thus entered the ranks at the very beginning of the corps’s existence and could rise with the office as it grew in size and importance. He did not stay with the corps for long, however, for already in 1645 his name is absent from the rolls. In the following year he was named royal architect, which must explain his formal departure from the fortifications corps. The terms of the appointment explain that he was to turn his attention to civil architecture, although in practice he continued to be involved with fortifications from time to time until his death in 1681.40 Although his patrons were apparently satisfied with his industry, it was clear that his knowledge of modern architecture was desperately lacking. It was to rectify this deficiency that in 1649 he was released from his duties for two years with

37

Tessin’s presence on the boat with Oxenstierna and Örnehufvud was proposed by Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 16. For Örnehufvud, see Ernst Ericsson, Olof Hansson Örnehufvud och svenska fortifikationsväsendet (Uppsala, 1935). 38 In August and November of 1639 Oxenstierna made payments to “the engineer” Nicodemus Tessin for “expenses on trips.” See Barbro Flodin, “Jean de la Vallées första verk. Hans utbildning och verksamhet före utlandsresan 1646 – sedd mot bakgrunden av svenska förhållanden” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 46 (1977): 126. 39 For the development of the Swedish fortifications office, see Ernst Ericsson, Olof Hansson Örnehufvud och svenska fortifikationsväsendet (Uppsala, 1935) and Bertil Runnberg, ed, Fortifikationen 350 år, 1635–1985 (Stockholm, 1986). Essential information is also available in the enormous project by Ludvig W:son Munthe, Kongl. fortifikationens historia, 6 vols (Stockholm, 1904–1916). Early in the century, fortifications work had been a rather ad-hoc affair left

largely to talent hired from abroad (almost all from Germany and the Low Countries). Gustaf II Adolf had planned to make it an official part of the military, and indicated that Örnehufvud would take on this responsibility. This did not happen until 1635, when Örnehufvud was named general quartermaster over fortifications. The corps came under the oversight of the war office (krigskollegium) in 1641, the first year for which records survive, and thus the first record of Tessin’s employment. 40 RA Riksregistraturet, February 9, 1646, Fulmacht för Nicodemus Tessin att wara Architecteur och Byggemästare. Transcribed in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 234. For Tessin’s occasional involvement in city planning and fortifications (which in practice fell under the same military auspices), see Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 326–366; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521– 1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 266–269 and passim.

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full salary to study abroad. The official court record noted that he was to work in France, Holland and Italy, but he spent by far the greatest part of his time abroad in Italy.41 This steady progression towards a relatively well-paid and secure court position shows Tessin’s personal drive and ambition quite clearly. It also demonstrates the opportunities that were available in Stockholm for someone of his talent and work ethic, and it is significant that this career path closely reflected Ehrenstrahl’s. The actual progress was far more serpentine, however, and is worth closer attention. Building Master and Architect Beginning in 1640, Tessin worked on civilian projects for the chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, though he was at this point no civil architect in the modern sense.42 However talented and ambitious he may have been, his only training, so far as we know, was in the construction of walls, bastions and ditches. The technical nature of his work can hardly be overstated. He was more concerned at this point with the appropriate depth for structural foundations rather than with the distillation of the abstract proportional principles of Vignola and Palladio. If Tessin was at this point hardly equipped to produce a modern design for a noble residence, he was just the man to realize the plans of another builder. Even while he was nominally a fortifications engineer for a very strained military, we find him in the spring of 1640 in charge of the building site of Oxenstierna’s estate at Fiholm (figure 15).43 The buildings themselves were evidently designed by the Frenchman Simon de la Vallée, who had come from Stadholder Frederik Hendrik’s court in 1637, though the main building was never built and, as we shall see, the design process in these years left a great deal up to the individual craftsmen working on the site. Tessin was to survey and lay out the plot on which the house and its auxiliary structures, including the garden, would be built. He was to organize the labor, oversee the digging for the foundation and instruct the masons who would raise the stone walls. Once all this was done and the work was underway, he was to cross the Mälar lake and inspect work on another of Oxenstierna’s estates, Tidö, where the decorative work was underway. If anything deviated from the plan, he was to fix it. At the same time, he oversaw work at the nearby Jäder church, which was closely associated with the Oxenstierna family (figure 16). This church, perhaps better than the chancellor’s other projects, represents the brick-and-sandstone style of the Low Countries and Baltic that was so prevalent in the kingdom until the 1650s. The building master was responsible for the oversight of these projects, although the patron himself was always the final authority on questions of progress and quality, and usually kept a close eye on the worksite. Oxenstierna was busy with affairs of state, however. He asked Tessin to lead the work, acting as a building master, and also to keep a critical eye on the developing work, taking over some of the responsibility typically left to the patron. Tessin thus approximated the traditional role of the building master in his work for Oxenstierna, but 41

RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5710, March 13, 1651. “Wir Christina … Thun kundt hiemit, demnach gegen wertigen Unser bedienter undt lieber getreuer Nicodemus Tessin von Unß in einigen Verrichtungen nacher Teutschlandt, Italien, Franckreich undt Hollandt abgefertiget.” 42 Tessin remained on Oxenstierna’s payroll until the middle of 1643. See Barbro Flodin, “Jean de la Vallée’s första verk. Hans utbildning och verksamhet fore

utlandsresan 1646 – sedd mot bakgrunden av svenska förhållanden” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 46 (1977): 126. 43 Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 173–191, treats Tessin’s earliest work. For Tessin and de la Vallée at Fiholm and Tidö, see Tord O:son Nordberg, De la Vallée. En arkitektfamilj i Frankrike, Holland och Sverige/ Les De la Vallée. Vie d’une famille d’architectes en France, Hollande et Suède (Stockholm, 1970), 208–228.

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15. Simon de la Vallée, Fiholm, ca 1641.

diverged in two major respects. First, he took over some of the patron’s role. Second, and more significantly, he was not asked to develop plans or contribute to the overall scheme, which, for Fiholm, was probably worked out largely by de la Vallée, with significant input from Oxenstierna. The building master was usually trained in one of several trades related to construction – carpentry, masonry, and so on – though Tessin’s background in fortifications also qualified him to undertake this task. For any given project an experienced tradesman would agree to oversee the project from beginning to end, securing materials and organizing the various logistical aspects of construction that are part of any building project. Consideration of the design was largely limited to ensuring that the patron and the master were in agreement on the expected size, general form and features of the project, as well as forestalling technical problems. There was no expectation that the building master should have a thorough knowledge of architectural history or theory. This very general description of the building master was open to endless variations, but the same man usually served both as designer and building master. A print of Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie’s city residence in Stockholm describes Hans Jacob Christler from Strassburg as “Inuentor und Bauwmeister dieses Werkes.”44 Caspar Panten from Amsterdam held a similar position for the crown in the 1620s, but, retrospectively, at least, his work was

44

This is inscribed in the fairly well-known print by Sigismund Vogel of de la Gardie’s residence, called “Makalös” (“Nonesuch”), from about 1640. It is illustrated

in Göran Axel-Nilsson, Dekorativ stenhuggarkonst i yngre vasastil (Lund, 1950), plate 46.

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more progressive.45 He seems to have made more extensive use of models and drawings (though none are known today), although he was evidently still expected to spend a great deal of time overseeing the worksite. Gustaf II Adolf created the impressive title “His Royal Majesty’s Architecteur” for him. This designation aside, his relatively few projects were mostly unremarkable.46 Simon de la Vallée filled the post left vacant at Panten’s death in 1630 and worked to the fill the promise of the title. He came from a court milieu, and brought detailed knowledge of courtly architecture with him. He was thus a significant and recognized master even before his arrival. Unlike Panten, who trained as a sculptor, de la Vallée was concerned only with the art and business of building. He seems also to have begun to separate the process of developing the plan for a building from overseeing its construction. This trend should not be overstated, however, for Tessin’s main tasks were to survey the site, prepare the foundation, and oversee the masonry work. The drawings themselves, as we shall see, were suited only to this task. 16. Jäder Church. The instructions for the decorative work would have been very general at best, and the details must have supplied by the sculptors and woodcarvers themselves, allowing the two executed wings to match in a general way, but to vary from one another in many of the details. The skillful and careful realization of an architect’s plans was important work. Sloppy construction on the part of other building masters would be a recurring frustration for Tessin later in his career. The young man was not satisfied with such a secondary role, however, and suggested numerous changes to Oxenstierna.47 Many of these were unrealistic, or at least the product of an ambitious but inexperienced imagination. In July of 1641, for example, he suggested making the wings of Fiholm one story higher than planned. It is clear from the letters that this idea was inspired by the supplies left over when Oxenstierna decided not to build two auxiliary buildings.48 Through this correspondence we can identify what appears to be the first surviving drawing by Tessin’s hand, drafted no earlier than 1642 (figure 17).49 The 45

For Panten, see Tord O:son Nordberg, “Gustav II Adolf som byggherre” Fornvännen (1931): 94–131; Barbro Flodin, “Jean de la Vallées första verk. Hans utbildning och verksamhet före utlandsresan 1646 sedd mot bakgrunden av svenska förhallanden” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 46 (1977): 123–143. 46 The exception is Wibyholm (figure 3). 47 This correspondence is summarized by Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13

(1930): 173–191. Copies of the letters are collected in RA Axel Oxenstiernas brefsamling E 739. 48 Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig (1930): 177. 49 This was done by Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig (1930): 178.

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17. Tessin, Plan of Fiholm, ca 1641.

general plan is clearly derived from Simon de la Vallée’s, but with some significant changes. The general layout of the body of the house with two projecting wings enclosing a courtyard has survived. Tessin has added a series of small gardens along the outside of each of the two wings. Facing the entrance gate would be two larger, square, tree-lined gardens, each divided into four fields of green. The larger changes came behind the main residence, where he has added stables and warehouses where de la Vallée had planned gardens. Tessin’s suggestions are interesting in the context of his later work. The overriding emphasis on symmetry and the integration of garden and architecture would develop throughout his career. They hardly represent an improvement on the earlier plan for Fiholm, however, and insofar as the structure was built (it was never finished as planned) it cannot be regarded as Tessin’s work. Tessin probably continued to oversee work at Oxenstierna’s house at Tidö at least until the middle of 1643, when the construction work was largely finished and he disappears from the chancellor’s payrolls. (We may well wonder how this worked with his responsibilities to the wartime fortifications corps, on whose payroll he remained until 1645.) The house was begun well before Simon de la Vallée’s arrival in Sweden, and the form was decided by Oxenstierna, presumably in collaboration with some unknown building master (figure 18). Like the unfinished plan for Fiholm, Tidö is comprised of a main block with two projecting wings that enclose an entrance courtyard. Heinrich Blume, from a family of stone carvers who came to Sweden from Bremen, carved elaborate sandstone portals framing the entrances to the courtyard and the house. Inside, the decorative doorways and other woodwork are closely related to the intarsia work done in Augsburg and elsewhere in southern Germany. This work had taken a long time and cost the chancellor a great deal more than necessary. Because of his political duties, he was in Stockholm or abroad more often than on his estates, and could direct progress on his building projects only by correspondence. This slowed the construction immeasurably, and also allowed all manner of mistakes to creep into the work. Showing just how personally the patron was involved in the building process in the first half of the century, he wrote that, “I have built much at Tidö at double cost and

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18. Tidö, Begun ca 1625.

more since most [of the work] was laid out and built in my absence, so that when I returned home I have pulled down [the work] and so with double cost built it up again, changed it, [and] transformed it after my fantasy.…”50 Oxenstierna seems to have thought of reconsideration and revision as a fundamental part of the building process, but it came at a heavy price, both in time and money. It comes then as no surprise that when Tidö finally approached completion and work began at Fiholm, he wanted a reliable figure to stand over the site and ensure more efficient progress on the new project. Tessin fit perfectly into this dual role of work leader and representative of the patron. A Position at Court The two projects for Axel Oxenstierna constitute the bulk of Tessin’s work in civil architecture from 1640 to 1646 when, very likely at the recommendation of the chancellor, Tessin was named royal “Architecteur [and] Byggemästare.” The text of Tessin’s nomination matches Simon de la Vallée’s almost word for word, and in fact the letter makes clear that Tessin filled the post left vacant by the Frenchman four years earlier. Like his predecessor, when the crown wished to “renovate some old building or begin a new one, he shall not only

50

Cited in T.A. Bendz, Tidö. Ett renässansslott och dess historia (Malmö, 1971), 9. “Förutan ded så hafver jag mycket bygdt på Tijdöön med dubbel kostnad och ähn mehr i ded den mest ähr anlagt och bygdt i min frånvahru, ded jag hemkommandes haff ner

omkullrijfva och så med dubbel kostnad bygds op igen, förändratt, förvandlatt efter min phantasie uthan mine efterkommandes gagn, så att der jag allt hade rett och tijdigt fallat, hade jag med tridsingen af omkostnaderna kunnat blijfwa förskönett.”

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19. Tessin, Plan of Gävle, 1646.

make the drawing, but shall also see that the preparations are made, and be at the [building] site personally … giving the carpenters, masons and others who should work there a right idea of how the project should be undertaken and completed. And anything else that is part of his field may be added, always letting him work with the greatest diligence and care … as a faithful and honest servant should.”51 He was responsible not only for providing the design (the “Architecteur” part of the job), but also for monitoring the worksite closely and instructing the carpenters and masons (the “Byggemästare” part of the job). As the last sentence made clear, he was a court employee very much like any other, whose task happened to be building. The new post was certainly a step forward for Tessin. He became less dependent on the good will of a single patron and had the prestige and regular pay of a court position. But the post was not really as significant as the title, and Tessin must have been very frustrated by much of what followed. The job was really a catch-all position that provided him with regular income, but left him with all sorts of unrewarding responsibilities. Far from setting him to work on palaces and large churches, Christina sent him to the north of the kingdom in the middle of the winter with orders to give a drawing for a bridge to the local governor and 51 RA Riksregistraturet, February 9, 1646, transcribed in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 234. “Så skall och hans ämbete enkannerligen dher wthi bestå att när Wij finne godt antingen någon gammal bygning att låta renovera eller någon ny att begynna, han då där ofwer icke allenast skall författa desseinen, vthan och sedan förordningen är giordt, wara der öfwer personligen tilstädes,

att leggia der handen wedh, gifwandes Timbermännen, Muremästarne och andre som der på arbeta skole, een rätt anledning, huru dhe wärcket företaga och fullborda skole; och eliest hwadh mehra honom vthi sådane och andre saker, som detta hans ämbete angår, kan befalt och pålagdt blifwa, altidh låtta sigh wara anlagit medh högsta och största flyt i acht taga och förrätta … som een trogen och rätrådigh tienare ägnar och bör.”

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20. Simon Stevin, Plan of an Ideal City. From Stevin, Materiae politicae, 1649.

explain how it should be built. With the help of an assistant, he should then make drawings and measurements of a series of provincial towns with proposals for regularizing and modernizing them before hurrying back to other local responsibilities.52 The effort to modernize these towns, all lying along the northwestern rim of the Baltic (there was a comparable effort on the eastern rim, in Finland), was part of a comprehensive plan to facilitate the transport of raw metals, timber, fish, and other resources from the vast northern region of the kingdom, and it occupied Tessin for about two years.53 One of these urban-planning projects is particularly instructive, for it shows very clearly the limits of Tessin’s experience in the 1640s. Gävle lies about 150 kilometers north of Stockholm. Tessin’s plan from 1646, like the others he made in these years, is both a survey of the town and an ideal expansion and regularization of it, and shows the same interest in a rigid form that we noted in his projects for Oxenstierna (figure 19).54 The town is contained within a perfectly rectangular wall (not a true fortification, but a wall to demarcate the limits of the town and control passage in and out of it for customs purposes). It is broken into a structured grid of mostly identical blocks. The rigidity of the design is particularly evident in the forested island in the river, which was laid out first with the scorer, and only later was the natural topography taken into account (though one wonders how accurately, given the sharp angles and straight edges of the land mass). The grid pattern is broken only by an older gothic church and residence, a town square, and a proposed new residence in the corner. 52

UUB Gahm Persson samling, X 222, December 31, 1647, fol 336r–337r. 53 Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 84.

54 For Gävle and Tessin’s plan for it, see Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 408–410.

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The rigorous quadratic symmetry and rectangular layout of Gävle, though fully consonant with Tessin’s earlier work, point more specifically to the ideas of the Netherlandish polymath Simon Stevin (1548–1620). Perhaps best known as a mathematician and engineer, Stevin’s activities carried over into urban and architectural theory.55 His plan of an ideal city shows the same rectangular form, with a similar, if more complex, canal system, and provisions for the princely residence, church, school, market square, and so on (figure 20). The plan was evidently devised around 1605–1610. It was however first published by Stevin’s son in 1649, three years after Tessin drew up his plan for Gävle.56 Although Stevin’s thoughts on architecture and urban planning remained largely unpublished in his lifetime, his ideas in this area circulated quite widely through his teaching. As a young man, he advised Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen on fortifications. The prince later asked him to develop a program for an academy that would provide a steady supply of welltrained engineers. Duytsche Mathematique, as this institution in Leiden was called, offered lessons in Dutch, rather than Latin. The curriculum was similarly oriented to practice rather than theory. Students received instruction in the requisite subjects – mathematics, hydraulics, and so on – but no more of each than was necessary for a practicing engineer.57 The Leiden academy was valuable not only to Prince Maurits, but also to the nascent Swedish fortifications corps, and there were many points of contact. Stevin’s own brother-inlaw found work there. Much more significantly, Johan Lenaeus Wärnschöld, the immediate assistant and successor to Örnehufvud, came from this background.58 When Tessin set off to regularize the northern towns – though no longer as a member of the fortifications corps – Wärnschöld was in charge of the corps and had long been a shaping force in it. But if Tessin could draw on ideas so current that they had not yet been published, he was also at this point observing their development at second hand and from a long distance. Within the plan for Gävle Tessin embedded a fairly advanced plan for a residence. It has an H-shaped design, with a larger courtyard in front of the building. A double staircase extends from the façade. The whole design is usually related to French palace architecture, although there is no reason that certain Italian prototypes, such as the Barberini palace or the Farnesina in Rome, could not also be in play. But where Stevin put the residence near the center of town, though close enough to the walls for the prince to have a private passage through the city walls, Tessin put it in a much less central position, isolated in the corner of the town with little logical relation to the urban fabric. The city walls enclose two sides of it (though without a private passage, effectively trapping the governor in the residence, rather than providing a means of flight) and the river lies on the third. The façade does not face a square, nor does it have any other logical relationship to the town. This could be dismissed as the work of a novice urban planner, except that there is a town with a similar format in

55

For Stevin’s architectural work, see Charles van den Heuvel, “De Huysbou.” A Reconstruction of an Unfinished Treatise on Architecture, Town Planning and Civil Engineering by Simon Stevin (Amsterdam, 2005). 56 The plan was first published posthumously in Simon Stevin, Materiae politicae. Burgherlicke stoffen … (Leiden, 1649). 57 Charles van den Heuvel, “De Huysbou.” A Reconstruction of an Unfinished Treatise on Architecture, Town Planning and Civil Engineering by Simon Stevin (Amsterdam, 2005), 15. 58 Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala,

2005), 260. Gustaf II Adolf was particularly impressed with Maurits’s fortifications training system, and sought to make use of it for his own purposes. Wärnschöld’s training in the Duytsche Mathematique may also be evident in a short tract he gave out in 1634, in which he argues that the military engineer must have both practical and theoretical skills, and should be at once a mathematician, engineer, and architect. See Alf Åberg, “Svenska fortifikationsväsendets utveckling” Fortifikationen 350 år, 1635–1985, ed Bertil Runnberg (Stockholm, 1986), 48.

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21. View of Barth (Pomerania). From Merian, Topographia Brandenburgici, 1652.

Pomerania that Tessin may well have known. Barth served as a ducal residence in the 1570s and 1580s. Views in Braun and Hogenberg (1590s) and Merian (1652) show the palace tucked away in the corner against the city walls, though even here the residence, the church, and the attached square are joined by a broad axial street, giving them a functional connection that is missing in Tessin’s plan (figure 21). Barth is quite literally the next town to the west of Stralsund, only about thirty kilometers away. Although palace design could, to some extent, be learned from books, and Stevin’s works were fundamental for town planning, there was still in the 1640s a strong local or provincial character to Tessin’s work. Although the plans for Gävle and the other northern towns were to some degree optimistic in conception, they were not meant simply as academic exercises or ideal towns. In 1648, after they had been approved by the crown, Tessin’s assistant began to stake out the changes in the urban fabric. The projects were made more difficult by the provincial governors, however, who balked at the proposed changes and actively worked against him, forcing the Tessin to appeal to Oxenstierna for additional authority to complete his task.59 In Gävle, 59

RA E 739, Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, January 21, 1648.

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only a fraction of the project was ultimately incorporated. Two broad, straight avenues were cut through the tangle of older streets and a new bridge built, giving easier thoroughfare and a semblance of order to the town.60 Tessin and de la Vallée – Early Competition and Travels The assignments that Tessin received in his new position were not glamorous, but neither were they frustrating and somewhat humiliating in the way that the success of Simon de la Vallée’s son Jean must have been. Jean was about nine years younger than Tessin, and the résumés of the two men were virtually identical: work under Simon de la Vallée and various other minor projects. It was thus something of a bitter pill to swallow when Jean, still in his early twenties, set off in 1646 with a royal stipend for a four-year study tour of France and Italy.61 Soon after his return, he received a much more attractive, newly-created post with broader oversight and fewer ties to the worksite, while Tessin contented himself with an increasingly outdated job description written decades earlier for Caspar Panten. It has been suggested that Tessin was able to study the principles of classical architecture in Leiden in the fall of 1647, which might have made up for Jean de la Vallée’s rather grander study tour, and which would have been consonant with the court’s respect for the academic and architectural training offered there.62 The basis for this is the notation of a Nicodemus Tessin from Stralsund in the entrance rolls of the University of Leiden in that year. But while this Tessin registered at the university, he does not appear to have taken classes. If this is in fact our Tessin, this curiosity is perhaps best explained by private lessons not with Simon Stevin, who died in 1620, but with the mathematician and architectural theorist Nicolaus Goldmann.63 Goldmann was a Lutheran from Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) who fled from Catholic Silesia during the Thirty Years’ War. Although he did not have formal teaching duties at the university, he took on a number of students informally. These students came for shorter periods from all over northern Europe – and especially from the Protestant regions – and then returned home, often with a manuscript copy of a treatise Goldmann developed over a number of years and finished around 1660. Thus, although the work was not published until 1696, when it appeared in a vastly different form, enlarged by Leonhard Christoph Sturm, it circulated among Goldmann’s students and their colleagues throughout much of northern Europe.64 There are manuscript copies in Wolfenbüttel and Copenhagen, and Goldmann’s “salon” was probably known in Stockholm as well.

60

Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 410. 61 See Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 25–26. 62 Badeloch Noldus, “De introductie van het Hollands classicisme in Zweden, aan de hand van twee woonhuizen van de familie De Geer” Bulletin KNOB 98 (1999): 152; idem, Trade in Good Taste (Turnhout, 2004), 44. 63 For Goldmann, see Jeroen Goudeau, “Nicolaus Goldmann (1611–1665) en de praktijk van de studeerkamer” Bulletin KNOB 94 (1995): 184–203; idem, Nicolaus Goldmann (1611–1665) en de wiskundige architectuurwetenschap (Groningen, 2005); and

Jan Harasimowicz, “Nicolaus Goldmann Vratislaviensis Silesius - lejdejski matematyk i teoretyk architektury XVII wieku” Niderlandyzm na Śląsku i w krajach ościennych, ed Mateusz Kapustka (Wrocław, 2003), 101–112, all with further references. 64 Leonhard Christoph Sturm, Nicolai Goldmanns Vollständige Anweisung zu der Civil Bau-Kunst (Wolfenbüttel, 1696). For Goldmann’s practice, see Jeroen Goudeau, “Nicolaus Goldmann (1611–1665) en de praktijk van de studeerkamer” Bulletin KNOB 94 (1995): 184–203; and Konrad Ottenheym, “Tilman van Gameren in Holland. Education and Sources of Inspiration” Tilman van Gameren 1632–1706. A Dutch Architect to the Polish Court, ed Konrad Ottenheym and Eymert-Jan Goossens (Amsterdam, 2002), 32–37.

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22. Tessin, Krusenberg, 1648. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

Although the possibility that Tessin studied in Leiden is appealing and has quickly been accepted, the chronology is problematic. On March 5, 1647, he presented a paper model of his project for the completion of the House of the Nobility begun by Simon de la Vallée. The proposal was rejected, but at the end of the month he was hired to work as a building leader on the project under Heinrich Wilhelm, a sculptor from Hamburg.65 He was presumably expected to begin work right away, and he was in any case in the kingdom by the end of the year, when he was in the northern provinces. In January of 1648 he wrote to Oxenstierna of his recent activities, and mentioned nothing more exciting than his trip to Gävle and the other northern towns.66 More problematic still for this proposition is a house he designed in 1648 for the chancellor’s daughter in an older manner that is hardly representative of the classicism that Goldmann championed (figure 22; destroyed 1716).67 With relatively little building experience and a reputation at court clearly secondary to Jean de la Vallée’s, one almost wonders why Tessin was offered a two-year leave with full salary to study abroad in 1649. What had he accomplished at this point that would make him a candidate for such a reward? He had only the house for Oxenstierna’s daughter to his credit, as well as various minor town-planning projects and work under Simon de la Vallée. Two circumstances must explain this development. The first is that Oxenstierna must certainly have been involved in the decision. Aside from the military work undertaken under Örnehufvud, the chancellor was involved in some way in nearly every architectural project Tessin undertook between 1636 and 1649. As we shall see, this patronage continued while he was away, for Oxenstierna received the only letter sent home during the journey. This was primarily because Tessin sent him some drawings from Rome, but he took the opportunity to write a lengthy and personal letter. Second, the decision must have been partly a result of the favorable resolution of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The court was flush with money, and Christina may have realized that a building boom would soon be underway. The queen herself contributed to this by rewarding her generals and favorites with prominent plots of land in Stockholm. One decent architect was enough for the court during the 1630s and 1640s,

65

Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 191. 66 RA E 739, Nicodemus Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, January, 21, 1648.

67

I have relied on Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 187, for this attribution.

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but would not suffice during the post-war years. Tessin, appointed royal “Architecteur [and] Byggemästare” in 1646, was the obvious choice. Study Travels – 1651–1653 Nicodemus Tessin the Younger documented his travels obsessively. His notes are so comprehensive that they form one of the essential sources for the study of seventeenthcentury architecture in France and Italy, and many consider these notes his most important legacy.68 The younger Tessin’s travels were orchestrated by his father, who presumably also guided his note-taking. It is therefore a great mystery that the record of the older architect’s own travels between 1651 and 1653 should be so thin. A travel pass written by Christina in March of 1651 authorizing his passage in Germany, Italy, France and Holland, three drawings, payments received in Amsterdam, and a letter comprise the known source material from this period. To this we can now add a description he wrote of the Medici collections in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and a travel journal kept by Tessin’s youngest brother, Ernst, who joined him in Stralsund and accompanied him to Rome.69 Both of these are significant additions to our knowledge of this crucial period, but both have serious shortcomings as well, for they give little insight on Tessin’s thoughts and responses to the monuments he saw. Tessin left Sweden with several projects to complete during his travels. From Rome he sent Oxenstierna a set of drawings for a “Lusthauß.”70 These would no doubt provide important insight into his development midway through his study period, but they are now lost. While away, he also prepared drawings for a major town-planning project for Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, which will be discussed below, and he appears in the records of the courtier and ambassador Schering Rosenhane during these years as well. He was also bound to go first to northern Germany. Before his departure he had promised de la Gardie that he would inspect the count’s newly acquired estates at Pöhl and Neukloster in Pomerania and make suggestions for their modernization. For Christina he was to inspect the Fürstenhof in Wismar.71 At the end of June, 1651, Carl Gustaf Wrangel, now general-governor of Pomerania, wrote from Wolgast that Tessin had visited him and brought word of the progress on his palace in Stockholm.72 These duties in northern Germany must have taken the whole summer, for it was not until the 16th of September that he arrived in his hometown, Stralsund, from which he and his brother set off to the south. Italy Ernst Tessin joined Nicodemus as a tourist rather than as a student, and his journal reflects this. He was reasonably well informed and eager to describe what he saw – so much so that he started his journal with a two-page description of his native Stralsund, its walls, 68

Tessin the Younger’s travel journals were the first part of his work to be published (Osvald Sirén, Nicodemus Tessin D.Y:S Studieresor i Danmark, Tyskland, Holland, Frankrike och Italien: anteckningar, bref och ritningar (Stockholm, 1914)), and have recently been republished in a more complete edition: Börje Magnusson and Merit Laine, eds, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Travel Notes 1673–77 and 1687–88 (Stockholm, 2002). 69 The description of the Medici collections is in RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5721; Ernst Tessin’s travel journal is in RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5766.

70

These drawings are mentioned in the letter to Oxenstierna of February 5, 1652, RA E 739. See Appendix Three. 71 Sten Karling, Kalmar Domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984), 22–24. 72 Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och i Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 123.

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academy, churches, and so on. The brothers traveled through Anklam and Stettin in Pomerania. With Wrangel now installed as the governor of Pomerania, the brothers must have had free reign to inspect the ducal palace in Stettin, which Tessin almost certainly did not know at first hand from his Stralsund years. Continuing south, they visited the electoral library and collections in Berlin, to judge by the descriptions of statues and mathematical instruments. They continued south through Wittenberg, Leipzig, Nuremberg, Bamberg and Augsburg to Venice. Ernst’s comments on each of these places show that he knew which monuments were significant, whether Elias Holl’s town hall in Augsburg or San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. They are however so shallow that one doubts that he really understood why any of these buildings are important. For instance, he noted that San Giorgio Maggiore lies outside of the heart of Venice. He knew that it was a Benedictine monastery with an important library, and even that Cosimo de’ Medici had stayed there during his exile in 1433–1434. But he wrote nothing about the church itself, and, notably, did not mention its architect, Andrea Palladio.73 The San Marco treasury appears to be the only thing in Venice that genuinely captured his interest. To judge from the length of the discussion of the city, it would appear that the brothers stayed in Venice at least a short time. There is however no mention of a visit to Vicenza, where the greatest concentration of Palladio’s works could be seen. It is possible that Nicodemus visited Vicenza while Ernst was visiting the tourist sights, or that that they passed through on the way to or from Venice. But we can be certain that the brothers recognized the importance of Venice, as did Ehrenstrahl, who spent two years there immediately after Tessin returned home. Nicodemus’s familiarity with Venetian architecture, and particularly with the works of Palladio, has long been assumed, but a documented stay in the city broadens his known repertoire of forms considerably and helps to balance the emphasis traditionally given to Roman sources. The two Tessins continued south from Venice over Ferrara and Bologna to Florence and Siena, and Ernst continued to fill his journal with prosaic notations. His description of the Laurentian library in Florence is similar to that of San Giorgio Maggiore. He knew that the library had 4800 books and eighty-eight reading stalls, but apparently did not know (or care) that it is one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces. Ernst reveals the source of his factual tidbits on several occasions. His notation that “Zeill., in seinem Raisebuch durch Welschland schreibet c. 6. p. 149. daß es a:o 1590 durch ein Edict verboten, einem Pabst eine Statuam bey seinem lebzeiten auffsurichten …” gives away a great deal.74 The historical trivia is inconsequential: a 1590 edict prohibiting popes from erecting statues of themselves during their lifetimes. It is the source that is interesting; “Zeill.” refers to Martin Zeiller, an Amsterdam geographer who collaborated with the Merian publishing house in the production of several multi-volume topographies of various regions of Europe. A number of small travel guides, organized by route, also came out of this collaboration. Much like modern travel guides for tourists, these books proposed itineraries and indicated the most significant cities and towns and their sights. Unlike the larger-format topographical works from the Merian press, which consisted primarily of printed illustrations of towns, buildings, and other monuments, the travel guides contained minimal printed illustration, if any. Many of these functions are indicated in the lengthy title of the book carried by the Tessins: the “Raisebuch durch Welschland” refers to the Itinerary of Modern and Ancient Italy: Or, Travel Description of Italy, in which not only various routes through Italy itself – as well as the routes from Germany and France over the Mountains, or Alps – are presented and described, but also the various provinces, cities, fortresses, as well as their qualities and related aspects; Likewise with many recollections on the current potentates in 73

RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5766, 43.

74

RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5766, 121.

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Italy … All partially out of personal experience and partially from the best ancient and modern writers. …75 Zeiller’s book was published by the Merian press in Frankfurt in 1640, and was widely available to all manner of travelers. Nicodemus and Ernst Tessin left Florence on November 22, 1651, and, after a detour through Siena, entered Rome through the Porta del Popolo sometime in December. They arrived in the middle of a building boom. They missed the large-scale manipulation of the urban fabric that would later be undertaken by Pope Alexander VII (1655–1667), such as Bernini’s piazza at St Peter’s, the Piazza del Popolo through which the Tessins entered the city, and Pietro da Cortona’s ingenious façade of Sta Maria della Pace,76 but there were nonetheless many important new monuments to visit, and several others nearing completion. Cortona’s SS Martina e Luca was finished in 1650, and Borromini’s Sant’ Ivo was completed in the same year, though the decoration would drag on for some time. Borromini’s reconstruction of the Lateran basilica was finished two years earlier, and his church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane was consecrated in 1646, although the construction had been finished five years earlier (figure 23). (It would lack a façade until the 1660s.) Bernini’s main foray into architecture to this point – his bell towers for St Peter’s – had been a disaster and led to his disgrace. However, his Four Rivers Fountain in the Piazza Navona was finished in 1651 to acclaim (Tessin mentioned it in a letter to Oxenstierna), and the Cornaro Chapel in Sta Maria della Vittoria was completed in the following year. He also began the Palazzo Ludovisi (now the Palazzo Montecitorio) in 1650, and although Nicodemus would have profited from seeing a major construction project more or less from the ground up, this was not something that was likely to appeal to Ernst. No mention of it appears in the journal. The brothers roomed at first with a French Huguenot, but moved from place to place quite a bit in the first months. Ernst quickly learned Italian well enough to read, and soon made friends with a group of northerners living in the city. He continued his touring in the following months, and though it is not clear that he was accompanied very often by Nicodemus, both certainly saw many of the essential monuments in the city. Ernst describes the Vatican, the Piazza Navona with Sant’Agnese (the remodeling just getting underway) and the Pamphili Palace, rebuilt on a scale befitting a papal family in the years before 1650 (figure 24). Ernst also saw and described Cortona’s ceiling fresco in the Barberini Palace, Bernini’s statues at the Villa Borghese, the Sistine Chapel at Sta Maria Maggiore, and much more. His comments on Rome are as uninsightful as ever, though better informed. This must certainly be due to the availability of better guidebooks rather than the presence of an engaged student of architecture such as his brother Nicodemus.77 It is in any case noted rather exceptionally that he and Nicodemus and three others set off for Tivoli on March 1, 1652, where they presumably inspected the ruins of Hadrian’s villa.78 75

Martin Zeiller, Itinerarium Italiae Nov-Antiquae: Oder, Raiß-Beschreibung durch Italien: Darinn Nicht allein viel underschiedliche Weg durch das Welschland selbsten, … auß Teutschland und Franckreich, uber das Gebürg, oder die Alpen … Sondern auch desselben … Landschafften, Stätt, Vestungen, … sampt ihren Qualitäten … und zugehörigen Sachen … vorgebildet und beschrieben; Deßgleichen allerhand Erinnerungen, von den jetzigen Potentaten in Italia … Alles, zum Theil auß eygener Erfahrung, zum Theil aber auß den besten alten und newen Scribenten … (Frankfurt am Main, 1640). 76 For Rome under Alexander VII, see Richard Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655–1667

(Princeton, 1985); and Dorothy Metzger Habel, The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII (Cambridge, 2002). 77 Indeed, a notebook survives in which Ernst demonstrated his Italian skills by translating an Italian guidebook of Rome into German. NM Konstnärsarkivet, Tessin biographica H II A 3. My thanks to Dr Martin Olin, Stockholm, for informing me of the existence of the manuscript. 78 RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5766, 177. For the importance of Hadrian’s villa for later architecture, see William MacDonald and John Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and its Legacy (New Haven, 1995).

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23. Francesco Borromini, Lateran Basilica, Rome, Renovated 1646–1648.

24. Girolamo Rainaldi, Pamphili Palace, Rome, 1645–1650.

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Where was Nicodemus all this time? He was back in Florence in October, 1652, where he visited the Medici collections in the Palazzo Vecchio and described them in a long and rather tedious manuscript.79 The room-by-room descriptions themselves are very general, and while a number of the objects can be identified today, many cannot. The primary value of the manuscript for the history of the Medici collections is that it tells us how the Medici acquired many of the objects in the collection, and gives approximate values for them. Presumably it was impossible to see the collections unaccompanied, and a knowledgeable guide led him through the galleries. Tessin’s access must be attributed to a letter of introduction from Christina. It is likely that the queen in fact requested just such a description of famous Italian collections. Certainly this would explain Tessin’s apparent boredom with the objects and his dry description of them: “Over half of these aforementioned things to be seen roughly in the middle of this room are painted [by] the most excellent and artistic masters. All are valued at 3 or 4,000 Crowns. First: Michel Angelo Bonaroutta; Cigulli [Lodovico Cigoli]; Tissiano; Raphael di Urbino; Alberto Turn [Albrecht Dürer]; Andra Sarto [Andrea del Sarto]; and many others.”80 A note near the end of the manuscript after the description of a clock reads: “NB I have taken only something from each chest, with which the gentle reader can imagine the nobility of the other things, for to include and describe everything that can be seen here is impossible.”81 Tessin thus had another reader in mind when he compiled this description, and the obvious candidate is Christina, who, after Jean de la Vallée had already left on his study trip, quite suddenly found herself the owner of world-class assembly of pictures, sculptures and naturalia. She had no first-hand knowledge of other major collections, and must have been deeply curious about the contents and display of the famous princely collections scattered about the continent. Tessin obliged her with a description not only of the objects in the Medici collections and their approximate values, but also of their organization and display. We may wonder if Christina intended to have Tessin advise her on the display of objects or even build her something similar to the Italian galleries on his return, much as her major contribution to the Stockholm palace was a new library. This would have been abandoned as she moved instead towards abdication. As neither Ernst Tessin’s travel journal nor the description of the Medici collections tells us much about what Nicodemus thought about the things he saw, we must return to the single surviving letter to gain some insight into his response to the Italian models. We are therefore lucky that the letter he sent to Axel Oxenstierna in February of 1652 reveals so much about which we would otherwise have to speculate.82 It is clear that Nicodemus had been busy. He writes that he had strained himself to see as much as possible, not only in Rome, but also during his entire journey through Germany. We may suppose that he saw much more than his brother Ernst noted in his journal, and that this included genuine study of the architectural sites of Venice, Florence, and Rome that his brother treated so superficially. He was less impressed by Roman palazzi than we might expect, however. “It seems that in some cases more is often made of them than they actually are, so that one finds only here and there a well-made piece, from which the entire building derives all its fame.” This lukewarm response to the palace tradition of the city was compounded by genuine dismay at the juxtaposition of the monumental residences and other houses. “The palaces are mostly very large and richly built, decorated with many statues and paintings, but are in contrast to

79 80 81

RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5721. RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5721, 14. RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5721, 27.

82

RA E 739, Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, February 5, 1652. See Appendix Three.

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the minor or burger houses, poorer than I have found in any other place.”83 Rome was not an unmitigated disappointment, however. Without pausing after his critique of palaces in the city, Tessin wrote that “I have found the best in this land to be the buildings of the ancients, so plentiful, and then the churches, where one sees many beautiful works.”84 These, with the gardens and fountains, were the true delights of Rome. It is thus wholly suited to this stated opinion that Tessin seems to have developed a connection to the fabbrica of Sant’Agnese in Piazza Navona under the supervision of Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi. There is no mention of this in the letter to Oxenstierna, although he did choose the Four Rivers Fountain, which stands directly in front of the church, as an example of the Roman tradition of fountains. Despite the complete lack of documentation of Tessin’s association with the Rainaldi, the circumstantial evidence is persuasive. Two drawings provide the basis for this: a plan and an elevation that are certainly related to Sant’Agnese and were proposed by Gerhard Eimer as copies or “paraphrases” of a project by Carlo Rainaldi for the church (figures 25, 26).85 With the exception of one other sheet discussed below, and a fragment of a drawing later used in the binding of Ernst’s journal, these are the only certain remains of what must have been a considerable body of drawings made in the years of study abroad.86 Although the two drawings related to Sant’Agnese are strong evidence of access to Rainaldi’s studio, they are not simple workshop copies, and there are serious problems in their interpretation. First, the replacement of what must have been the Pamphili papal arms in the cartouche with a crown – a motif repeated on each of the bell towers, comprising the three crowns of the Swedish royal arms – would have been unacceptable in the context of the workshop. This change of motif has been understood as a personal expression of Tessin’s Protestantism,87 but it is much more plausibly representative of a change in the function of the drawings. Tessin may well have made these large sheets as impressive presentation drawings to show to Christina and other potential patrons, displaying both his ability and Italian training to their fullest, as well as justifying the years abroad. This would certainly account for their unusual richness as well as for their singular survival, while virtually all of the other drawings that he presumably made in these years have disappeared.88 More challenging is the problem of the design itself. It can be considered only a very loose derivation of Rainaldi’s ideas, since on many points it does not closely reflect other drawings for the project. Still more problematic is that Tessin’s stay in Rome seems to anticipate the developments in the building project shown in his drawing. Gerhard Eimer, the only scholar to account for Tessin’s drawings in the extremely complicated building history of Sant’Agnese, placed the project in October of 1652.89 But as we shall see, Tessin probably left

83

RA E 739, Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, February 5, 1652. See Appendix Three. This was not a unique impression. Many visitors were shocked by the inequalities in life in seventeenth-century Rome. See Richard Krautheimer, The Rome of Alexander VII, 1655–1667 (Princeton, 1985), 126–127. 84 RA E 739, Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, February 5, 1652. See Appendix Three. 85 Gerhard Eimer, La Fabbrica di S. Agnese in Navona, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1970), 87–90. 86 The fragment has since been detached from the journal, and is now in RA Tessinskasamlingen 5766, Format A2, 0001:00001–2.

87 Gerhard Eimer, La Fabbrica di S. Agnese in Navona, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1970), 89. 88 Börje Magnusson has plausibly suggested that the Sant’Agnese drawings were made soon after his return to Stockholm, rather than in Rome. Börje Magnusson, Svenska teckningar, 1600-talet (Stockholm, 1980), 163. 89 Gerhard Eimer, La Fabbrica di S. Agnese in Navona, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1970), 89.

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25. Tessin, Elevation of a Church (Sant’Agnese), ca 1652–1653.

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26. Tessin, Plan of a Church (Sant’Agnese), ca 1652–1653.

Rome already in March of that year. Even if this is incorrect, he is documented in Florence in October, and it is hard to believe that he could have returned to Rome late in the fall, worked in Rainaldi’s circle, and still have made it to Amsterdam by February. Either the development of Rainaldi’s project must be shifted forward by a number of weeks or months, or Tessin’s

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drawings must be seen as a very free interpretation of Rainaldi’s latest ideas at the moment he left Rome, which thus anticipated the general design, but diverged on nearly all of the details.90 The changes Tessin made to the design of Sant’Agnese reopen the question of what, precisely, Tessin did in Rome. Such obvious revisions of a project would have been unacceptable within the context of the workshop, unless, of course, he prepared the drawings on his own time. His revisions disqualify the sheets as the standard sorts of drawings and copies made by assistants, and thus exclude what would have been essential evidence for considering Tessin a member of Rainaldi’s workshop. As we shall see, however, the qualities of the drawings themselves were quite different from what he would have learned in Sweden. We therefore cannot know from the available record whether he worked with or for Rainaldi on a day-to-day basis, or merely gained some access to his shop through friendship with the architect or an assistant, or as a simple visitor. This problem is compounded by his short stay in Rome. He was there long enough to see the sites, but not long enough to study the important works in and around Rome – we recall, for instance, that he took a field trip to Tivoli – and to work full-time for an extended period in a workshop. Tessin the Younger managed this, but his first study trip was four years long, or twice the length of his father’s. Yet he must have found just such a balance between studying the practice of architecture and the models in the area – with weight given to process and draftsmanship – for his working methods upon his return were novel in Germanic Europe and unprecedented in the Baltic region.91 One other drawing from his time in Italy survives. It is an ambitious design sent from Rome to Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. The plan was for a complete restructuring of the count’s town of Arensburg (Kuresaare) on the island Ösel, off the Estonian coast. The original drawing for this project is lost, but it is known through what appears to be a copy with de la Gardie’s proposed changes (figure 27). This drawing was supplemented by a written description.92 From these two sources we can reconstruct the project fairly fully. The fortifications around the residence were the only standing structures Tessin had to contend with; he was otherwise free to redesign the town, which he had never seen, as he wished.

90 The early history of Sant’Agnese is exceptionally complex, and I cannot attempt to sort out all of the problems here. Briefly, the project was first awarded to Girolamo Rainaldi, the Pamphili house architect, in 1652. Girolamo worked with his son Carlo, who soon took sole responsibility. In the summer of 1653 Carlo Rainaldi was replaced by Borromini, who, however, had to work largely within the confines of what had already been built. In 1657 Carlo Rainaldi regained oversight of the project, and made a number of changes to Borromini’s work. See Rudolf Wittkower, “Carlo Rainaldi and the Roman Architecture of the Full Baroque” Art Bulletin 19 (1937): 242–313; Gerhard Eimer, La Fabbrica di S. Agnese in Navona, 2 vols (Stockholm, 1970); Filippo Trevisani, “La fabbrica di S Agnese in Navona: estate 1653” Storia dell’arte 23 (1975): 61–72; Martin Raspe, “Borromini und Sant’Agnese in Piazza Navona. Von der päpstlichen Grablege zur Residenzkirche der Pamphili” Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 31 (1996): 313–368.

There are a number of other drawings in Stockholm relating to Sant’Agnese that date from the mid 1650s, but these are by other hands and must have been purchased by Tessin the Younger or other visitors to Rome. The attribution of our two drawings is quite secure. They fit well with other drawings from the 1650s, although they are much more fully developed, and an early, perhaps contemporary, inscription on the reverse gives them to Tessin. Moreover, the changes in the design of the façade are precisely what we would expect for someone in his position, and make no sense within the context of the workshop. 91 This development will be discussed more fully in chapter five. 92 The drawing is in KrA Utländska kartor Östersjöprovinserna - Stads- och fästningsplaner, Arensburg Nr: 5. The written description could not be found following reorganization of the archives, but is described in Sten Karling, Jakob och Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie som byggherre i Estland (Tartu, 1938), 24–30.

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The attribution of this drawing is troublesome. Sten Karling considered it a reduced version by the building master Franz Stimer from Elbing, who took over the project after Tessin submitted his proposal. Despite the uncertainty surrounding his drawing methods in these years, there are oddities that make it difficult to associate the sheet with Tessin, such as the insistent description of waves in the water, which diverges from his more spare representation of water both earlier (in the drawing of Gävle, for instance), and later. Nonetheless, a later copy is also somewhat difficult to justify on several grounds. First, Christina reclaimed Ösel from de la Gardie in 1653, so there can have been only very limited further work after Tessin presented his plan to the count in 1652 or 1653.93 Second, an early inscription on the verso of the drawing reads: “Grundtriß der befestigung des Schloßes undt Stadt Arenseburg auf Osell. f. NT. 1652.” The initials NT suggest that it 27. Tessin (after?), Arensburg, ca 1652. is at least Tessin’s idea, particularly if the abbreviated inscription is to be read “fecit,” or “Tessin made it,” even though the drawing itself is very likely a copy with some modifications by de la Gardie.94 Unlike the earlier plan for Gävle, Tessin’s plan for Arensburg is composed as a whole. Earlier projects for the town by various building masters treated only the fortified residence, and that in a haphazard manner, and particularly against this background the project takes on the character of an ideal town.95 At one end, Tessin proposed a three-story residence. The lower story was to have a rusticated blind arcade with Ionic pilasters on the second floor. The third story was evidently to be a sort of mezzanine half-story, naturally without articulation through the orders of columns.96 Although the description leaves many details unexplained, the design must have approximated the sort of urban palace developed by Donato Bramante 93

Gerhard Eimer, “Romerska centraliseringsidéer i Sveriges barocka kyrkobyggnadskonst” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forssman (Stockholm, 1966), 133. 94 Except for the paraphrase of Rainaldi’s plan for Sant’Agnese, which may have been done several months after the Arensburg plan or even after Tessin’s return to Sweden, we have no standard of comparison for the drawing style. Unless the project for de la Gardie was done immediately upon his arrival in Rome – which is unlikely, as it seems to reflect a more mature conception of urban planning than he had upon his departure – we would expect a higher standard of schematic representation and draftsmanship, which are indeed vouched for by the Sant’Agnese drawings.

95

See for example the two sheets by Georg von Schwengeln in KrA Utländska kartor, Östersjöprovinserna, Stads- och fästningsplaner, Arensburg Nr: 1–2, dated 1641 and 1645, which show only the fortified residence and various windmills, etc, outside of the wall. Michael J Lewis, “Utopia and the Well-Ordered Fortress: JM von Schwalbach’s Town Plans of 1635” Architectural History 37 (1994): 24–36, points out that – with some notable exceptions, such as Richelieu in France – the Renaissance notion of the ideal city in the seventeenth century became largely the province of fortifications engineers, such as Tessin. 96 See the description in Sten Karling, Jakob och Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie som byggherre i Estland (Tartu, 1938), 25.

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at the beginning of the sixteenth century and picked up later in the century by other architects, such as Palladio (e.g., the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza). It is however the town, which is completely absent in the earlier projects by other builders, that is most interesting. The fortress/ residence is separated from the town by an artificial water barrier, but the two are visually connected nonetheless. The town is laid out axially and in perfect symmetry, with the residence forming the endpiece to the axis. The mass of the building is mirrored in the town by a square, and just off of the square are twin central churches. The need for two churches in such a small town – it would have consisted of just twenty-two blocks – must be the consequence of Estonian- and Swedish-speaking congregations. There are few prototypes for such an urbanistic arrangement. Carlo Rainaldi’s twin central churches at the Piazza del Popolo are certainly the most relevant, though Tessin’s plan preceded Rainaldi’s by eight years. In the space of six years, Tessin’s conception of urban planning expanded from the plan for Gävle, based in part on a provincial Pomeranian town, to ideas that were not yet in use in Rome. Tessin and Venice Ernst Tessin’s travel diary breaks off abruptly at the end of precisely 200 pages. When he reached the end of his ready-made notebook he must have continued his entries in a second volume, now lost. We are thus left to guess about the return travel. It has often been assumed that Tessin stayed in Rome until early in 1653, which would mean that he spent the bulk of his study years there.97 On February 12, 1653, he received a sum of his travel stipend in Amsterdam, as he did again in March and April, from the Swedish resident in the United Provinces.98 This poses a serious problem for his travel itinerary, for it is difficult to fit a visit to Paris into such a schedule. We recall that his travel pass, written by Christina, stipulated that he was to pass freely through Germany, Italy, France and Holland. It is possible that he passed through the eastern portions of France and visited, for instance, Nancy, until 1766 the capital of the duchy of Lorraine, where he would have seen the impressive urban planning undertaken under the dukes. It is rather hard to believe that he would have skipped Paris entirely, especially considering the degree to which he absorbed various aspects of the French architectural tradition and used them later on in his own practice. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that Tessin was more impressed by French domestic architecture than by Roman. There is another possibility, though not without its own problems. Soon after the brothers’ excursion to Tivoli, Ernst described a much longer trip to Ferrara, Bologna, Forlì, Ravenna, and Rimini, where he stopped to see Leon Battista Alberti’s Tempio Malatestiano. He continued to Padua where he arrived on March 14, 1652, and where he filled the last pages of his journal.99 He does not specify that Nicodemus was with him in Rimini or Padua, though it seems unlikely that Ernst would have been inspired on his own to see Alberti’s unfinished building at Rimini. This second trip came so soon after they set off together for Tivoli (on March 1), that Hadrian’s villa was probably the first stop to the east on the way out of the city. The well-known English tourist, John Evelyn, took just about precisely the same amount of time to get from Rome to Venice by the same route in 1645.100 Evelyn noted that he was traveling at a very quick pace, so it is hardly likely that Ernst could have described two separate trips within such a short period. Moreover, such a long excursion for its own sake would have been very strange, since they had come to Rome by this route not long before and stopped in many of the same cities. This journey northward thus demands a more 97 See e.g., Gerhard Eimer, La Fabbrica di S. Agnese in Navona, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1970), 88. 98 Sten Karling, Kalmar Domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984), 25.

99

RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5766, 189–192. Guy de la Bédoyère, ed, The Diary of John Evelyn (Suffolk, 1995), 54. Evelyn left Rome on May 18, 1645 and arrived in Venice by the beginning of June. 100

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believable clarification. The trip would be easiest to explain if we were to assume that they left Italy sooner than has been thought, perhaps to spend more time in France. However, they did not take the western route via Genoa and Turin to Lyon, and this explanation is in any case untenable, since Nicodemus was back in Florence the following October to see the Medici collections. Although the documentary trail stops just short, the answer seems to be that Nicodemus, who had recently declared his ambivalence about Roman secular architecture, decided that further study of Palladio, Longhena, and Venetian architecture was a better use of his time, and returned to the Veneto. A longer stay in Venice – it could have extended from mid-March to early October – would have given Tessin the opportunity to study in depth Palladio’s and Scamozzi’s buildings, which he certainly knew through their treatises. It would also have allowed a lengthier visit to Vicenza, where there is a great concentration of both architects’ work. But he may have had other reasons for returning to Venice as well. On a purely practical level, Tessin had remarked in his letter to Oxenstierna that much of what made Rome so singular could not be replicated elsewhere, and particularly in the north.101 In Venice he had the opportunity to study architectural practices in a city built on watery sand where transportation by boat was the norm, conditions very similar to those in Stockholm. Most of all, however, he would have had the opportunity to work with – or at least observe – Baldassare Longhena, the leading architect in the city. Evidence of this can be found in various motifs in Tessin’s later work that can be traced back to Longhena.102 There appears to be some correspondence between their drafting styles as well, but the uncertainty surrounding Longhena’s drawings makes this difficult to assess.103 Longhena can in some ways be considered an heir to Palladio, who left an enormous shadow over architecture in Venice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.104 His Sta Maria Assunta at Chioggia, begun in 1624, is clearly dependent on the older architect’s S Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.105 The basilica form with interlocking pediments is a 101

RA E 739, Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, February 5, 1652. See Appendix Three. “… wie auch ist die materia undt des landes Ahrt alhier treflich gudt undt bequem, also daß es unmöglich, an andern örtern, so weiter gegen Norden, also zu bauwen. …” See chapter seven for further comments on this remark. 102 This is particularly true of the design of the staircase of Drottningholm palace, begun in 1662, which reflects Longhena’s staircase in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. There are drawings of Longhena’s staircase in Stockholm. They are illustrated in Göran Alm, “’Beqvämligheet och skiönheet’ Inredningarna under Hedvig Eleonoras tid” Drottningholms slott. Från Hedvig Eleonora till Lovisa Ulrika, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 210, where they are attributed to Longhena – an untenable claim, as they are on Netherlandish paper and are otherwise hard to reconcile with Longhena’s known sheets. Erik Dahlbergh and David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl also showed a strong interest in Longhena’s work when they visited Venice in the 1650s. See Wilhelm Nisser, Die italienischen Skizzenbücher von Erik Jönson Dahlberg und David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, 2 vols (Uppsala, 1948). 103 See the catalogue entries by Susanna Biadene in Longhena (Milan, 1982), for Longhena’s drawings. (A comprehensive and critical catalogue is lacking.) Specifically, a plan for Sta Maria della Salute in the Archivio

Parocchiale di S Maria in Vallicella, Rome (published by Andrew Hopkins, Santa Maria della Salute. Architecture and Ceremony in Baroque Venice (Cambridge, 2000), color plate IV) appears to be quite similar to Tessin’s drafting style from the 1650s, which reached a consistent maturity in the following decade. 104 With the exception of S Francesco della Vigna, none of Palladio’s Venetian church façades were completed during his lifetime; the façade of S Giorgio Maggiore was not finished until 1610, and thus well within living memory when Tessin was in the city. Andrea Guerra has described the project in the late sixteenth century as a school for the next generation of architects, as well as the origin of “Palladianism” as a phenomenon. See Andrea Guerra, “Movable Façades. Palladio’s Plan for the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice and Its Successive Vicissitudes” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61 (2002): 276–295. For the ongoing building history of S Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore in their social contexts, see Tracy Cooper, Palladio’s Venice. Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic (New Haven, 2005), 109–145, 229–257. 105 Andrew Hopkins, “Longhena before Salute: The Cathedral at Chioggia” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 (1994): 199–214.

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severely simplified derivation of Palladio’s church facades, found elsewhere in Venice in the late sixteenth- and earlier seventeenth century. Even Longhena’s decision to put a thermal window on the front of the building had precedent in Palladio’s destroyed church of Sta Lucia. Many of the structural concepts of his Sta Maria della Salute can also be traced to S Giorgio Maggiore, although they are reworked within the context of a central design. Thus we find both at Chioggia and in the Salute a giant order of composite engaged columns on high plinths framing the larger central space – nave or central rotunda – cast against smaller Corinthian pilasters on the lower side aisles. Longhena of course diverges from Palladio on many points as well, but it is certainly worth noting that an early (though not contemporary) tradition holds that Longhena apprenticed under Palladio’s follower Vincenzo Scamozzi in his early years.106 From Tessin’s point of view, this is significant only in so far as architecture in the Veneto was both vital and part of a longstanding tradition that may have transcended the individual authors to some extent. Tessin could have stayed in Venice until the beginning of October, 1652, since he is not recorded in Florence until the eighteenth of that month. We do not know how long he stayed in Tuscany, but it was probably not very long, since they had seen the main sights the year before. (Perhaps Christina wrote as an afterthought to ask him to inspect the ducal collections, since there is no mention of it in the travel pass or the award of the stipend.) Moreover, he would not have wanted to cross the Alps too late in the season, and this alone makes it fairly safe to assume that he was in France by November, almost certainly via the western pass. He would thus have seen Genoa, whose palaces were made famous by Rubens three decades earlier,107 and in Turin he would have seen a standing pair of twin churches – albeit not centrally-planned ones – on the Piazza S Carlo. Once the Tessins crossed the Alps, they probably headed northwest to Lyon before turning north toward Dijon and Paris, where they must have spent the majority of the winter before continuing to Amsterdam. As with virtually everything regarding the visit to France, there is no documentary support for this supposition. (Indeed, the only indications that Tessin went to France are Christina’s travel pass and Sandrart's later biography, based on information supplied by Ehrenstrahl, as well as various aspects of his subsequent work.) This was a fairly standard route, however. Young northern nobles routinely followed this course on their study trips, among them Tessin the Younger thirty-five years later on his second trip south.108 Paris Like Rome, Paris and the surrounding region were undergoing a period of major building. Salomon de Brosse, who dominated the early part of the century and who had worked with Simon de la Vallée’s father, had died in 1626. Three distinguished architects – Jacques Le Mercier, François Mansart, and Louis Le Vau – succeeded him and contributed greatly to the maturation of French architecture. Of Le Mercier’s work, the church of the Sorbonne (1635–1638) would have been both the most monumental and the most recent, and aspects of it – specifically, its dual axiality – may have been fundamental to Tessin’s Kalmar Cathedral a decade after his 106

For the connection between Longhena and Scamozzi, see Andrew Hopkins, “Vincenzo Scamozzi e Baldassare Longhena” Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548– 1616, ed Franco Barbieri and Guido Beltramini (Venice, 2003), 121–127. 107 Peter Paul Rubens, Palazzi di Genova (Antwerp, 1622-ca 1626). See generally Herbert Rott, Palazzi

di Genova. Architectural Drawings and Engravings, 2 vols (London, 2002). For the reception of Rubens’s book, see Piet Lombaerde, ed, The Reception of P.P. Rubens’s Palazzi di Genova During the 17th Century in Europe: Questions and Problems (Turnhout, 2002). 108 Tessin the Younger’s first journey south took him through the heart of Germany in both directions.

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28. François Mansart, Hôtel de la Vrillière, Paris, Begun 1635. From Jean Marot, L’Architecture françoise, ca 1665.

return. Louis Le Vau, who was only three years older than Tessin, was the youngest of the three architects, and though he had already built various hôtels in Paris and country residences for rich financiers, his star was not yet at its height when Tessin was in France. It was only when he was employed in 1657 by the Minister of Finance, Nicolas Fouquet, to plan the château of Vaux-Le-Vicomte that Le Vau came to the attention of the court. So while Tessin may have noted some of his Parisian residences,109 he more likely focused on the work of François Mansart, who was then at the peak of his career. He could have seen a number of city and country residences by Mansart: the Orléans wing at Blois had been finished in 1638, and the château of Maisons in 1646, and the Hôtel de la Vrillière, which was fairly typical of mid-century Parisian city residences, in 1650 (figure 28).110 As we shall see, it was the type of hôtel, or city residence, refined by this generation that Tessin relied on most heavily in his own designs for city residences. But while this interest was crucial, its manifestation in Stockholm is too general to find specific sources for particular buildings, and it can be used only as a general categorization. The Low Countries We have no indication that Tessin visited Antwerp or other centers in the southern Low Countries, though it would have been precisely on the route between Paris and Amsterdam. The itineraries of the young Carl [X] Gustaf, Carl Gustaf Wrangel, Schering Rosenhane, and other notable travelers are also conspicuously silent on this region, and we must wonder whether it was politically difficult for visitors from such a militantly Protestant state, and one simultaneously allied with France and the Netherlands, to visit the Spanish-controlled provinces.111 109

For the Parisian residences of Le Vau, see Cyril Bordier, Louis Le Vau: architecte, vol 1 (Paris, 1998). 110 For Mansart, see Allan Braham and Peter Smith, François Mansart, 2 vols (London, 1973); and Jean-

Pierre Babelon and Claude Mignot, eds, François Mansart. Le génie de l’architecture (Paris, 1998). 111 Tessin the Younger did visit the southern provinces, but not until his second study period of 1687–1688.

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Notably, Christina requested passage for her architect only through “Hollandt,” rather than the broader Low Countries. Indeed, the most notable Swedish visitor to Antwerp in the seventeenth century was Christina herself, on her way to Rome in 1655, as she prepared to convert to Catholicism under the sponsorship of Philip IV of Spain. Whether or not Tessin visited the southern Low Countries, he found the Dutch Republic, recognized in 1648 with the Peace of Münster, in no less of a building mode than Paris or Rome. Major projects were going up throughout the provinces in a variant of a classical or Palladian style familiar to Tessin, in a way, from his stay in the Veneto. These buildings were significantly reworked, however, and the efforts by the Dutch architects to adapt an Italianate classicism to northern conditions must have captured his attention. This was, we recall, one of the problems that frustrated him in Rome. The solutions found by the Dutch classical architects at mid century may have been as useful as his study in Italy.112 The most significant project underway in Amsterdam was Jacob van Campen’s Town Hall (figure 29). Van Campen undertook this commission in 1648, just as the Dutch Republic received its independence and statehood, and so the enormous building represents much more than the civic stature and municipal functions of Amsterdam. It was not finished until 1655, however, so while Tessin would certainly have seen and grasped the overall concept, he had to wait for the architect to publish his plans to study the building in detail.113 Other significant structures were already finished. Pieter Post’s Huis ten Bosch outside The Hague had been built and decorated in 1645–1647, and Tessin would draw on its plan (also published) soon after his return to Stockholm. Two other important buildings were also to be seen in The Hague: the Noordeinde palace and Mauritshuis, both by van Campen (figures 30 and 31). Although all three documents of Tessin in the Netherlands place him in Amsterdam – he received a stipend from the Swedish resident there – the significance of the buildings in The Hague suggest that he must have spent a good part of the spring of 1653 there. This was in fact entirely natural. Not only had Simon de la Vallée, his first teacher, made his name there, it was also the seat of the Dutch court, and so both the architecture and the milieu in which it was built were more closely related to the commissions that Tessin would covet most upon his return. * * * Tessin was back in Stockholm by the summer of 1653, where, through the mediation of Axel Oxenstierna, he promptly married Maria Swan, the widow of an Amsterdam merchant named Abraham Wijnandz. With a new wife and a nine-year-old stepson, also named Abraham Wijnandz, the period of study and travel was over. The two years spent abroad were essential to his formation as a creative architect capable of designing representative architecture. If the itinerary proposed above is correct in its essentials, he would have spent roughly three months each in Rome, France and the Netherlands, with a rather longer period – roughly six months – in and around Venice. He balanced these sources and experiences

112

For Dutch Palladianism generally, see W Kuyper, Dutch Classist Architecture (Delft, 1980); J.J. Terwen and Konrad Ottenheym, Pieter Post (1608–1669). Architect (Zutphen, 1993); Jacobine Huisken, Konrad Ottenheym, Gary Schwartz, eds, Jacob van Campen. Het klassieke ideaal in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam, 1995); Konrad Ottenheym, “’Possessed by Such a Passion for Building.’ Frederik Hendrik and Architecture” Princely Display. The Court of Frederik Hendrik

of Orange and Amalia van Solms in The Hague, ed Marika Keblusek and Jori Zijlmans (The Hague, 1997), 105–125; Jörgen Bracker, ed, Palladio. Bauen nach der Natur – Die Erben Palladios in Nordeuropa (Ostfildern, 1997); and Guido Beltramini, ed, Palladio and Northern Europe. Books, Travellers, Architects (Milan, 1999). 113 Jacob van Campen, Afbeelding van ’t stadt huys van Amsterdam in dartigh coopere plaaten (Amsterdam, 1661).

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29. Jacob van Campen, Town Hall, Amsterdam, Begun 1648.

30. Jacob van Campen, Mauritshuis, The Hague, Begun 1633.

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31. Jacob van Campen, Noordeinde Palace (Oude Hof), The Hague, 1639–1647.

throughout his career as well as during his studies. Taken as a whole, therefore, his mature work cannot be considered an outgrowth of any of these local schools; rather, he could work in the idiom of any of them as he thought appropriate for the project. He could also combine and synthesize these local variants of the Vitruvian canon – for Italian architects modified and adapted ancient Roman principles to their needs just as French and Netherlandish architects did – drawing on their common classical sources. In this way he was very much like his colleagues throughout the Holy Roman Empire, who sought to achieve precisely this synthesis. As we shall see, the elder and younger Tessins themselves became models in this effort. Their position – far enough from Rome, Venice, Paris and Amsterdam to avoid cultural domination by any of them – was in some ways fortunate. It allowed the Tessins, in the way explained by Jan Białostocki, the freedom to draw equally – and equally critically – from all of them.114

114

Jan Białostocki, “Some Values of Artistic Periphery” World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity, ed Irving Lavin (University Park, 1989), 49–58. By contrast, in the next generation neither Filippo Juvarra nor Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach was able to visit Paris, and Christopher Wren was unable to visit Rome

(though he met Bernini in Paris). Andreas Schlüter probably visited France briefly in 1696, and was in Italy in the same year. None of these, however, had a depth of knowledge of both places comparable to the Tessins, and especially Tessin the Younger. For more on the consequences of this, see chapter eight.

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The early years of the 1650s saw an enormous change in Tessin’s work. In 1648, his plan for Gävle, a relatively minor port town, may well have been a synthesis of a printed ideal plan by Simon Stevin and a sixteenth-century plan for Barth in Pomerania, the outdated secondary residence of a provincial German court. The plan for Arensburg, designed five years later, was entirely modern – so modern, in fact, that its twin churches preceded the more famous expression of this idea by Carlo Rainaldi at the Piazza del Popolo in Rome by eight years. It was never executed, however, and in truth it has something of the character of an ideal city. Like the Sant’Agnese drawings, Tessin may have intended it as a sort of presentation piece for a major patron to show his skill as a designer and city planner and his familiarity with Italian models. The same period also saw the beginnings of a crucial shift in the way that Tessin thought about building and approached his work. Although he had a court post under Christina from 1646, he is in these years more precisely described as court building master than court architect. The contrast with the architectural methods that he saw in his travels must have been as impressive as the buildings themselves. The consequences of this are discussed more fully in chapters five and six, but it is important to emphasize here that he began in the 1650s to pull himself away from the work site and to take on more projects across a wide geographic area, including a large number of freelance commissions for private individuals. It was a halting effort at first, but by the 1660s he worked largely from a desk, for a broader range of patrons, as an architect in the stricter sense of the term. By the 1670s Tessin had established himself as the leading architect in the kingdom, certainly more respected than Matthäus Holl, but also more respected than Jean de la Vallée by most major patrons. The period from the 1650s to the 1670s were the key years for Tessin’s somewhat unexpected success, and we will see in this chapter and the following ones how he claimed the leading position. The basic trajectory of Tessin’s career is fairly straightforward. His earliest work for Axel Oxenstierna and Olof Hansson Örnehufvud was crucial, and must have reinforced his awareness of the importance of connections and social networking. Almost certainly through Oxenstierna, he gained a court position and a two-year travel period, on which all of his later success depended. In the years 1661–1663 he received three more official posts, and it was the monopolizing effect of these posts that helped establish him as the dominant architect in the kingdom. It is true that Jean de la Vallée had similar opportunities – including some of the same posts as Tessin – but we shall see that he struggled to complete the work he took on, which gave him something of a reputation for unreliability. Although it would be a mistake to see this trend in overly stark terms, as Tessin secured his position as the leading architect, de la Vallée moved increasingly into administrative work. Tessin was named City Architect of Stockholm in 1661, a position that gave him responsibility for municipal buildings, such as courts, a firehouse, a town hall, and less noteworthy projects. He was the first to hold this position, which answered both to the city council and to the court.1 Officially, it was created in response to the remarkable growth of 1

The city architect reported not only to the city council, but also to the chief governor (överståthållaren) of the royal palace. See chapter six.

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Stockholm and the consequent need for an expanded urban fabric, but certainly the council was aware that the city was now the seat of a European power, and should represent itself accordingly. In reality, much of the planning for the expanded urban fabric had already taken place in the second quarter of the century, leaving Tessin primarily responsible for individual projects, rather than for the overall shape of the city. A number of these new projects were of a scale and grandeur completely unprecedented in the city. In 1663 Tessin took over Jean de la Vallée’s post as Palace Architect, a royal office that made him responsible for all repairs and renovations to the Stockholm palace, as well as for other court buildings. In 1662, between his two other nominations, Tessin began work on Drottningholm palace for the dowager queen, Hedwig Eleonora, a project so significant that the post and the title were as important as his other offices. These positions represented a significant advance over his 1646 nomination as Royal Architect, which, despite its imposing title, in practice meant little more than official building master, responsible for any odd repairs or building projects might be necessary on the crown’s buildings scattered throughout the kingdom, and many of his most significant projects in the following years fell within one or another of these responsibilities. Carl X Gustaf and Borgholm King Carl X Gustaf (r 1654–1660) is known almost exclusively as a general and martial king.2 Much of his reign, which lasted less than five and one-half years, was taken up by war with Poland and Denmark. Altogether, his career in the Swedish court lasted only a little over ten years, ending with his sudden death in February, 1660, at thirty-seven years old. Yet in those few years he showed considerable interest in the visual arts and architecture, and significantly more sensitivity to quality than is generally supposed. Carl Gustaf was the heir of a minor branch of the house of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, a cousin of the palatine electors related through marriage to Gustaf II Adolf. After the election of Friedrich V of the Palatinate (Pfalz) as king of Bohemia and the ensuing disaster for the Protestant side at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, Sweden was a safer place for a dynasty with obvious political and religious allegiances but no real power. Carl Gustaf was born and educated in the kingdom, and would not leave until he completed his education with a two-year journey, begun in 1638, that took him through the major cities in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and England. At each of these stops Carl Gustaf met intellectuals and politicians, very often through a local representative of the Stockholm court. Thus in Amsterdam he was a guest of the iron magnate Louis de Geer, who made his fortune in Sweden and divided his time between the kingdom, where he had several residences, and the republic.3 De Geer introduced him to Gerhard Vossius, a Leiden polymath, and may also have gained entry for him into the various private collections that he seems to have seen. In The Hague he met the stadholder, Frederik

2

A recent exhibition catalogue of Sweden in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mentions only in passing that when he was frustrated in political pursuits, Carl Gustaf turned to “commercial, agricultural and building activities.” See Martin Olin and Mårten Snickare, “Arte e politica al tempo di Carlo X Gustavo e Carlo XI” Cristina di Svezia. Le collezioni reali (Rome, 2003), 91–97; and Magnus Olausson, “Carlo X Gustavo” Cristina di Svezia. Le collezioni reali (Rome, 2003), 175–176. For a more sympathetic treatment, see Olof Granberg, Svenska konstsamlingarnas historia

från Gustav Vasas tid till våra dagar, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1930), 7–23; and Michael Conforti and Guy Walton, eds, Sweden. A Royal Treasury (Washington, D.C., 1988), 138–153. 3 Louis de Geer was a crucial figure in the introduction of the new style of Dutch Palladian architecture to Sweden in the 1640s. See Badeloch Noldus, Trade in Good Taste. Relations in Architecture and Culture Between the Dutch Republic and the Baltic World in the Seventeenth Century (Turnhout, 2005), passim, especially 56–84.

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Hendrik, through Ludwig Camerarius, formerly advisor to Friedrich V, the Winter King, and the Swedish resident in the Netherlands from 1626. In Paris he met Hugo Grotius, the Swedish resident in France, who convinced him to spend more time in the city than he had planned. We know that he saw the Palais Royal and the Tuileries and Luxembourg gardens, but certainly he saw and was impressed by much more.4 Simon Vouet had returned from Italy in 1627, and his works could now be seen in churches throughout the city. He would likely have seen Salomon de Brosse’s church of St Gervais (begun 1616) and Luxembourg palace (begun 1615), no doubt fully aware that Simon de la Vallée, who had arrived in Sweden in 1637, had grown up around the site. François Mansart’s Orléans wing at Blois was finished in 1638, and he could hardly have missed the construction site of Jacques Lemercier’s church of the Sorbonne (begun 1635), built in his neighborhood. This very Roman church was a serviceable introduction to Italian architecture for the young man who never made it across the Alps.5 Carl Gustaf experiences in the court after returning in 1650 from the battlefield of the Thirty Years’ War coincided with the height of Christina’s reign, just as the treasures poured in from Prague and elsewhere. Although he does not seem to have been interested in maintaining the queen’s circle of intellectuals, he appears to have shared her taste in the arts. He sat for both David Beck and Sébastien Bourdon. Early in the eighteenth century, Arnold Houbraken wrote that Carl Gustaf commissioned a series of twelve paintings of the Passion from Jacob Jordaens, and if this otherwise undocumented project was completed, it can be seen as an emulation of Christina’s earlier commission of mythological pictures from the same painter.6 Nonetheless, there are also signs that he had a fairly sophisticated taste for the arts quite independent of Christina’s example, for while in Nuremberg in 1649 he commissioned a pair of bronze busts (one of himself and one of Christina) from Georg Schweigger, the city’s leading sculptor.7 At the same, time he commissioned a monumental equestrian portrait from Joachim von Sandrart, and a large view of the banquet in celebration of the peace in Nuremberg, over which he presided. To this can be added a series of portraits of various military commanders, all lost.8 As king, Carl X Gustaf surpassed Christina in his architectural commissions, although he was considerably better about proposing projects than about seeing them to completion. He initiated the project for Kalmar Cathedral, and it is his monogram that stands above the door, though this may be attributed more to the nearly hagiographic attitude towards him in the later seventeenth century than to actual progress on the project during his reign. He ordered Jean de la Vallée to draw up plans for a renovation of the royal palace in Stockholm. More tantalizing is a project for a new palace to be built by de la Vallée in the southern district of the city. This project, which never left the drawing board, was to be built near Catharine Church, 4

For Carl Gustaf’s travels, see Hilding Rosengren, Karl X Gustaf före tronbestigningen. Pfalzgrefven intill tronföljarvalet 1649 (Uppsala, 1913), 32–90; and Sven Ingemar Olofsson, Carl X Gustaf. Hertigen – tronföljaren (Stockholm, 1961), 46–62. His travel journal is preserved in KB D 687 (a German translation of the original Latin is also preserved in the Royal Library). 5 Claude Mignot, “La chapelle et maison de Sorbonne” Richelieu et le monde de l’esprit (Paris, 1985), 87–93; Hilary Ballon, “The Architecture of Cardinal Richelieu” Richelieu. Art and Power, ed Hilliard Todd Goldfarb (Montreal, 2002), 257–258; Alexandre Gady, Jacques Lemercier. Architecte et ingénieur du Roi (Paris, 2005), 309–322.

6 Arnold Houbraken, De grote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, vol 1 (Amsterdam, 1718), 155. 7 Karl-Erik Steneberg, “Kejsaren och generalissimus. Två bronsskulpturer av Georg Schweigger” Vision och gestalt. Studier tillägnade Ragnar Josephson, ed Mårten Liljegren and Sven Sandström (Stockholm, 1957), 90–106; Quasi centrum europae. Europa kauft in Nürnberg 1400–1800 (Nuremberg, 200 2), 256–258. 8 Sandrart described these portraits in a lengthy letter to Carl Gustaf, whom he clearly viewed as a valuable patron. See Christian Klemm, Joachim von Sandrart. Kunst-Werke u. Lebens-Lauf (Berlin, 1986), 177–192. The letter is transcribed on pages 177–178.

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one of de la Vallée’s most significant projects.9 An enormous arsenal was to be built nearby. And even before he succeeded Christina, Carl Gustaf began work to rebuild the sixteenthcentury castle at Borgholm, on an island off the southeast coast of mainland Sweden. Of all of these projects, only the churches in Kalmar and on Södermalm reached completion. Borgholm Jean de la Vallée received each of the Stockholm commissions in his capacity as palace architect. Tessin was not entirely forgotten, however. He inherited a project at Borgholm that de la Vallée had undertaken in 1651–1652, but on which he had thereafter made little progress.10 In the sixteenth century it had been one of the residences of the peripatetic court, but when the crown settled permanently in Stockholm early in the seventeenth century, Borgholm was reduced to a remote and little-used residence. In 1633 the chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna, commented that the castle was useful only as a hunting lodge.11 The commission was significantly less rewarding than those given de la Vallée, but it was nonetheless a large royal commission, and carried an importance and prestige that the newly-trained architect could not ignore. Oxenstierna wrote during a weak moment for the Danish crown. Until the conquest of lands now in southern Sweden from the Danish crown in 1658 – four years after Tessin took over the project – the castle stood near the border. It had been an important outpost over the long period of hostility between the two kingdoms. In this capacity, Tessin, with his experience as a military engineer, was better suited to the project than de la Vallée. (The bastions can be seen clearly in Erik Dahlbergh’s print of the castle as it was projected to appear; figure 32.) The prince began work on the project more or less immediately after receiving the surrounding estates in February of 1651. This was well before his coronation, and thus before he was responsible for the defensive strategy of the kingdom. The fortifications must therefore be explained by Carl Gustaf’s martial mindset as well as the strategic location. Its heavy battlements notwithstanding, the project must be considered primarily a private project for a prince who wanted a hunting lodge and residence on a grander scale than Oxenstierna had intended.12 Tessin was occupied with Borgholm from the fall of 1653, a year before Carl Gustaf became king, until the patron’s death in 1660. Much of the core of the sixteenth-century fabric had already been pulled down when he came to the project, and Tessin was responsible for regularizing and rebuilding what remained. He spent most of this period on the island overseeing large teams of workers, most of whom were utterly unskilled. The project that Tessin and his team worked on was a large, square building, with a round tower capped by a dome and a lantern at each of the four corners. Four wings united the towers and enclosed a central courtyard. Depending on the interplay of the building and the fortifications, these wings were either two or three stories. The wings were to be fairly simply decorated, perhaps with segmental pediments above the windows on the main floor. Only the main façade received a more monumental treatment, with the three slightlyprojecting central bays grouped under a pediment. Here there were only two stories, as a set of stairs bridged the basement story and lead to a tripartite arched entrance. The quoins

9

For these and other projects commissioned by Carl X Gustaf, see Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 48–67. 10 For Borgholm, see Ernst Aréen, Borgholms slott under de sista trehundra åren (Borgholm, 1927); Zygmunt Łakocinski, Borgholms slott (Lund, 1949); and Ingrid

Rosell, “Borgholms slott och Tessin d.ä. Bidrag till slottets byggnadshistoria” Fornvännen 93 (1998): 181–189. 11 Zygmunt Łakocinski, Borgholms slott (Lund, 1949), 329. 12 This opinion is also forwarded by Zygmunt Łakocinski, Borgholms slott (Lund, 1949), 329.

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32. Tessin, Borgholm. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

bounding the entrance and the arms in the pediment complement the defensive works surrounding the building.13 The degree to which Carl Gustaf was involved in the Borgholm project is uncertain. Eleven letters from Tessin to the prince regarding this project survive.14 All were sent between March and June of 1654, and they amount to a series of reports on the progress of work. Although there is some discussion of creative matters, it tends to be very general. Most of the letters treat practical matters, most often the shortage of workers and money. This regular correspondence appears to have been part of the extra effort to have the structure ready for a visit by the prince in the summer of 1654, since no further correspondence on the project is known. It is of course possible that other letters were lost or have yet to surface, but it seems more likely that Carl Gustaf was preoccupied with his marriage in the fall of 1654, and then with wars with Poland and Denmark. Though Tessin continued to oversee the project, 13

This analysis is derived both from the prints in Erik Dahlbergh, Suecia antiqua et hodierna (Stockholm, 1715) and from the contract drawing (a plan) signed by Carl X Gustaf in 1658, reproduced in Ingrid Rosell, “Borgholms slott och Tessin d.ä. Bidrag till slottets byggnadshistoria” Fornvännen 93 (1998): 183. These are contradictory on a number of points, but the prints were made much later (1707), and may reflect later adjustments. A second drawing published by Rosell (figure 3, page 184) is not by Tessin, and is so closely related to one of the prints in Suecia antiqua that it must instead be related in some way to the publication rather than the building project.

14

RA Stegeborgsamling E 188. Ingrid Rosell believed that the letters were written in regard to renovations at Kalmar castle, but this seems unlikely as at least some of the letters were signed at Borgholm, and the numbers of workers mentioned could describe only a very large worksite. Even if these letters do in fact refer to Kalmar castle, their description of the working conditions is largely valid for Borgholm as well, since the same laborers were used at both sites. After Carl X Gustaf’s death in 1660, the worksite moved to the mainland and the crew began work on the new cathedral at Kalmar. Ingrid Rosell and Robert Bennett, Kalmar domkyrka (Stockholm, 1987), 48.

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33. Tessin, Borgholm, 1653 –1660.

the king may not have been able to take an active role once he became saddled with state affairs. Work stopped well short of completion after his death in 1660. Carl XI took up the project again in 1687–1693, intending to turn it into a viable royal hunting lodge, but work stopped again as the king turned to other projects, most notably Tessin the Younger’s plans for the complete renovation of the royal palace in Stockholm. Borgholm decayed over the following century, and was finally destroyed by a fire in 1806. Only a portal and a few other details from Tessin’s work there survive (figures 33, 34). A Project for a New Royal Palace Although Tessin’s labors at Borgholm never resulted in a functioning palace and Jean de la Vallée’s proposed residence in the southern district of Stockholm never came to anything, both architects contributed to a project to rebuild the old royal palace in the capital (figure 2). This was part of a longstanding effort to turn the old structure into a palace suitable for a European power. The origins of the project antecede both Carl Gustaf’s reign and any significant role in European politics, and can be traced in one form or another back to the later sixteenth century.15 There was a renewed effort from the 1650s, however, when the crown was flush with war satisfactions and revenue from the provinces. More than ever before, a new palace seemed within reach. Responsibility lay first with de la Vallée, who prepared a number of plans to regularize the palace. Work began in 1657, but soon came to a stop because of renewed war with Denmark. 15

For the royal palace in the later seventeenth century, see Tord O:son Nordberg, “Slottets historia under

sextonhundratalet” Stockholms slotts historia, vol 1, ed Martin Olsson (Stockholm, 1940), 272–330.

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Tessin was tied to the works at Borgholm during the planning and preliminary construction, and had no part in the earlier development of the project. It must therefore have been immensely frustrating for him when, as the new palace architect, he inherited responsibility for the project when work began again in 1663, and, to judge from the remaining record, he received a number of de la Vallée’s plans, without sections or elevations to tell him how the façades and interiors were conceived. To make all of this more difficult, he was bound by contract to save money by using the foundations dug under de la Vallée’s direction, but had no clear idea of what his colleague had intended to raise above them. The project for the royal palace was in a way comparable to the attempt to rebuild Borgholm. Both tried, somewhat futilely, to force an older, irregular structure into a newer proportional and conceptual framework. It thus introduced a clash of methods, since Tessin typically worked out all the details on paper within a fairly rigidly coherent proportional schema. The compromises imposed by the nature of the project must have been deeply frustrating, 34. Tessin, Portal, Borgholm, 1653–1660. and can be seen throughout in the full set of plans that Tessin prepared around 1665 (figure 35). He developed a basically Palladian plan, with a rich portal derived from the Serliana comprising the basis of the decorative central grouping. It also provided the framework for a sculptural program. Of the figures, only Hercules, the paragon of strength and wisdom, is clearly identifiable. He crowns the pediment, and is associated with the pair of equestrian statues of Swedish kings (Gustaf II Adolf and Carl X Gustaf?) below.16 Tessin grouped the column orders around the center of the new façade, disjoining the pedimented portion from the flanking wings and corner towers. The wings are nonetheless consonant with the central motif, as the rusticated first story with the arched windows corresponds to the Doric order and arches of the portal. There is a similar coherence in the upper stories. No doubt mindful that earlier rebuilding projects had been unsuccessful, Tessin made the façade effective despite a great economy of decoration. Except for a double arcade in the main courtyard, the rest of the building is extremely plain. More was done to renovate the apartments and offices than to restructure the façades or profile of the exterior, but all of this was lost in the 1697 fire. Tessin’s brief was not a unique one. While he was grappling with the longstanding problem of the Stockholm palace, Bernini, Louis Le Vau, François Mansart, and others worked on what may be described as a collaborative solution to the unfinished east front

16

Although too causal a connection is unlikely, it is hard not to relate the image of Hercules on the facade to Georg Stiernhielm’s moralizing poem Hercules, published in 1658. For the text, see Mats Malm, “Rhetoric, Morals, and Patriotism in Early Swedish Literature.

Georg Stiernhielm’s Hercules (1658)” Rhetoric and Literature in Finland and Sweden, 1600–1900, ed Pernilla Harsten and Jon Viklund (Copenhagen, 2008), 1–26, with further references. Hercules was also a central figure in Habsburg and Bourbon iconography.

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35. Tessin, Project for the Royal Palace, Stockholm, ca 1666.

of the Louvre in Paris. They, too, had to fit a representative façade into a rambling structure assembled over a long period, and though it is tempting to speculate on how aware he may have been of the parallel efforts in Paris that would later become a preoccupation for his son, we know nothing of this. Certainly each project posed its own set of problems. Tessin was evidently keenly aware of the financial and practical constraints of the assignment. On the exterior and courtyard, at least, he limited himself to a regularization of the structure with a few economical decorative elements. Even this was not built. The old palace structure would remain until the fundamental rebuilding by Tessin the Younger began in the 1690s. If the palace itself would never be completed as Tessin envisioned it, it formed the centerpiece of a larger project to rework the urban fabric of Stockholm to the north of the residence. On an island between the old town and the northern district of the city, he developed a plan for a large, centrally-planned church for the Finnish-speaking congregation in the city.17 This was projected from the mid 1660s, and work began in 1668 on land donated by the regency on behalf of the crown. The site was very convenient to the palace, which soon brought the church into competition with Tessin’s own project from the mid 1670s to build royal stables across the street.18 Already in 1672 interest in the project flagged, and two years later the crown resolved the issue by retracting the land. Had there been the will to see the church through, however, the city would have gained a remarkable church, and perhaps the clearest example of Tessin’s appropriation of the kind of urbanism particular to Venice for use in Stockholm. An early sketch for the exterior of the church shows a series of very clear references to Baldassare Longhena’s Sta Maria della Salute, including paired sets of giant scrolls cascading down from the attic story. The church would have been built on a short spit of land, surrounded on three sides by water, much as Longhena’s church 17

Martin Olsson, “Nikodemus Tessins Finska kyrka” Rig 9 (1926): 34–54; Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich (Stockholm, 1961), 348– 358; idem, “Romerska centraliseringsidéer i Sveriges barocka kyrkobyggnadskonst” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forssman (Stockholm, 1966), 131–188.

18

Ludvig Magnus Bååth, Helgeandsholmen och Norrström från äldsta tid till våra dagar, vol 1 (Uppsala, 1916), 259–266; Martin Olin, “Tessin’s Project for Royal Stables on Helgeandsholmen” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 159–170. See also chapter nine.

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36. Tessin, Plan of Finnish Church, Stockholm, ca 1666–1668.

37. Tessin, Project for Finnish Church, Stockholm, ca 1666–1668.

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ELDER sits at the entrance to the grand canal (figures 36, 37, 38).19 The water view would in fact have been dominant, for the façade proper was enclosed in a small, trapezoidal courtyard, while all traffic inland, including the upper classes traveling by boat to the various country residences on the Mälar lake, would have passed by the church reflecting in the water. Where Tessin the Younger would later make a basically Roman palace work with a water-bound location, his father arguably gave priority to the nature of the site in considering appropriate sources for his work. Kalmar Cathedral

The various projects for new royal palaces in Stockholm failed until the very end of the century. It was, ironically, in other kinds of architecture, and often in other places, that the crown was more successful in its building efforts. These were in some cases joint ventures with local municipal authorities or private concerns, and we must wonder what priorities ensured that the very large church in the peripheral – though historically important – town of Kalmar reached completion, while other important ecclesiastical 38. Baldassare Longhena, Sta Maria della Salute, Venice, Begun 1631. projects in Stockholm, such as the church for the Finnish congregation, foundered. Similar questions inevitably arise for why Tessin’s project for a town hall in the young city of Gothenburg was built, but the analogous and much-needed town hall in Stockholm failed. And in the 1670s, Tessin prepared plans for a large military hospital centered around a church for Malmö, quite unlike anything near Stockholm.20 Although it is difficult to define a court style in these years, all of these structures were generically classical or Italianate, and in strong contrast to the Netherlandish-Baltic Renaissance structures surrounding them.21 Nearly all displayed a royal crown and the monogram of the king prominently on the façade.22 It may be,

19

Gerhard Eimer, “Romerska centraliseringsidéer i Sveriges barocka kyrkobyggnadskonst” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forssman (Stockholm, 1966), 131–188, points rather to an early project by Carlo Rainaldi for Sta Maria in Campitelli (which is however from ca 1660, and thus well after Tessin’s departure from Rome) and several other models, mostly Roman. 20 Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections.

Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 80–81. 21 The question of a court style is particularly difficult because so few monumental works were built by sitting regents, in part because of the long years of regency. Moreover, the defining model within the kingdom (as opposed to various famous palaces abroad) was the palace at Drottningholm, built by a dowager queen and used only in a more or less informal way by the court. 22 A prominent exception is the bank house, discussed below.

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39. Tessin, Kalmar Cathedral, Begun 1660.

40. Tessin, Kalmar Cathedral, Begun 1660.

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41. Tessin, Kalmar Cathedral. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

quite simply, that in the 1660s and 1670s the crown thought it essential to establish its presence prominently and permanently throughout the newly-expanded southern part of the kingdom. The cathedral in Kalmar follows this pattern very closely (figure 39, 40, 41). Shortly before his sudden death in February of 1660, Carl X Gustaf asked Tessin to prepare the project. This may signal a late shift in the king’s interest, but with his death the focus moved from Borgholm to the new church. The architect met with the city magistrates in April of that year to discuss the project, and it appears that the building works moved from Borgholm to nearby Kalmar soon thereafter. Work stopped in the following year and would not resume before the end of the decade, allowing Tessin to return to Stockholm and establish himself in the capital. When new financing materialized in 1670, the magistrates asked him to simplify the earlier drawings – we do not know in what way – and work resumed under Tessin’s stepson, Abraham Wijnandz. Writers have disagreed on specific models and on whether Tessin intended the church to have a dome, but since the eighteenth century, when the first efforts were made to trace Tessin’s sources, it has been generally agreed that the building has a fundamentally Italian design.23 The pilasters carved from limestone and sandstone that approximate Roman tufa support this thesis, as do the pairs of Ionic pilasters that encircle the interior of the church. It is the pedimented upper story with flanking volutes that has drawn the most attention and regular comparisons to Giacomo della Porta’s façade for il Gesù in Rome (figure 42). Della Porta’s design was hugely influential, however, and important derivations can be found in France and central Europe. Kalmar belongs among these loose variants, and while it is valid to call the design “Italianate” in a general way, all attempts to locate a specific model have been unsuccessful. 23

See Sten Karling, Kalmar Domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984); Torbjörn Fulton, “Domkyrkan i Kalmar. Några synpunkter i anslutning till en nyare skrift” Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift (1987):

121–138; Ingrid Rosell and Robert Bennett, Kalmar Domkyrka (Stockholm, 1987). Karling includes a useful bibliographical review.

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42. Giacomo della Porta, Il Gesu, Façade, Rome, Begun 1571.

Tessin had no interest in recreating a specific model precisely, though some sources can still be traced. The general plan, with apses at each end of the nave and a shallow, centrally-placed transept, for instance, is very similar to the last design in Serlio’s fifth book (figure 43). Serlio’s design includes a portico on the west façade, however, which is the only entrance to the building. Tessin’s solution has portals on the west and south façades, as well as a small, unadorned door on the north façade. The ambiguity of orientation is similar to Jacques Lemercier’s church of the Sorbonne in Paris, which is itself a very Italianate design (figure 44).24 Further analysis of Tessin’s design for Kalmar hangs on an intractable problem: did Tessin intend for the building to have a dome above the crossing? For many in the first generations of academic art historians to take up the problem between ca 1880 to 1930, it seemed clear that Tessin had intended a large dome, which was then excised from the plan around 1670, when the magistrates asked the architect to simplify the accepted design. It seemed so obvious that Tessin’s ideas had been crippled by a shortage of funds that several projects were developed to fulfill the architect’s original intentions with an enormous 24

The Sorbonne was known both to Tessin and to Carl X Gustaf, who first proposed the church and who lived near the Sorbonne while the church was under construction. For an in-depth survey of sources, with further references, see Sten Karling,

Kalmar Domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984); and Torbjörn Fulton, “Domkyrkan i Kalmar. Några synpunkter i anslutning till en nyare skrift” Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift (1987): 121–138.

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43. Sebastiano Serlio, Design for a Church. From Serlio, Quinto libro d’architettura, 1547.

44. Jacques Lemercier, Church of the Sorbonne, Paris, Begun 1635. From Jean Marot, L’Architecture françoise, ca 1665.

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dome set on a high drum. More recent writers have rejected the notion that Tessin planned a dome at all, pointing out that a number of sources – including Serlio’s project – do not have a dome. The problem is significant, for if there was to be a unifying central dome, the four bell towers would appear to the outside observer as complementary lanterns, similar to the well-known scheme at St Peter’s, which Tessin had seen in Rome and which Serlio had published. If no central dome was intended, the four towers are somewhat more difficult to explain.25 As with the Finnish church, Tessin was very aware of the position of the church. It was in the middle of a town set on a small island, where the highest elevation was a few meters above sea level. The primary approach was from the large square to the south, and the façade facing the square is richly ornamented. It was unusual to have the south side of the church function as the main façade, making the transept the primary portal, but this solution was forced by the apparent difficulty of working the body of the church into one of the blocks surrounding the square. The adjacent west portal is also functional and ornamented, though this approach is too cramped either for processions or for effective viewing. It was unnecessary to provide the small door to the north with a proper portal, since it opened on a narrow street and was hidden by neighboring buildings. The upper story of the church was visible from all directions because it towered above the one- and two-story houses around it, much as it does today. Moreover, it could be seen clearly both from the mainland to the west and from boats approaching from the other directions. The second story is in general much more richly decorated than the first, and also more dramatic, with color contrasts and deep blind niches set under shadow-casting projections, all of which make the upper part of the façade more legible from a distance. The four towers work well within this multiplicity of views, for the church appears from every approach to have two towers flanking a façade. Throughout, the cathedral at Kalmar is a compromise between a central and a longitudinal plan.26 The pulpit is in the crossing, but there is also a large altarpiece in the eastern apse designed by Tessin the Younger. This ambiguity of focus extends to the overall plan. Use of the western entrance emphasizes the length of the building, while the southern entrance, which is somewhat more richly ornamented, draws attention immediately to the pulpit and the centrality of the plan. The orientation can be related Jean de la Vallée’s uncompromisingly central plan for the Catherine Church in Stockholm, begun in 1656. The worshippers in this church were divided evenly between four equal arms, and all faced the crossing, where both the pulpit and the altar were housed. This arrangement can be associated with Netherlandish (Reformed) models – it is especially close to the Noorderkerk in Amsterdam – and has accordingly been interpreted primarily in terms of confession and liturgy.27 Drawing an over-close association between architectural form and confession has often proven hazardous, however. It is true that the parishioners reacted negatively to the new arrangement in the Catherine Church, either out of confessional

25

There are some precedents for a church with four high towers, such as Ascanio Vitozzi’s sanctuary of the Madonna, begun in 1596 at Vicoforte, south of Turin. For Vitozzi’s church, see most recently Paolo Cornaglia, “Un mausoleo per Carlo Emanuele I: la Madonna del Mondovì a Vico” Ascanio Vitozzi. Ingegnere militare, urbanista, architetto (1539–1615), ed Micaela Viglino Davico (Ponte San Giovanni, Perugia, 2003), 173–223. Tessin probably passed through Piedmont on his way out of Italy late in 1652, but it is far from certain that he would have passed through the small town

of Vicoforte. He may have known the design primarily from a plan published by Giacomo Fornaseri in 1595, which does not indicate the height of the towers. 26 This compromise also introduced some very awkward passages in the design. The narrower eastern and western facades, for instance, move uncomfortably from a convex apse in the lower story to a scrolled pediment in the upper story. 27 Per Gustaf Hamberg, Temples for Protestants [1955] (Gothenburg, 2002), 197–203; Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 81–85.

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ELDER suspicion or simple conservatism, once the fittings were installed around 1690. But this was well after Tessin had prepared his drawings for Kalmar, and cannot have affected his design. To judge from the preparatory drawings, he toyed with a number of formats before settling on a largely Roman plan.28 But the elements in the plan that have been considered largely in terms of confession and liturgy, such as the orientation of most of the pews toward the pulpit, can more profitably be seen as another manifestation of the synthetic attitude that we have seen elsewhere in Tessin’s work, and which is visible in much of northern European architecture. It was an added bonus of the final plan that a major entry on either axis gave the church a great deal of flexibility and receptiveness to changes in usage. The State Bank

The Italianate quality of the cathedral in Kalmar accords well with the letter Tessin sent to Oxenstierna from Rome in 1652, in which he declared the ecclesiastical architecture in Rome preferable to the domestic.29 Although this statement is significant, it is easily overstated. In 1675 work began on one of his last 45. Tessin, State Bank, Stockholm, Begun 1675. major projects, the state bank in Stockholm (figure 45), which is a remarkably pure transcription of the Roman palazzo tradition in a northern-European context. Public banks were not a familiar part of daily life in the seventeenth century, and the Stockholm bank introduced several innovations. It was the first to issue circulating paper money, and it seems also to have been the first to receive a purpose-built structure conceived specifically for the institution’s needs.30 If the bank was a pioneer in some areas, however, its corporate structure was very consciously derived from models elsewhere in Europe. It was originally the private initiative of Johan Palmstruch, the son of a Netherlandish financier based in Riga. That Netherlandish background was essential, for in the initial proposal to the Stockholm magistrates, the new institution was compared explicitly to that in Amsterdam.31

28

The drawings are fraught with problems. Some of them are published in Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 64–67. 29 RA E 739, Nicodemus Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, 5 February, 1652. See Appendix Three. 30 Jonathan Williams, ed, Money. A History (London, 1997), 179.

31

The eventual organizational structure of the bank was more closely derived from that in Hamburg, however. For the bank generally, see Sven Brisman, Den Palmstruchska banken och riksens standers bank under den karolinska tiden (Stockholm, 1918); Lars Olof Larsson, ed, Sveriges Riksbank. Its Buildings, 1668–1976 (Stockholm, 1976).

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47. Andrea Palladio, Villa Pisani at Montagnana. From Palladio, I Quattro libri, 1570.

The city authorities never acted on Palmstruch’s proposal, however, and so in 1657 he approached Carl X Gustaf and received permission for his enterprise. A decade later, the institution foundered, and in 1668 the crown took over and absorbed it within the state bureaucracy. Although the city paid for the construction and maintained much or all of the responsibility for the project, it was thus a plan for a state institution that Tessin was called on to develop in 1675, when he evidently became the first architect to design a purposebuilt bank. (We will see that this was not the only project in which state and municipal interests became entangled.) This posed challenges on several levels. The first was a basic question of what form and features the building should have. He found a serviceable plan in Palladio’s Villa Pisani at Montagnana (figures 46, 47). The axial division of the layout, with a large room on each side of the main (second) floor, corresponded neatly to the two main divisions of the bank: credit and exchange. The teller’s office was on the ground floor.32 But if the layout suited the functional needs of the institution, Tessin evidently did not believe that a Palladian façade could give an appropriate representative face to the enterprise. The façade is severely Roman, and may well be the most pure expression of that tradition in northern Europe. The block-like format of the façade with rusticated quoins and a heavy cornice under a flat roof all point to the Roman palazzo tradition – although similar forms could be seen elsewhere in Italy33 – and the portal has been compared to Vignola’s portal for the Villa Farnese at Caprarola.34

32

Lars Olof Larsson, “The Bank and its Buildings” Sveriges Riksbank. Its Buildings, 1668–1976, ed Lars Olof Larsson (Stockholm, 1976), 32. 33 Bartolomeo Ammannati’s façades for the Palazzo Grifoni in Florence employ a similar design.

34

Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), figures 50–51.

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48. Vignola, Façade of the Palazzo Borghese, Rome, ca 1560.

It is often assumed that Tessin’s return to Roman types late in his career was the direct result of the his son’s studies in Italy in the 1670s, and that the design may even have grown out of drawings he received in the post.35 While Tessin was certainly interested in recent developments in Italy, these cannot have been decisive in the bank’s design. The façade resembles the palazzo type current in the first half of the seventeenth century, and specifically that associated with Carlo Maderno and his predecessors in the later sixteenth century (figure 48).36 It is precisely the sort of structure that Tessin would have studied in Rome in the 1650s, and for which we have no surviving drawings. He may well have appreciated the severity of the design, with its Doric order and all the requisite gravitas, as the embodiment of strength and security promised by the bank’s motto: Hinc securitas et rubor.37 Hedwig Eleonora and Drottningholm Although Carl X Gustaf commissioned a great deal of architecture and seems in general to have been more interested in the arts than is generally recognized, many of his 35

See, e.g., Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 29. 36 For Maderno, see Howard Hibbard, Carlo Maderno and Roman Architecture 1580–1630 (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1971). For Maderno’s dependence on earlier sources, see pp 85–88. The attribution of the

façade of the Borghese Palace to Vignola is proposed forcefully by Howard Hibbard, The Architecture of the Palazzo Borghese (Rome, 1962), 4–17. 37 Lars Olof Larsson, “The Bank and its Buildings” Sveriges Riksbank. Its Buildings, 1668–1976, ed Lars Olof Larsson (Stockholm, 1976), 27–36.

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proposals languished, and we can legitimately question his commitment to his projects. With his consort, Hedwig Eleonora, there is no doubt.38 Upon her marriage to Carl Gustaf in 1654 she became queen of Sweden at eighteen years of age, and widow and leader of the regency of Carl XI at twenty-four.39 She succeeded Christina as queen, and there is good reason to believe that she took this role seriously, and sought – despite weaker financial and intellectual resources – to continue the advancement of the arts that had begun in the middle of the century. She was easily the leading patron of the arts in the kingdom throughout the second half of the seventeenth century and even into the eighteenth, and it seems that she, like her exact contemporary, Louis XIV, prolonged the style of the later seventeenth century and inhibited the reception of the rococo. Hedwig Eleonora was a daughter of the duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, and thus grew up a cosmopolitan center surrounded by outstanding painters, poets and intellectuals.40 She brought this legacy to Stockholm, where she inherited much of the world that Christina left behind. She took over many of the remaining collections and added significantly to them, but she also seems to have had more of a taste for imported collectors’ chests, fine china and carved ivory than for French philosophy.41 And unlike Christina, Hedwig Eleonora was an eager and involved patron of architecture. She built two palaces (Drottningholm and Strömsholm; figure 49) from the ground up, made major modernizations at Jakobsdal (lost in further modernizations in the eighteenth century), and considered projects for pleasure pavilions at Gripsholm and Vadstena. Nearly all of these plans came from Tessin’s drafting desk.42 Christina, in contrast, made relatively minor modifications to the old palace, but never built anything of significance.

38

The literature on Hedwig Eleonora is woefully lacking, considering her general historical interest and importance. The only biography, which is itself deeply inadequate, is Nanna Lundh-Eriksson, Hedvig Eleonora (Stockholm, 1947). To this can be added Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 78–87; Olof Granberg, Svenska konstsamlingarnas historia från Gustav Vasas tid till våra dagar, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1930), 24–35; Lars Ljungström, “Hedwig Eleonora Prinzessin von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, Königin von Schweden” Gottorf im Glanz des Barock. Kunst und Kultur am Schleswiger Hof 1544–1713, vol 1, ed Heinz Spielmann and Jan Drees (Schleswig, 1997), 287–291; Lis Granlund, “Queen Hedwig Eleonora of Sweden: Dowager, Builder, and Collector” Queenship in Europe. The Role of the Consort, ed Clarissa Campbell Orr (Cambridge, 2004), 56–76; Åsa Karlsson, “Hedvig Eleonora – en karolinsk landsmoder” Drottningholms slott, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 24–39; Lisa Skogh, The Konstkabinett of Swedish Dowager Queen Hedvig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp (1636–1715): A Reconstruction of its Idea and Content (MA thesis, Bard Graduate Center, 2005, which is now being reworked as a PhD dissertation at the University of Stockholm). See also various essays in Karolinska förbundets årsbok (2007) and Eva Magnusson, ed, När

sundet blev gräns. Till minne av Roskildefreden 1658 (Stockholm, 2008). 39 Hedwig Eleonora was the only member of the regency to hold two votes. It is however generally accepted that Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie wielded more political influence. 40 See Heinz Spielmann and Jan Drees, eds, Gottorf im Glanz des Barock. Kunst und Kultur am schleswiger Hof 1544–1713, 4 vols (Schleswig, 1997). 41 Lars Ljungström, “Hedwig Eleonora Prinzessin von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, Königin von Schweden” Gottorf im Glanz des Barock. Kunst und Kultur am Schleswiger Hof 1544–1713, vol 1, ed Heinz Spielmann and Jan Drees (Schleswig, 1997), 287–291; Lisa Skogh, The Konstkabinett of Swedish Dowager Queen Hedvig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp (1636–1715): A Reconstruction of its Idea and Content (MA Thesis, Bard Graduate Center, 2005). 42 The pavilion at Vadstena has been attributed to Tessin, but this is problematic, since the drawings are in some ways difficult to relate to Tessin’s other sheets from this period (which, admittedly, had not yet settled into the more consistent manner he would develop in the 1660s). See Sten Karling, “A Project by Nicodemus Tessin Sr for a Summer Palace at Vadstena” Opus Musivum. Een bundel studies aangeboden aan Professor Doctor M.D. Ozinga, ed H.W.M. van der Wijck (Assen, 1964), 215–229.

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49. Tessin, Strömsholm, Begun 1668.

Drottningholm Drottningholm palace is the key legacy of both Tessin and Hedwig Eleonora, and the three entities are to some degree inseparable (figures 50, 51, 52). It is a magnificent building that was conceived in part as a memorial to the royal family, and so brings together the queen’s evident general interest in building and her constant focus on dynasty and lineage.43 The project exceeded the scale and importance of the works Tessin took on for the crown proper. Although it never housed state offices or rituals, it was a frequent retreat for the court and often used for minor festivals. The proximity of the palace to the crown, its function as a showpiece for the kingdom, and its character as a dynastic shrine allowed it to approximate a royal palace, even if Tessin did not build it in his capacity as palace architect. Hedwig Eleonora bought a sixteenth-century manor house from Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie early in 1661, and on the last night of that year a raging fire destroyed the building. The queen did not hesitate for a moment in tearing down what remained. On January 9, 1662, she paid a wrecking crew to clear the site, and already in the following April there 43

Hedwig Eleonora wrote that she wanted to use portraits of Carl X Gustaf and her predecessors to make the palace “a remarkable monument.” Cited in John Böttiger, Hedwig Eleonoras Drottningholm

(Stockholm, 1897), 66. For dynastic themes in Drottningholm, see Allan Ellenius, Karolinska bildidéer (Stockholm, 1966), 55–142.

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50. Tessin, Drottningholm, Begun 1662.

51. Tessin, Drottningholm, Begun 1662.

was a ceremonial groundbreaking for the new palace. This need not imply that Tessin had a mature plan for the project at this point, but only that work was ready to go forward. This was possible because Tessin was to build upon the earlier foundation as much as possible. Although he certainly had preliminary ideas for the project, it would develop through

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three distinct stages in an ever-expanding complex (figures 53, 54, 55).44 The first project was a compact rectangle completely contained within the foundations of the earlier structure. The second added projecting wings at each corner that gave depth to the façade and expanded the profile considerably (figure 56). The third plan reduced the size of these projecting wings and turned them ninety degrees so that they extended forward from the water- and garden façades. To these he added low passageways extending outward a further five bays to the north and south and ending in a small pavilion on each side. These pairs of small pavilions were connected by low walls, enclosing two small courtyards. At the mid-point of each of these end walls projected a larger circular structure – a centrally-planned chapel to the north and a kitchen to the south, each capped with a low dome, reminiscent of sixteenth-century Italian ones – which define the somewhat stretched boundaries of the palace complex. Although each plan introduced major new elements to the project, each was sympathetic to the earlier developments on the whole, 52. David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Hedwig Eleonora Before and required only minor changes to the general Drottningholm Palace. layout of the main building. It is rather difficult to date each of these plans precisely, but the first and second in particular must have come in close succession, since the central structure was largely standing by about 1667. The round chapel of the third plan was not built until the 1680s, after Tessin’s death and after much of the decoration of the main body was finished. Nonetheless, it follows quite closely the architect’s plan as he laid it out in a presentation drawing for the queen (figure 57). In complete contrast to the old royal palace, which was a forest of towers and irregular juxtapositions, Drottningholm is a coherent structure with exceptionally clean lines broken into blocks of mass. Only one tower rose above the façade, and even this did not remain long. The pavilion character was even more evident before Carl Hårleman added a second story to the passageways connecting the circular chapel and kitchen to the body. The original structure is easily seen in the prints made in the 1690s for Suecia antiqua, a collection of antiquarian, architectural, and city views prepared for publication by Erik Dahlbergh (figure 58). The general relationship of this building type to the French tradition of grouped masses is widely noted, and the palace is often, and rather predictably, called “the Swedish Versailles,” despite the fact that work had been underway for more than half a decade, and the interiors

44

For these stages of construction, see Stig Vänje, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Drottningholm” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 29 (1960): 1–19; Fredric Bedoire, “Drottningholm under Hedvig Eleonora”

Drottningholms slott, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 59–61. These three stages do not include various vague early ideas that survive on paper.

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53. Tessin, Drottningholm, Project I, ca 1662.

54. Tessin, Drottningholm, Project II, ca 1663–1664.

55. Tessin, Drottningholm, Project III, ca 1666–1667.

56. Tessin (?), Drottningholm, View of Project II and Gardens, ca 1664.

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57. Tessin, Drottningholm Chapel, ca 1667 (?).

58. Tessin, Drottningholm. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

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were already well along, when work began on the renovation and expansion of Louis XIII’s hunting lodge in 1668.45 Although the palace does indeed bear an important debt to French architecture, Tessin’s study in Venice played an equally important role. Fredric Bedoire has recently noted the Palladian proportional system underlying the spatial relationships in the apartments.46 The carefully devised proportional structure of the rooms may explain why each revision to the plan left a surprisingly small mark on the composition of the interior of the main palace. In certain places changes were of course inevitable, as when Tessin moved the chapel from one of the four protruding wings of the second plan to the circular pavilion of the third plan. In general, however, it was easier to add elements within the same formal and proportional framework than to recompose the apartments repeatedly. The scheme Tessin used in the apartments is generally associated with Palladio and Palladianism, and Tessin is quite correctly to be associated with that tradition, however loosely it must be understood before Lord Burlington and the Palladians of the eighteenth century. But architecture in Venice in the middle of the seventeenth century was the province of Baldassare Longhena, and, as we have noted, Tessin took notice of his work and may have known him. Palladio’s enduring principles may lie at the heart of Tessin’s work, but Longhena provided more specific models than did the sixteenth-century master. This is nowhere more evident than in the formal staircase at Drottningholm, whose similarity to Longhena’s staircase in the monastery of S Giorgio Maggiore has long been noted (figures 59, 60).47 In the 1694 print of the staircase in Suecia Antiqua, drawn by Dahlbergh, Longhena’s star motif in the floor tiles is repeated, even though this was not in fact used in the palace.48 Tessin revised Longhena’s composition significantly, most notably by extending it to bridge three stories, rather than two. Nonetheless, the arcades joining each of these galleries to the staircase are visibly derived from the upper floor of Longhena’s staircase. Even the central niche in the Venetian staircase found a use at Drottningholm, housing Nicolaes Millich’s statue of Apollo. The loosely French character of Drottningholm is emphasized by the gardens. Tessin had occasionally worked with garden design since his early days as Axel Oxenstierna’s building master. To judge from his letter from Rome, in which he commented on the grottos, fountains, statues, and verdant alleys of Italian gardens, he evidently studied garden design fairly closely during his studies abroad.49 To a large degree, however, this must have been through prints and published literature. His plans show all the components of French gardens, with bosquets, fountains and statues, all worked out in rigorously geometric patterns that suggest knowledge of André Le Nôtre’s masterpiece at Vaux-Le-Vicomte, designed about seven years

45

For a different interpretation of the projecting chapel, in particular, see Jarl Kremeier, “Unexecuted Results of Unexecuted Ideas. Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Louvre Chapel and its Reception in France and Germany” Le Bernin et l’Europe. Du baroque triomphant à l’age romantique, ed Chantal Grell and Milovan Stanič (Paris, 2002), 117–118. 46 Fredric Bedoire, “Drottningholm under Hedvig Eleonora” Drottningholms slott, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 61–65. The proportional system at work in the apartments is discussed more fully in chapter seven. 47 Bertil Waldén, Nicolaes Millich och hans krets (Stockholm, 1942), 91. See thereafter Börje Magnusson,

“Tessin Jr and Sylvius at Drottningholm. The Impact of their Studies in Rome” Nationalmuseum Bulletin 3 (1979): 55; and Fredric Bedoire, “Drottningholm under Hedvig Eleonora” Drottningholms slott, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 128. 48 A later drawing by Tessin the Younger also shows Longhena’s motif in the floor of the Drottningholm staircase. Börje Magnusson, “Tessin Jr and Sylvius at Drottningholm. The Impact of their Studies in Rome” Nationalmuseum Bulletin 3 (1979): 55. 49 RA E 739, Nicodemus Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, 5 February, 1652. See Appendix Three.

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59. Tessin, Drottningholm, Staircase. From Suecia antiqua 1715. 50

Tessin the Elder’s work with gardens has received much less attention than his architecture. See Göran Lindahl, “Nicodemus Tessin d.ä.” Svensk trädgårdskonst under fyrahundra år, ed Thorbjörn Andersson et al (Stockholm, 2000), 44–51. For Tessin’s garden plans for Drottningholm, see Nils Wollin, Drottningholms lustträdgård och park (Stockholm, 1927), 11–33; and Magnus Olausson, “Lustträdgård och generalplan” Drottningholms slott. Från Hedvig Eleonora till Lovisa Ulrika, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 132–173. For the history of gardens in Sweden generally (with many passages discussing Tessin the Elder), see Sten Karling, Trädgårdskonstens historia i Sverige intill le nôtrestilens genombrott (Stockholm, 1931); and Thorbjörn Andersson et al, eds, Svensk Trädgårdskonst under fyrahundra år (Stockholm, 2000). André Le Nôtre’s work at Vaux-Le-Vicomte was not finished until nearly a decade after Tessin left France, so many of the more specific aspects of his sources must have come through prints in the 1660s.

after his tour of France.50 His view of French gardens would in any case have been muted, for he was there in the winter. Tessin was also now able to integrate the palace and the gardens in a fairly sophisticated manner. Immediately on entering the palace from the portal on the façade facing the water – the palace was accessible only by boat until a bridge was built in the eighteenth century – the visitor peers into a false-perspective corridor very much like Borromini’s at the Palazzo Spada in Rome, begun just about the time Tessin left the city.51 This entertaining trick not only serves as a jolly introduction to the palace, but carries the visitor’s attention through the structure to the garden side, where it focuses on a statue several hundred meters away. (Though shown somewhat incorrectly, this is very clear in the print from Suecia antiqua.) Adriaen de Vries’s Hercules has stood there since the later 1680s, but Tessin certainly expected something equally impressive to occupy the spot. In 1684 the queen commissioned a large marble sculpture of Scylla for this purpose from Nicolaes Millich.52 The architect in this way introduced a very appealing foretaste of the gardens, which are completely invisible from the water façade, while also underscoring their strict axiality. They cannot be seen again before climbing to the main floor, where the windows offer a panoramic view in complete contrast to the limited first impression. 51

For Borromini’s false perspective at the Spada palace, see Lionello Neppi, “Punti di vista sulla prospettiva Spada” Bollettino d’arte (Rome) 22 (1983): 105–118; Rocco Sinisgalli, A History of the Perspective Scene from Renaissance to the Baroque. Borromini in Four Dimensions (Florence, 1998). The project was built between the spring of 1652 and the winter of 1653. Since Tessin appears to have left Rome in March of 1652, a clear causal relationship is difficult to establish. Tessin may have heard about it through architectural circles in the city, though Borromini’s pathological secretiveness and distrust of other architects complicates this possibility. One might also point to the perspectival stage set employed by Palladio at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, and similar examples elsewhere, which found a (somewhat different) written basis already in the discussion of stage scenery in Sebastiano Serlio’s second book (significantly, on perspective), published in 1545. 52 Magnus Olausson, “Lustträdgård och generalplan” Drottningholms slott. Från Hedvig Eleonora till Lovisa

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60. Baldassare Longhena, Staircase at S Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 1643–1645.

The view that visitors saw through the windows of the upper galleries was not Tessin’s creation, however. The gardens were still unfinished when Tessin died in 1681, and it fell to Tessin the Younger to finish them. With the help of Hedwig Eleonora, who intervened at court on his behalf and secured funding for him, Nicodemus the Younger had been formally trained in garden design in England and France in 1678–1680.53 It was the court of the latter that left the deepest impression, thanks largely to the close personal relation that he developed with André Le Nôtre, jardinier du roi to Louis XIV at Versailles.54 Fresh from renewed study, Tessin had a plan for the gardens at Drottningholm ready in 1681. Tessin the Younger’s friendship with Le Nôtre benefited him greatly, but it also caused some awkward moments. The queen, in one of her more inspired moments of patronage, approached the former French resident in Stockholm, Isaac de Pas, Marquis de Feuquière, about the possibility of recruiting skilled workers from the French court to prepare her gardens.55 Le Nôtre, perhaps acting out of fondness for Tessin the Younger, offered in 1683 to draw up plans for the Drottningholm gardens himself and to send one of his best assistants to execute them. He evidently did not know that work had already progressed on the plan of

Ulrika, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 155. The statue was delivered already that fall, but was installed instead at Jacobsdal/Ulriksdal. 53 Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 79. 54 Tessin the Younger’s close relationship with Le Nôtre led F Hamilton Hazlehurst to describe him as the French master’s foremost student outside

of France. F Hamilton Hazlehurst, Gardens of Illusion. The Genesis of André Le Nostre (Nashville, 1980), 374. 55 Part of the correspondence between Hedwig Eleonora and Feuquière is published in Nils Wollin, Drottningholms lustträdgård och park (Stockholm, 1927), 327–330.

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1681, and the offer put Tessin and Hedwig Eleonora in the difficult position of either rejecting a generous offer from the greatest gardener of the seventeenth century or setting Tessin’s career back.56 For Tessin, however, the choice was clear. The fountain engineer Louis de Cussy and the master gardener Nicolas Sevin arrived in 1684 with no plan by Le Nôtre. Another offer by Le Nôtre in 1693 to design the gardens for any royal residence also drew only polite excuses in response. Drottningholm’s Interior The palace formed an impressive armature for a remarkably coherent artistic and thematic program. In a way that was unprecedented in the kingdom, Hedwig Eleonora assembled a group of leading artists in a collaborative project in which the work of each contributed to a seamless conceptual whole. In its first phases, the team comprised Tessin, Ehrenstrahl and Millich, whom the queen called to Sweden. Tessin the Younger would take over responsibility for the architecture and gardens after the death of his father in 1681, and Ehrenstrahl would eventually be complemented by Johan Sylvius and other painters, but the concept held throughout, and ultimately formed the basis of the team that rebuilt the north wing of the royal palace under Tessin the Younger from 1692.57 The visual program emphasized royal and dynastic themes, and particularly the history and glorification of the house of Pfalz-Zweibrücken – the lineage of Carl X Gustaf and Carl XI.58 Thus there are two galleries illustrating the battles of Carl Gustaf in a series of large-scale paintings by the Nuremberg painter Johann Philipp Lemke, with the ceiling vaults painted by the Frenchman Evrard Chauveau.59 In the later 1660s Ehrenstrahl turned out some of his best work for the queen’s formal bedroom. Here quality workmanship and allegorical invention surpass all other projects in the kingdom in a group of meditations on the union of Carl Gustaf and Hedwig Eleonora, and the destiny of Carl XI, the progeny of that union entrusted to the queen’s care (figure 61). In the 1690s Ehrenstrahl produced another series of related allegories on the queen’s stewardship of the dynasty, showing, for example, Hedwig Eleonora steering the ship of state by keeping an even hand on a ship’s rudder inscribed with Carl XI’s monogram. Even the gardens can be interpreted in light of dynastic themes, for the Adriaen de Vries statues that ornament them were taken during Carl X Gustaf’s campaign in Denmark in the later 1650s, and the others were taken in Prague, where he was involved in the sack of the Malá Strana.60 The Pfalz dynasty forms the central focus of the program, but it is supported and legitimized by the presence of earlier rulers. This is most evident in the fourteen busts of ancient Gothic rulers carved by Nicolaes Millich for the staircase and adjacent galleries, which reflect the insistent claim of the Swedish rulers to the heritage of the Gothic tribes that conquered

56

Magnus Olausson, “Tessin and Le Nôtre. An Eclectic Meets his Master” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 61–66. 57 As the palace stands today, relatively few of the programmatic interiors date from Tessin the Elder’s involvement in the palace, and his drawings for ceiling schemes are decorative rather than allegorical, as they became under Tessin the Younger’s leadership. 58 For the dynastic themes of Caroline artistic commissions, see Allan Ellenius, Karolinska bildidéer (Stockholm, 1966), 55–142; Martin Olin, Det karolinska porträttet (Stockholm, 2000).

59

Börje Magnusson, “Lemkes bataljmålningar på Drottningholm och deras förlagor” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 49 (1980): 121–131. 60 This is pointed out by Guy Walton, “Royal Castles and Palaces. The Architectural Image of the Monarchy in Sweden” Sweden. A Royal Treasury, 1550–1700, ed Michael Conforti and Guy Walton (Washington, DC, 1988), 49. Hedwig Eleonora was present at Frederiksborg with the Swedish troops, and it seems that they were taken at her request. See Magnus Olausson, “En Dansk Adriaen de Vries på Svensk grund” Christian 4. og Frederiksborg, ed Steffen Heiberg (Copenhagen, 2006), 177.

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61. Tessin, Drottningholm, Formal Bedroom.

Rome.61 Georg Petel’s bust of Gustaf Adolf, commissioned by the king in Augsburg in 1632, was in Hedwig Eleonora’s collection at Drottningholm.62 Although she did not commission the work, it served to bridge the gap between the Goths and Pfalz kings, particularly since Gustaf Adolf’s victories over the imperial armies were frequently seen as an reprise of the Gothic victories over the Romans.63 The continuity between the Vasa and Pfalz lines was 61

Bertil Waldén, Nicolaes Millich och hans krets (Stockholm, 1942), 100–102. For the Swedish claim to a Gothic heritage, see most recently Inken SchmidtVoges, De antiqua claritate et clara antiquitate Gothorum. Gotizismus als Identitätsmodell im frühneuzeitlichen Schweden (Frankfurt, 2004); and Kristoffer Neville, “Gothicism and Early Modern Historical

Ethnography” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 213–234. 62 Boo von Malmborg, De kungliga slotten: Drottningholm (Malmö, 1971), 155–156. 63 Andreas Zellhuber, Der gotische Weg in den deutschen Krieg. Gustav Adolf und der schwedische Gotizismus (Augsburg, 2002).

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62. Tessin, Drottningholm, Staircase.

emphasized even more strongly by pendant busts of Christina and Carl Gustaf, made in 1649 in Nuremberg by Georg Schweigger.64 The legacy of Christina, the last of the Vasa line, can also be found elsewhere in the palace. She seems generally to have left a profound impression on Hedwig Eleonora, but her legacy at Drottningholm is most evident in the monumental formal staircase (figure 62). The staircase is remarkable in part because it combines architectural and allegorical significance.

64

Only the bust of Carl Gustaf is in the palace today, but the bust of Christina was almost certainly originally there as well. The surviving bust stands on a

plinth made to match its peculiar base, and there is a matching plinth in the palace that now supports a copy of Petel’s bust of Gustaf Adolf.

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We have seen that Jan Vos wrote in a verse that Artus Quellinus had in the 1640s sent clay models of Apollo and the muses to Christina to live at the Swedish “Court Parnassus.”65 These were never carved in marble for Christina, but it is virtually certain that these clay bozzetti were still in the Stockholm palace in the 1660s. When Nicolaes Millich was called from Antwerp in 1669 to carve the Apollo, Minerva and the nine muses lining the staircase, he could use Quellinus’s bozzetti as inspiration, if not as outright models. His figures accompany the visitor as he or she symbolically ascends the staircase of Mount Parnassus, sheltered in the heart of the queen’s residence. Millich was an ideal choice for the project.66 He was a student of Rombout Verhulst, Quellinus’s most important pupil, and this lineage helped preserve the artistic and authorial coherence of the whole project over the course of the two reigns. Stylistic unity was important, because Millich added one piece to the program for which Quellinus left no model.67 In a niche at the top of the staircase-Parnassus we find Minerva with Nike, her owl and shield, all of which are conspicuously absent in Vos’s poem. It is of course possible that Vos was misinformed, but this is unlikely. The central point of the verse is that Quellinus’s bozzetti were sent to the court of a living Minerva: Christina herself. There was no need for a statue of Minerva in the original program. Unlike Christina and some noblewomen at other courts, Hedwig Eleonora never took on the guise of Minerva herself, even as she sought to associate herself both with the Roman goddess and the abdicated queen.68 In Drottningholm, Apollo, Minerva and the muses are housed and protected by the queen, who is in turn ennobled by their presence. In the lantern crowning the program, Ehrenstrahl painted the monogram of the queen, HE, crowned with laurel by Apollo and Minerva.69 This, too, is clearly visible in Dahlbergh’s print. Apollo, the sun god, became a common theme in court imagery, and particularly in Hedwig Eleonora’s circle. This is reflected in Millich’s sculptural program and a portrait by Ehrenstrahl of the young Carl XI as Apollo, and is found in literary sources as well. Hedwig Eleonora liked allegorical theater, for which Tessin sometimes provided sets and other ephemera.70 In a theater piece dedicated to Hedwig Eleonora and Carl XI on the opening of a new theater in Stockholm, the Netherlander Hendrik Jordis describes a new golden age of prosperity, trade, theater, and architecture under the patronage of the art-loving queen. In the same spirit as Vos’s poem for Christina, which he probably knew, he describes how Apollo and Minerva should live with Hedwig Eleonora.71 The obvious parallel is of course to Louis XIV, who had begun to represent himself in the same guise some years earlier.72 65

See Karl Erik Steneberg, “Le Blon, Millich, and the Swedish Court ‘Parnassus’” Queen Christina of Sweden. Documents and Studies, ed Magnus von Platen (Stockholm, 1966), 332–364. 66 For Millich see Bertil Waldén, Nicolaes Millich och hans krets. (Stockholm, 1942). 67 There was, however, a statue of Minerva by Quellinus from about 1660, given by the city of Amsterdam to Johan Maurits of Nassau Siegen, stadholder in Kleve, where the statue is preserved. 68 A number of examples are given in Ruprecht Pfeif, Minerva in der Sphäre des Herrscherbildes. Von der Antike bis zur Französischen Revolution (Münster, 1990). 69 This is explicitly explained by Ehrenstrahl himself. David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Die vornehmste Schildereyen/ welche in denen Pallästen des Königreiches Schweden zu sehen sind (Stockholm, 1694), 4.

70

Kurt Johannesson, I polstjärnans tecken. Studier i svensk barock (Stockholm, 1968), 140. 71 Hendrik Jordis, De Stockholms Parnas ofte Inwijdingh van de Konincklijcke Schouburg (Stockholm, 1667), 15. “Ja selfs de Maijesteit, uyt Liefde tot de Konst, Bouwt Schouburgh en Toneel, en streeltze met sijn gonst. De vaste Kerker, daar de Koninck aller Dieren, Een overwonnen Leeuw, met ongedult gingh tieren, Die zal veranderen in Pallas Lust Prieel, En Schouburgh, en in t’ kleyn een Wereldts Tafereel. Apollo en Minerf die zullen bij u woonen, De tijdt, die alles leert, zal t’ vord’re u vertoonen.” 72 See e.g., Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992), 26–37.

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Carl XI never took this symbolism to the lengths that his mother and the French king did. It does not seem to have suited his introverted personality as it did the inflated ego of Louis XIV. It may rather have been a conceit contrived by his mother, for we never see this kind of allegory again after he reached majority, even as Apollo references became as common as Minerva imagery. For the dynastic shrine of Drottningholm, however, this kind of picture was perfect. The palace housed Hedwig Eleonora, nurturing a symbolic continuity between the departed Christina-Minerva and the future Carl XI-Apollo, living in Drottningholm-Parnassus in an allegorical world devoted to the royal house and lineage, her dead husband, and the continuation of the line in her son. What could be more suitable for the leader of the regency, charged with surrogate leadership of the state in place of the departed rulers until the prince reached maturity?

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Alongside the official duties of his various offices, Tessin developed strong working relationships with individuals and families who commissioned projects from him on a freelance basis. He worked regularly for Schering Rosenhane, Johan Gabriel Stenbock, Gustaf Bonde, the Sparre family, and many others. The commissions from these men and women provided income to supplement his base pay from the court and kept him busy during years in which the various official projects were at a standstill. Although he seems to have been a very shrewd courtier, never alienating those who could hurt him, his quality work for such a broad segment of the aristocracy ensured continuous support from many quarters, and made him less susceptible to the fickleness of court life.1 Gustaf Bonde’s Palace The Bonde residence stands next to the House of the Nobility, which had been in progress for some time and was nearing completion when work began on new the palace in 1662. It is a central block with two pairs of wings extending to the front and to the back, each ending in a small pavilion (figure 63).2 These wings enclose a large open space on either side of the central body. The front was closed off with a gate and formed an entrance courtyard, and the back, which faced the water, enclosed a garden. A pediment on each façade set off the three central bays. Jean Marot’s engravings for Erik Dahlbergh’s Suecia antiqua et hodierna show segmental pediments; today they are triangular (figure 64). Bonde’s palace has often been described somewhat generically as a French design, but in this case there is much to be said for this characterization, which probably has roots in Paris. Two pages Jean Marot’s L’architecture françoise: ou, Recueil des plans, élévations, coupes et profils des églises, palais, hôtels, et maisons particulières de Paris (generally known as the Grand Marot, ca 1665–1670), show “plans for a palace to be built in Sweden for the Marquis Bonde, drawn and engraved by himself” (i.e., by Marot; figures 65, 66).3 These two folio plates immediately stand out from the other plates in the book in their appearance and function. Most of Marot’s engravings show a single, monumental view of the subject, but the Bonde project consists of two plans and five smaller elevations. They are therefore much more closely related to functional architectural drawings than are the other prints. This distinction is supported by the inscription, which indicates that Marot prepared them as an architect rather than a publisher. Marot’s plan is similar to the finished building, but not similar enough to attribute the palace to him, and we know that the building history is considerably more complex. Bonde seems to have had both de la Vallée and Tessin prepare plans as well. There are drawings for the palace by the 1

As we shall see, it took the sweeping changes in the social structure of the kingdom in the 1670s, combined with the costs of renewed war with Denmark (from 1675) and an ill-timed investment in a large house for his family to destabilize Tessin’s position. 2 For the palace generally, see Claes Ellehag, Bondeska palatset. En skrift till minnet av högsta domstolens 200-årsjubileum 1789–1989 (Stockholm, 1989). Although the wings enclosing the garden were

part of the original plan, they were not built until the eighteenth century. 3 Jean Marot, L’architecture françoise: ou, Recueil des plans, élévations, coupes et profils des églises, palais, hôtels, et maisons particulières de Paris (Paris, ca 1665), fol 56r and 57r. “Plans d’un Château a bâtir en Suede pour le Marquis Bonde dessinez et graués en France par luy mesme.” I have used the 1727 Mariette edition, but this plate was included in earlier editions as well.

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63. Tessin, Bonde Palace, Stockholm, Begun 1662.

64. Tessin, Bonde Palace, Stockholm, Begun 1662. From Suecia antiqua.

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65. Jean Marot, Project for a Palace for Gustaf (?) Bonde. From Marot, L’Architecture françoise, ca 1665.

66. Jean Marot, Project for a Palace for Gustaf (?) Bonde. From Marot, L’Architecture françoise, ca 1665.

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former, and in May, 1662, the latter wrote to Carl Gustaf Wrangel that he had just prepared plans for Bonde that describe the present building.4 All three of these projects follow essentially the same form. The most significant difference is that Marot’s plan includes only a cour d’honneur enclosed by projecting wings in front of the palace, while de la Vallée’s and Tessin’s plans add a second set of wings enclosing a small garden at the rear. Marot’s courtyard was enclosed by a pair of low flanking walls ending in nearly freestanding pavilions. Tessin’s flanking walls are a full story high, culminating in pavilions with a rather more imposing effect.5 Although the Grand Marot was first published sometime around 1665 – the date is very uncertain, but it seems to have been some years after Tessin presented his own drawings to Bonde – there is no reason that Marot should not have prepared his plans for the project earlier. Bonde appears not to have visited France, and we do not know if he had any personal contacts with the Parisian architectural world. There are other means through which he could have come into contact with Marot, however. Marot was engaged in the production of the plates for Suecia antiqua in the 1660s, and Claes Tott, Bonde’s colleague in the bureaucracy, had drawings for his own country residence at Ekolsund made by an unknown architect in Paris during an embassy there in 1657.6 Tott returned to Paris in 1661, a year before Tessin prepared his drawings for Bonde, and it is possible that he asked Marot to prepare drawings for Bonde during one of these visits. If the contact between Bonde and Marot was mediated by Tott or restricted to correspondence, it is very likely that the architect would have had only a vague idea of what Bonde wanted. Marot was clearly satisfied with his plan, since he included it in his compilation of the most representative Parisian residences. But if the design did not meet Bonde’s needs, the nobleman may well have asked Tessin and de la Vallée to rework the design within Marot’s overall framework, explaining the general similarity of the three plans, as well as the addition of a garden courtyard by both local architects. The restriction to the general format of another architect’s plan would also explain the exceptional place of the Bonde palace in the oeuvres of both Tessin and de la Vallée. Other commissions in which Tessin drew on French models take a very different approach, and were generally more successful compositions. Heavy restoration work on the Bonde palace in later centuries makes it difficult to judge it fairly, but the solutions he found in the same year for Bonde’s predecessor as treasurer, Seved Bååt, were reworked and reused for other projects. Tessin never drew another building like the Bonde palace. Seved Bååt’s and Carl Sparre’s Palaces Seved Bååt, like Gustaf Bonde, was a career bureaucrat. Each served as royal treasurer for a period, and their knowledge of the costs of war was no doubt the primary reason that each was an outspoken proponent of peaceful resolution. The military careers of Wrangel and Königsmarck are better known, but Bååt and Bonde represent an alternative career path with similar potential for social elevation for talented and ambitious young men. Like others at court, Bååt received a building plot from the crown, on which Tessin built one of his more important residences. 4

RA Skoklostersamlingen, Tessin to Wrangel May 7, 1662, published in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 121. “Sonsten habe ich vor Ihr Excell. dem Herrn Reich schatzmeister einen ziemlichen grossen Dessein gemacht auf dem tompt bey dem Ritterhause. Das grosse Haus mitten über den Platz ist 54 ellen lang, 40 ellen breit, hinten und vorne mit flügeln, woselbst in dem einen eine gallerie von 54 ellen lang und ein kleiner Garten gegen dem Wasser; die üntere Wohnung alla rustica und die obere mit Pilastern.”

5

It has been suggested that Marot’s plan was for a country residence for Bonde, or possibly his son, but this is unlikely. Although the changes suggest some initial confusion about the site and the characteristics of the project, there is no evidence of a desired country residence, and it is in any case clear that building two such similar buildings would have been redundant. See Osvald Sirén, “Storhetens Stockholmsarkitektur I” Samfundet St Eriks årsbok (1910): 30. 6 Claes Ellehag, “Fem franska 1600-talsritningar för Ekolsunds slott” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 52 (1983): 111–120.

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Bååt’s residence is more compact than Bonde’s, but equally imposing (figures 67, 68). The main body is set behind a courtyard embraced by two wings. The greater part of the building was finished when Bååt died in 1669, but little of the decoration was completed. The ceiling of the two-story salon on the piano nobile in the heart of the building has a rich stucco ceiling by Carlo Carove. This frames a space still awaiting a monumental painting probably to have been executed by Ehrenstrahl. The overall effect of the enclosed courtyard in front of the body of the palace was that of Parisian hôtels of mid-century. Bååt had never been to France, and was therefore not familiar with the works of Louis Le Vau and François Mansart at first hand, though he could well have known them through prints and descriptions. We have few details of Tessin’s work for Bååt, and it is accordingly difficult to know whether Bååt deferred to Tessin’s expertise or had strong ideas of his own about what sort of residence he wanted. Both approaches to patronage were common. Bååt’s palace provided the template for the residence of General Carl Sparre, but this structure, designed in 1669, represents a significant refinement of the plan of seven years earlier (figures 69, 70).7 Now the projecting wings are three bays wide, and thus are composed axially around a window rather than a pilaster. (The Bååt residence had been designed for a narrow site, which induced some compromises.) The façade is richer generally, but the precise character of this is difficult to establish, for Tessin’s drawings show one design, but the drawing and print for Suecia antiqua show something quite different (figure 71).8 The printed image, which corresponds well with Dahlbergh’s original drawing made directly from the structure, presumably represents the executed design most faithfully.9 The façade in Tessin’s drawing is more interesting, however, for he has worked an essentially Italianate design into a French framework. The portal is elevated by half a story, where in Bååt’s design it had been worked into a ground-level arcade closer to those used by Le Vau and Mansart, neither of whom ever elevated the portal of a residence by more than a few low steps. This elevation is bridged by a symmetrical double staircase derived from Michelangelo’s at the Palazzo dei Senatori in Rome. The portal group is based on a Serlian window composition, with an arched central portal flanked by lower rectangular window openings, each surmounted by a bust within a circular niche. The smaller-order columns necessitated by the Serliana contrast with the larger-order pilasters, but in a manner similar to Michelangelo’s conservator’s palace on the Campidoglio. It was a very clever way to conflate the two elements in a coherent façade. Carl Sparre evidently did not approve of this hybrid plan, however, for Willem Swidde’s print shows an unpedimented façade crowned only by a balustrade and a dormer window, with a cartouche above the doorway. In all other essentials, Tessin’s plan was built. The design shows an overall symmetry and balance well beyond what Tessin had produced for Seved Bååt at the beginning of the 1660s. It is less cluttered, and its simplicity makes it more effective. Sparre was a career soldier, but not of the rank of Wrangel or Königsmark; his financial resources seem to have been considerably less than Bååt’s, and so the enhanced grandeur of the project must be attributed to Tessin’s development as an architect, rather than to a patron with greater resources. The most striking aspect of the design for Carl Sparre is the oval salon that protrudes from the rear of the building. This relates to developments elsewhere, and speculation on Tessin’s adoption of the motif is worthwhile. The most direct source that Tessin could have 7

For the Sparre palace, see Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 176–188; and Ragnar Josephson, “Sparreska palatset” Samfundet St Eriks årsbok (1925): 121–133. 8 Photos from the early twentieth century, after much misfortune, reflect neither the original drawings nor

the print. The building was transformed into a theater in the nineteenth century and torn down in 1915 to make way for a department store. 9 For the drawings for Suecia antiqua, see Sigurd Wallin, ed, Teckningarna till Svecia antiqua et hodierna, 4 vols (Stockholm, 1963–1970).

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67. Tessin, Bååt Palace, Stockholm, Begun 1662.

68. Tessin, Bååt Palace, Stockholm. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

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69. Copy after Tessin (by Tessin the Younger?), Elevation of Sparre Palace, Stockholm, ca 1669.

70. Copy after Tessin (by Tessin the Younger?), Plan of Sparre Palace, Stockholm, ca 1669.

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71. Tessin, Sparre Palace, Stockholm. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

known is the oval salone of the Barberini palace in Rome, built in the 1620s and 1630s in a collaborative effort by the most distinguished architects in Italy: Carlo Maderno, Francesco Borromini, Gianlorenzo Bernini, and Pietro da Cortona. The palace was more public than most, in part because visitors wanted to see Cortona’s enormous fresco in the main salon. Ernst Tessin described the room, and Nicodemus must certainly have seen it in the winter of 1651–1652 as well. We do not know precisely what the oval room was used for, but Girolamo Teti mentioned in passing in the 1640s that it housed “literary activities.”10 The room protrudes slightly at the rear of the palace, so that a section juts out of the center of the façade. This protrusion is square to the rest of the façade, however, and betrays nothing of the form of the interior room. The Barberini palace may have been the most accessible source for an oval salon, but its fame was soon surpassed by Louis Le Vau’s Vaux-le-Vicomte, near Paris. Here the idea was inflated, so that the oval room became a primary space in the building, rather than 10 Girolamo Teti, Aedes Barberinae ad Quirinalem (Rome, 1642), 15. For the oval salon, see Giuseppina Magnanimi, “Palazzo Barberini: La sala ovale” Antologia di belle arti 1 (1977): 29–36. For the Barberini

palace, especially in regard to the function of the various rooms, see Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces. Use and the Art of the Plan (New York, 1990), 173–271.

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a secondary one. This and other aspects of the design were hugely influential throughout northern Europe, but it is difficult to know how quickly Tessin learned of Le Vau’s work. He visited France some three years before work began on Vaux-le-Vicomte. Israel Silvestre produced a series of engravings of the residence and its gardens, but all of these appeared after 1660, and it is uncertain whether Tessin had these at hand by the end of the decade.11 He may however have been aware of or seen other variants on the idea, including Le Vau’s earlier château, Le Raincy, where the dominant oval dome was incorporated in a very different format (1643, destroyed). Le Raincy was engraved by Silvestre in 1655, and while this was still two years too late for Tessin to have purchased in Paris, it was immediately copied by Caspar Merian and published in the same year in his Topographia Galliae, with text by Martin Zeiller, whose travel handbooks had guided the Tessin brothers to Rome.12 There is yet another possibility for the importation of the oval salon. Louis de Geer, a Dutch iron magnate who divided his time between Amsterdam and Sweden, built a residence at Finspong, southwest of Stockholm, in 1668–1670. The author of the building was long unknown, but has recently been identified as the Amsterdam architect Adriaen Dortsman.13 Dortsman seems never to have visited the site – or the kingdom at all – but his drawings were clear enough that de Geer’s builders could execute them. Dortsman’s plans include precisely the same sort of protruding salon at the rear of the building included in Tessin’s design for the Sparre palace (figure 72). Further, it has been proposed that this set of drawings for Finspong is preserved in the Tessin-Hårleman collection because Tessin may have provided the garden design, although this has never been proven.14 The problem with establishing a causal formative relationship between Dortsman’s and Tessin’s designs lies in their dates: so far as we can tell, they are nearly exactly contemporaneous, with Dortsman’s proposal under construction at a relatively remote site at most a year or eighteen months in advance of Sparre’s. We do not know that de Geer sent the drawings to Tessin immediately, if indeed he did so at all. Tessin certainly did not invent the oval salon at the rear of the palace, but it may be a hopeless task to try to determine precisely through which channel he absorbed and acknowledged it. Vaux-Le-Vicomte was the most famous example, available through prints, while he had firsthand knowledge of the Barberini palace. Dortsman’s plan came more or less to his doorstep – quite literally if a set of drawings was sent to him as part of a request for a garden design. Tessin’s drawings for the Sparre palace show a more flattened oval much closer to the Barberini and Vaux plans than to the circular room at Finspong.15 This problem touches on a much larger

11

Louis Étienne Faucheux, Catalogue raisonné de toutes les estampes qui forment l’œuvre d’Israel Silvestre (Paris, 1857), 293; Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Vaux le Vicomte (Paris, 1997), 101–102. A more expansive monograph on the château by Cyril Bordier is forthcoming. 12 Louis Étienne Faucheux, Catalogue raisonné de toutes les estampes qui forment l’œuvre d’Israel Silvestre (Paris, 1857), 271–272; Caspar Merian, Topographia Galliae, 3 vols (Frankfurt, 1655–1661; facsimile Kassel, 1968). The copies of Silvestre’s views of Le Raincy appear in volume 1, 105–106. 13 A complete set of plans for the building was published in 1935 that was subsequently lost through archival reorganization. A second set has surfaced in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, which has been attributed to Dortsman. See Martin Olsson, “Finspångs slott. En holländsk slottsbyggnad i det karolinska

Sverige” Svenska kulturbilder. Ny föld (Stockholm, 1935); Badeloch Noldus, “De introductie van het Hollands classicisme in Zweden, aan de hand van twee woonhuizen van de familie De Geer” Bulletin KNOB 98 (1999): 152–164; idem, “Frågan om arkitekten till Finspångs slott, ett exempel på den holländsk klassicistiska arkitekturen i 1600-talets Sverige” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 69 (2000): 7–17. 14 Gunnar Lindqvist, “Lustgård och park på Finspong” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forssman (Stockholm, 1966), 225. 15 This feature is shown as a nearly-perfect circle in the engraving for Suecia antiqua. There are numerous errors of detail in this work, however, and while it is certainly possible that Tessin changed his mind about the plan, the print cannot be taken as definitive evidence.

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72. Adriaen Dortsman, Plan of Finspong Manner, ca 1668.

point, however, for it is evident that this motif very quickly became a working element in an international architecture. The Barberini palace and Vaux-le-Vicomte are classic examples of their respective building traditions, and Dortsman is representative of a nascent Netherlandish tradition of classical architecture. Although Tessin was very much aware that different regions had different architectural traditions – this was why he had traveled so widely – he may have considered the specific source of some motifs like the round or oval room immaterial. It was already an international form, a legitimate component of modern architecture, available to all working within the framework of the established strains of the classical tradition. Carl Gustaf Wrangel and his Palaces With Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, Carl Gustaf Wrangel was arguably the most significant patron in Sweden not intimately connected to the royal family, and he was certainly the most significant cultural and architectural patron in Pomerania after he was named governor-general

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of the province following the Peace of Westphalia. He built the most imposing private residence in Stockholm and Skokloster, an even larger country residence north of the city, as well as a smaller hunting lodge in the southern part of the kingdom. His only new building project in Pomerania was a city residence in Stralsund (destroyed 1944). It was previously attributed to Tessin the Elder on occasion, but was in fact built by Nils Israel Eosander, father of Johann Friedrich Eosander Göthe, who would later work for Friedrich III/I in Berlin and for Augustus the Strong in Dresden.16 Although Wrangel modified several older residences, he commissioned little other new architecture in Germany.17 Wrangel was born in 1613 to a Baltic nobleman from what is now Estonia, and rose quickly through the ranks to the position of field marshal and supreme commander of all troops in Germany by the summer of 1646.18 Wrangel’s remarkable military career did not preclude a broad education, however. He studied at a school for noble children, and completed these lessons with a period of travel beginning in 1629. His various interests are evident from his studies in shipbuilding, astronomy, and politics in the Netherlands. In the spring of 1631 he turned up in Paris with a number of friends. We do not know what he did or saw in France, but his visit was short, for he joined the army and served under Gustaf II Adolf from the fall of the same year. The twin themes of the soldier and the intellectual (or at least pseudo-intellectual) prevailed until Wrangel’s death in 1676. In his cultural interests he seems to have been quite different from the other major Swedish generals, such as Banér, Torstensson, and Königsmarck, who were brilliant tacticians but, so far as we know, did not have a particular literary or artistic bent. But Wrangel profited from the spoils of the peace more than any other general (except Königsmarck), and therefore had a greater opportunity to pursue other interests. Thus the career soldier, who had pleasant decorative stuccowork of birds and other natural motifs chipped out and replaced with cannons and arms when he took ownership of a house in Pomerania,19 was also initiated into the Nuremberg-based Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the most highly-regarded literary society in the German lands. Membership implied a place in the intellectual elite of central Europe. Each member was given a title on entry; Wrangel’s was “The Victor” (“der Obsiegende”).20

16

The building was tentatively attributed to Tessin the Elder by Ragnar Josephson in “Tessin in Deutschland” Baltische Studien 30 (1928): 31. For the generally accepted attribution to Eosander, see Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 21–43. 17 For Wrangel’s patronage in Sweden and Pomerania, see Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961). 18 For Wrangel’s early military career, see Arne Losman, Carl Gustaf Wrangel och Europa. Studier i kulturförbindelser kring en 1600-talsmagnat (Stockholm, 1980), 18–32. 19 Allan Ellenius, Karolinska bildidéer (Stockholm, 1966), 38. 20 Arne Losman, “Carl Gustaf Wrangel, Skokloster and Europe: A Display of Power and Glory in the Days of Sweden’s Dominance” 1648. War and Peace in Europe, vol 2, ed Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (Münster, 1999), 639. Wrangel’s colleagues, generals Johan Banér, Hans Christoph von Königsmarck and Robert Douglas

were also members of this society. Although Königsmarck (and the family line he founded) captured the imagination of Europe, he has been the subject of very few studies, most of which focus on his military career. The others are remembered purely for military prowess. In the absence of better information, it appears that the others were inducted into the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft more for military achievement than literary interests, though this may be true of Wrangel as well. Carl [X] Gustaf was also initiated into the society, but it is even more difficult to evaluate the grounds on which he was selected. It may be interpreted either as contemporary recognition that he was a more consequential cultural figure than is usually granted in the modern literature, on military grounds, or as crass politicking and fundraising. There is in principle no reason why these men should not have been inducted on their military records alone. War was considered an intellectual pursuit – one thinks of the art of war, or martial arts – just as were literary or philosophical pursuits, and fell under the protection of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and of war.

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Wrangel arranged a European network of contacts that constantly sent him the latest news in a variety of fields. Clients in Nuremberg, Frankfurt am Main, Stettin, Greifswald, Hamburg, Amsterdam and London wrote regularly of local cultural developments.21 Other clients in Copenhagen, Danzig, Warsaw, Vienna, Zürich, Madrid, Paris, and The Hague informed him of political and military developments, constantly updating what he had seen in his study travels, and guaranteeing international awareness in his intellectual life. These contacts also kept him up to date on architectural matters. Through these channels he purchased a large number of architectural treatises and handbooks. These included the standard works by Vitruvius, Serlio, and Palladio, less well-known collections of designs by Jacob van Campen and Philips Vingboons, and similar volumes by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Philibert de l’Orme, Louis Savot, Joseph Furttenbach, Johann Wilhelm, and Georg Andreas Böckler.22 Wrangel’s library, though apparently lacking some important sources (he appears not to have owned Vincenzo Scamozzi’s L’Idea della architettura universale, for example), thus encompassed a more or less comprehensive history of architecture in Europe, with significant representation for each of the major building traditions. The degree to which these architectural handbooks in Wrangel’s library guided his patronage is unclear. Certainly he considered himself a competent dilettante – very likely reflecting extensive reading – and was deeply involved in his building projects. This is not entirely unusual; we have seen that Gustaf Bonde probably imposed significant limitations on the architects of his palace as well. It nonetheless poses a serious problem for the consideration of Wrangel’s patronage because very little of his architecture follows the principles of the treatises in his library in any meaningful way. Adding to these problems, Wrangel’s city palace in Stockholm and Skokloster are both fraught with documentary shortcomings. Particularly in the Stockholm residence, it is frequently difficult to tell what was built from what was projected or desired, and how consistently the patron followed up on the general goals and ideas he occasionally mentioned in his letters. In part, these problems stem from the more general difficulty that Wrangel was impatient with the building process, and often engaged several architects to work on the same project, while also asserting his own often idiosyncratic ideas. Ultimately, we are left with an image of a bright and deeply-interested man, eager to discuss architectural questions with Tessin, but with neither the patience nor the inclination to allow the building process to unfold at its own pace. The Wrangel City Palace Wrangel received a well-situated plot on the outskirts of the old town in Stockholm in 1648 as a gift from Christina in recognition of his extraordinary military service for the crown.23 The general was in Prague – which had not yet fallen to the Swedish troops – when

21 Arne Losman, Carl Gustaf Wrangel och Europa. Studier i kulturförbindelser kring en 1600-talsmagnat (Stockholm, 1980). 22 Wrangel’s book inventories can be found in RA Skoklostersamlingen E 8205 (1655); RA Skoklostersamlingen E 8580 (1660); and RA Rydboholmsamlingen E 8074 (death inventory). See Arne Losman, “CG Wrangels litteratur om byggnadskonst – ett urval” Arkitektur 14:4 (1972): 9. For Wrangel’s library more broadly, see Losman, “Drei schwedische Büchersammler des 17. Jahrhunderts. Per Brahe d.J., Carl Gustaf Wrangel und Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie” Arte

et Marte. Studien zur Adelskultur des Barockzeitalters in Schweden, Dänemark und Schleswig-Holstein, ed Dieter Lohmeier (Neumünster, 1978), 159–172. 23 For Wrangel’s city palace, see Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 43–114. Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961) treats both the city palace and Skokloster and adds important information and revisions to both. His discussion is the best available, and is the basis for most of what is presented here.

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he received news of the queen’s generosity. Neither Tessin nor Jean de la Vallée had matured yet, and Wrangel was eager to begin work. From a letter of that year we know that he engaged a Prague architect to help him work out a plan for the palace that incorporated aspects of the structure already standing on the site.24 We have neither a name nor any specific information about this first plan, which makes further speculation on the early origins of design difficult. But since he wrote in 1650 and 1651 that he wanted the palace to be built in the Italian “manier,”25 he probably sought the help of one of the architects of Italian extraction working in the city. In the later 1640s Carlo Lurago was the outstanding architect in Prague, and it may have been he or someone in his circle who worked with Wrangel in the development of the initial scheme for his palace.26 In 1650 Jean de la Vallée returned to Stockholm from Italy and France, and was the logical choice to take charge of the project as it advanced. But when he was unable to produce an acceptable model by the following year, Wrangel was willing to wait no longer. Christina suggested that Tessin might be a suitable replacement, and Wrangel seems to have been optimistic about this possibility. This change of plans came precisely when Tessin was preparing to leave for Italy, however, and although he visited Wrangel at Wolgast (near Stettin in Pomerania) to discuss the general’s ideas for the residence, little more concrete progress was made in the following years. Wrangel was forever impatient. At the end of September, 1651, he wrote that he had made some drawings after his own fantasy.27 Soon thereafter he approached two fortifications engineers for help in refining his plans. Recognizing the growing distinction between a fortifications engineer and a civil architect, he soon abandoned this effort and approached de la Vallée again, with little more success. In the meantime, Tessin returned from Italy in the summer of 1653, but he was occupied with other demands and soon based at Borgholm, and in Stockholm as rarely as Wrangel himself. This sort of uncertain back-and-forth continued until the mid-1650s, when the general was impressed by some of the aristocratic palaces he saw in Warsaw and wanted to change the plan yet again.28 Tessin’s real contribution began around 1657, when large parts of the palace were torn down, apparently at the insistence of the architect. It has been supposed that this was because Wrangel’s amateurish participation in the project had introduced unacceptable proportional problems, but the circumstances of the project to this point had allowed innumerable opportunities for all kinds of problems to arise.29 Work was now to proceed after Tessin’s model (now lost), which was supplemented by drawings (figure 73). There was real progress now, and by the mid-1660s the palace was largely finished. Archaeological evidence suggests that the craftsmen followed Tessin’s drawings quite carefully and that Wrangel intervened very little after the drawings were delivered.30

24

Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 120. 25 Wrangel specified at least twice that he wanted the palace in an Italian “Manier.” “… på italianisch manier ogh uthförr åt siön medh affsatser ogh altaner” (1650), and “so dass uff Italianische Manier faconiert würde” (1651). He may have referred (in part) to the raised altana or belvedere on the roofs of the wings. See Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 121–123. 26 Other architects who would soon leave their mark on Prague, such as Francesco Caratti and Giovanni Domenico Orsi, did not arrive in the city until the

middle of the 1650s. For a survey of architectural developments in Bohemia in this period, see Heinrich Gerhard Franz, Bauten und Baumeister der Barockzeit in Böhmen. Entstehung und Ausstrahlungen der böhmischen Barockbaukunst (Leipzig, 1962). 27 Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 124. 28 Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 129. 29 Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 131. 30 Tord O:son Nordberg, “Wrangelska palatset” Samfundet S:t Eriks årsbok (1947): 49–56.

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73. Tessin, Section of Wrangel Palace, Stockholm, ca 1657.

Tessin’s plan consists of a central block with two projecting wings that enclose a forecourt. Because the wings extend over a gentle decline in the topography of the site, the courtyard is elevated by nearly a story over street level, and is accessible by a staircase. This elevated position allowed the façade to overlook most of the nearby buildings, and enhanced the grandeur of the building from the square. Foreign visitors frequently noted that Wrangel’s palace was the most impressive private residence in Stockholm, and often considered it more worthy than the old royal palace, which was an agglomeration of additions to a medieval fortress.31 The print by Jean Marot for Dahlbergh’s Suecia antiqua may inflate this grandeur, but it gives a much better representation of the spirit of the building than can be seen today (figures 74, 75). The palace burned in 1693 and was rebuilt soon thereafter by Tessin the Younger as a residence for the royal family when the royal palace burned to the ground four years later. Whatever remained of its original character was lost in a more devastating fire in 1802, which reduced the grand residence to little more than a shell. It is an office building today. Lost in these fires was the exuberant stuccowork on the façade so clearly visible in Dahlbergh’s print and Tessin’s drawing. Most of this was purely decorative, but there was room here for allegory as well. Crowning the broken pediments of the window frames of the second-story piano nobile was a series of female busts. In Tessin’s drawing, the two busts nearest the main body of the structure are different from the others. Both of these figures bear laurel wreaths and breastplates (the other figures wear simple gowns), and only one is female (figure 76). The most convincing identification for these figures must be Minerva and Mars, both identified with war, and Minerva specifically with its intellectual aspects. Both figures can be associated with the general in this way, particularly as a 1667 poem describes Minerva giving Wrangel the military skills to become a Gothic Mars.32 Minerva is 31 See, for example, Guy Miège, A Relation of Three Embassies from his Sacred Majestie Charles II (London, 1669), 352 (this embassy was undertaken in 1663); Hans Moritz Ayrmann, 1668–1671, BStB Ms Germ Fol 1031, fol 14v (partially transcribed in Rig 33

(1950): 136–148); and the travel journal of Ulrich von Verdum, 1673, BStB MS Germ fol 68, 315. 32 Daniel Lüdemann, Carmen Eucharisticon … (Bremen, 1667). See Allan Ellenius, Karolinska bildidéer (Stockholm, 1966), 44.

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74. Tessin and Others, Wrangel Palace, Stockholm. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

75. Tessin and Others, Wrangel Palace, Stockholm.

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76. Tessin, Section of Wrangel Palace, Stockholm, Detail, ca 1657.

probably to be understood here as the protector of learning and wisdom, a common theme in Christina’s court. Wrangel, who was also praised as a protector of the arts, is thus to be considered the protégé of both gods, and the embodiment of the learned warrior. This was precisely the theme of a cycle of allegorical paintings proposed by Ehrenstrahl for the interior of the palace,33 and would have brought together in a coherent program the decorative and programmatic schemes of the interior and exterior of the palace. Skokloster The building history of Skokloster is just as tortuous as that of Wrangel’s city palace (figure 77).34 Wrangel began accumulating materials for the building in 1646, but it was only in 1653, after a number of false starts, that the project really developed. He engaged Caspar Vogel from Erfurt, a court building master in Saxe-Gotha, to design the building in 1653. Soon thereafter, unhappy with various aspects of the design, and particularly with the façade, he wrote to Tessin at Borgholm requesting suggestions and corrections. Tessin’s contribution to the project seems to be limited to the plain, lightly-rusticated façade and various proposals for interior decorations (particularly the ballroom, which was left unfinished at Wrangel’s death), and an unexecuted marina, for which Jean de la Vallée also provided drawings.35 Wrangel was without doubt a frustrating patron. He meddled constantly in the builder’s work, changed his mind frequently, and played one architect against another. At one point

33

RA Rydboholmsamling E 8110, undated. See Allan Ellenius, Karolinska bildidéer (Stockholm, 1966), 29–54. 34 Erik Andrén, Skokloster. Ett slottsbygge under stormaktstiden (Stockholm, 1948); Gerhard Eimer, Carl

Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 138–150. 35 Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 139–149.

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77. Tessin and Others, Skokloster, Begun 1653.

in 1671 Tessin, exasperated by this system, refused to deliver the drawings for the grand hall of Skokloster because Jean de la Vallée had been consulted before him.36 Wrangel probably considered his involvement in the building process a virtue, a sign of his intellectual and architectural sophistication. Although it was doubtless maddening at times, it also offered some advantages to Tessin. A number of letters between the two men discussing the architectural projects of Gustaf Bonde and Hedwig Eleonora suggest that Wrangel, like the queen herself, acted as a true protector in the aristocracy.37 In these two figures, Tessin found a replacement for the crucial role that Oxenstierna had played in his early successes. Schering Rosenhane Unlike Carl Gustaf Wrangel and Carl X Gustaf, Schering Rosenhane was not a military man, but a diplomat and writer.38 He was a poet in a society famous for its warriors. In a chronicle of his life composed over a number of years, he recalled how even in his earliest 36

Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 144. 37 See, for example, the letters published in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus och några samtida byggnader af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä., vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 93–95. 38 A biography of Schering Rosenhane is very much needed. The two key biographical sources – and the basis for this discussion – are presently his own memoirs,

written over a number of years and published as “Lefverne, af honom sjelf beskrifvit” Nya swenska biblioteket (1763): 515–622, and Magnus Mörner, “Schering Rosenhane” Svenskt biografiskt lexicon, vol 30 (Stockholm, 1998– 2000), 524–532. This is supplemented significantly by Badeloch Noldus, Trade in Good Taste (Turnhout, 2004), 19–29. Rosenhane’s other writings provide further insight into his life and thought, and are complemented by a very limited specialized bibliography.

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studies with a local priest, he was so diligent that he never received a single beating or punishment of any kind at school or at home.39 With the help of a well-connected member of the Oxenstierna family, this industry eventually led to a place at court. Rosenhane’s court position suited him perfectly, for it enabled him to travel in the company of a well-educated elite and to meet like-minded foreigners. In 1629, at twenty years old, he attached himself to the resident in London and spent six months there. The delegation received a formal audience at Whitehall, where Inigo Jones had completed the Banqueting House seven years earlier. He also visited Hampton Court, Richmond, Oxford, and Cambridge, all of which left a powerful impression on the young man.40 After the London embassy, Rosenhane spent a year in Paris, apparently pursuing further study, and also visited Rotterdam, Leiden, The Hague, Amsterdam, and parts of northern Germany, returning to Sweden around 1633–1634. These travels were complemented in the following decade by longer posts in Osnabrück during the negotiations ending the Thirty Years’ War, and then in Paris during the Fronde. In a short tract on husbandry, Rosenhane outlines some general ideas about architecture, which reflect a general Vitruvian outlook.41 A stone house is more respectable, durable, and allows greater commodity than a wooden one, which is more vulnerable to fire. It should be well proportioned and symmetrical, with the door in the middle of the façade, which should face the street. The size of the wall should determine the number and size of the windows. The entire effect of the façade should be visually impressive. He continues to give his thoughts on the practical aspects of the household: the cellar and kitchen should not be too far from the dining room, and so on. Most important of all, according to Rosenhane, is that the house should reflect its occupant. It should be neither too big nor too small for the social stature of the builder, and should in every way represent the owner, who is presumed also to be the builder. This was not to suggest that the patron must be an amateur architect, however. Although he very likely assumed that a nobleman should have some knowledge of architectural history and style, he noted specifically in the Oeconomia that the patron, to guard against displaying his ignorance, should seek the advice of a good architect.42 In Rosenhane’s case, that architect was Nicodemus Tessin. Tessin appears on Rosenhane’s rolls from 1651–1654, beginning soon after Rosenhane’s return from Paris and elsewhere, full of impressions from abroad. Precisely what the architect did in this period is unclear, however. He was abroad for much of the first two of these years, and in December of 1652 there still were no concrete plans for his city residence, though Rosenhane hoped work could begin the following summer. If this schedule was followed, work would have begun just as Tessin returned from Amsterdam. More likely, however, is that Rosenhane and Tessin spoke before his departure or corresponded during his absence. Tessin may well have prepared drawings while in Rome or elsewhere, as he did for Axel Oxenstierna and Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. This would account for payments to Tessin

39 Schering Rosenhane, “Lefverne, af honom sjelf beskrifvit” Nya swenska biblioteket (1763): 519. 40 Schering Rosenhane, “Lefverne, af honom sjelf beskrifvit” Nya swenska biblioteket (1763): 538–540. The London embassy is described in more detail – as are the visits to various palaces, though for the most part these descriptions are still rather vague – in a manuscript journal of the journey. UUB MS X 351, Itineris in Angliam descriptio.

41

Schering Rosenhane, Oeconomia (Stockholm, 1944), 41–46. For commentary on Rosenhane’s text, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Early Modern Ideas about Artistic Geography Related to the Baltic Region” Scandinavian Journal of History 28 (2003): 263–272; Badeloch Noldus, Trade in Good Taste (Turnhout, 2004), 19–29. 42 Schering Rosenhane, Oeconomia (Stockholm, 1944), 43.

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during his absence, and also for what appears to have been fairly good progress on the house around 1653.43 Like the Bonde residence in Stockholm, Rosenhane’s house stands quite apart from any other design in Tessin’s oeuvre (figure 78).44 Given Rosenhane’s writings, this may perhaps be attributed to his own intervention in the design process. The house is a fairly compact block with a central grouping of three bays covered with a simple pediment on the façade bearing Rosenhane’s arms. The pediment aside, the rusticated façade is very simple and largely devoid of ornament. Its general form is not unlike Jacob van Campen’s Mauritshuis in The 78. Tessin, Rosenhane Palace, Stockholm, Begun ca 1653. Hague (1633–1644; figure 30). Although the decorative scheme is not consistent with the brick-and-sandstone decorative scheme so common in the Netherlands, there are significant models there and in England that have simple white façades, such as van Campen’s Noordeinde Palace in The Hague (unrusticated) and Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House in Greenwich (rusticated, like Rosenhane’s; figure 31). Tessin and Rosenhane were both very familiar with this strand of architecture, and given Rosenhane’s insistence on the participation of the patron in the design process, it is impossible to determine who proposed the format. Little is known of the interior, other than that it contained many neo-stoic emblems, portraits, silver, and other luxury goods.45 Residence and Representation There is one central figure who is largely absent from this discussion of Tessin’s work for the nobility. Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie was the richest private individual in the kingdom, a collector who owned paintings by Rubens and Jordaens as well as various Italian painters of 43

This is also supported by Tessin’s comments upon his return that he should first take up projects he had begun before his departure. See Sten Karling, Trädgårdskonstens historia i Sverige intill le nôtrestilens genombrott (Stockholm, 1931), 255. 44 The Rosenhane residence has often been omitted from discussion of Tessin’s work in Stockholm (Sirén does not take it up), but the attribution must be considered solid, as the master mason Andreas Fischer was contracted “to follow the architect Nicodemus’s drawings in every way” (“efter arkitekten herr Nicodemi däröver gjorda avritning och dessein och densamma i alla måtto efterfölja”). Cited in Sten Karling, Kalmar Domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984), 26.

45

The emblematic content is emphasized in Allan Ellenius, “Schering Rosenhane och det emblematiska språket” Lychnos (1997): 81–102; reprised in idem, “Emblematic Thinking. The Visual Language of Schering Rosenhane, Swedish Resident in Münster 1643–1647” 1648. War and Peace in Europe, vol 1, ed Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (Münster, 1999), 397–401. A 1663 post-mortem inventory of Rosenhane’s house survives in UUB MS X 290 L. A few small paintings from Ehrenstrahl’s workshop, originally in Rosenhane’s residence (though probably installed there after his death), are now in the Bååt palace.

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the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.46 He had spent considerable time both in France and Germany, devoted huge amounts of money to fashionable goods, and was clearly interested in artistic matters.47 Tessin prepared the Arensburg project for him early in the 1650s (which he himself revised), and designed a burial chapel and several other relatively minor buildings and restorations for the count later in the decade. But in general de la Gardie preferred Jean de la Vallée and Matthäus Holl to Tessin. Both of these men were competent architects, although quite different from Tessin both in architectural spirit and in working method. Certainly a preference for their work to Tessin’s does not imply a lack of taste. Yet de la Gardie’s legacy is not what one might expect from someone of his stature. His Stockholm residence was grand, but by the 1660s it was a thoroughly outmoded Netherlandish-Baltic brick structure built two decades earlier by his father (figure 79). It had little of the currency of the new manner of architecture in use from mid-century. De la Gardie was interested in emblematic motifs, and it has been suggested that he judged his commissions primarily on the grounds of their moral content and on the loyalty and honesty of the workers, with relatively little weight given to connoisseurship or intrinsic artistic quality.48 How this fits with the image of the count as a free-spending playboy has not been explained satisfactorily. Part of this apparently contradictory picture can perhaps be attributed to his occasionally stormy relations with the court and his declining financial fortunes later in life. Nonetheless, he still had the potential to be the single most significant patron of the arts well into the 1670s – a potential that was only occasionally realized, for example, in the rebuilding of Karlberg palace by Jean de la Vallée. It is also true, as an Italian visitor observed, that de la Gardie undertook too many projects, spreading his efforts and his resources too thinly, and so undermining his own efforts.49 One step towards a resolution of this paradox may be to suggest that de la Gardie had a different set of aesthetic values than Tessin and Hedwig Eleonora did, generally preferring an exuberant abundance of forms (and indeed, of estates) to one or two palaces subjugated to an overriding conceptual and aesthetic principle, such as we find at Drottningholm. It may also be, however, that de la Gardie was very much aware of architecture at the court and emulated it, but that it took some time for him to recognize the achievements of Hedwig Eleonora, or at least for him to understand that her mode of building had become the local standard of taste and excellence. His palace at Läckö, rebuilt under the leadership of Matthäus Holl from 1654, has been seen as a personalized reduction of the Stockholm palace as it stood in the middle of the century, irregular and bristling with towers (figure 80).50 Yet by 1670, when de la Gardie visited another noble estate, Ekolsund, we hear that “the design of the house itself did not please. Rather, it was wished that the building at Drottningholm were paired with that garden [at Ekolsund].”51 Around the same time, he set Jean de la Vallée

46

It is difficult to reconstruct de la Gardie’s collection from archival sources, but some paintings have been traced fairly convincingly to his collection. Among these are a Danaë by Giuseppe Salviati and a Judith and Holofernes by Antiveduto Grammatica. See the exhibition catalogue Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (Stockholm, 1980), 139–140. 47 Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (Stockholm, 1980). For a general biography of de la Gardie, see Rudolf Fåhraeus, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (Stockholm, 1932). 48 Göran Lindahl, “Den Tessinska radikalismen” 1600talets ansikte, ed Sten Åke Nilsson and Margareta Ramsay (Lund, 1997), 53. For de la Gardie’s interest in emblems, see Allan Ellenius, “Bild och bildspråk

på Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies Venngarn” Lychnos (1973–1974): 160–192; and Lars Ljungström, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies Venngarn. Herresätet som byggnadsverk och spegelbild (Stockholm, 2004). 49 Lorenzo Magalotti, Relazioni di viaggio in Inghilterra Francia e Svezia [1674] (Bari, 1968), 323. 50 Göran Lindahl, “Läckö: slott och grevskap” Läckö. Landskapet, borgen, slottet, ed Leif Jonsson (Stockholm, 1999), 215–253. 51 Cited in Claes Ellehag, Fem svenska stormanshem under 1600-talet (Stockholm, 1994), 114. “Elliest behagade dehseinen af sielfwa huuset intet, uthan önskades att Drottningholms huus wed denna trägården fogat wore.”

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79. Hans Jacob Christler, de la Gardie Palace (“Makalös”), Stockholm, 1635–1642. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

80. Läckö, Rebuilt by Matthäus Holl from 1654. From Suecia antiqua, 1715.

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81. Jean de la Vallée, Karlberg, ca 1670.

to work rebuilding Karlberg palace near Stockholm in a form much closer to the new, more restrained and unified mode for which Drottningholm had become a model (figure 81).52 The renovated residence even included ceremonial bedrooms much like Hedwig Eleonora’s, which Tessin had also replicated in the old royal palace in the later 1660s. De la Gardie was hardly alone in this, and was arguably well behind his peers in the nobility in doing so. Already in the later 1660s and earlier 1670s Gustaf Bonde’s burial chapel incorporated a design by Tessin (or his workshop), with stucco in the latest mode framing a funerary monument by Nicolaes Millich (figure 82). Before his death in 1669, Seved Bååt had brought together a design by Tessin, a ceiling by Carlo Carove, and intended to add a large ceiling painting, probably by Ehrenstrahl. (He died in the year that Millich came to Sweden.) The team that Hedwig Eleonora first brought together at Drottningholm was soon much desired among the nobility for a kind of architectural ensemble that had not previously existed in the kingdom.53 Nonetheless, there is still at de la Gardie’s Karlberg a tangible exuberance in the stucco decoration and other details which was more subdued in projects for other patrons (figure 83). It is not a structure that could be mistaken for one built for Hedwig Eleonora or Schering Rosenhane. Rosenhane is particularly important in this regard, as he wrote in his Oeconomia about the ways in which a house must reflect its owner in size, richness, and 52

For Karlberg, see Tord O:son Nordberg, Karlbergs slott. En byggnadshistorisk skildring (Stockholm, 1945); Bengt M Holmquist et al., eds, Karlberg. Slott och skola (Västervik, Sweden, 1992). 53 It should be noted that there is a general shift in Tessin’s work and in architecture in the kingdom at large around the early 1660s. The exuberant variety

in de la Gardie’s work is in some ways a more exaggerated variant of what we see in Wrangel’s projects, for instance. While Drottningholm, begun in 1662, is certainly central to this, a broader crystallization of Tessin’s style, seen for instance in the Bååt residence begun in the same year, also contributed to the standardization of aristocratic architecture.

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ARCHITECT character. Rosenhane held firm to these tenets in practice. In 1652, his neighbor, Carl Gustaf Wrangel, wanted to make his palace even more grand and expansive than his plot would allow, although it was already one of the largest in the city. He hoped to convince Rosenhane to accept an extant residence in the northern part of the city in exchange for his plot, which was still undeveloped late in 1652. Rosenhane replied that it was quite impossible for him to live in a purchased house, as “one in other built houses [i.e., houses built for others] hardly finds the suitability in all things, as when one builds after one’s own designs.”54 Rosenhane’s house was indeed in perfect keeping with its owner’s character. De la Gardie described it as “beautiful and moderately adorned,”55 which could hardly characterize either Wrangel’s or de la Gardie’s residences, but which reflects perfectly the French resident Pierre Chanut’s description of Rosenhane as “well traveled, agreeable and discreet.”56 Rosenhane sent his reply to Wrangel’s request for his plot from Lübeck. Wrangel lived primarily in Pomerania in these years. The most remarkable residences in Stockholm were built for men who were rarely there. Wrangel was in the kingdom less than almost any other, and yet he built two of the most imposing structures of his generation. It is little wonder, then,

54

RA Skoklostersamling E 8460, Schering Rosenhane to Carl Gustaf Wrangel, December 4, 1652. “Och efter man uthj andre bygde huus näpligh finner den Commoditet i alla stycker, såsom det man sielf äffter sin eghen Dessein låther uppbyggia, Så hafwer iagh icke heller kunnat tänckt uppå något annat bugdt huus till att köpa eller förbytha.” The letter is a very entertaining illustration of the vast differences in the character of Wrangel, the field marshal, and Rosenhane, the poet-diplomat. Wrangel clearly wanted an even more bombastic and sprawling residence in the city, while Rosenhane, who repeatedly called Wrangel his

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82. Tessin and Others, Bonde Burial Chapel, Spånga Church, ca 1667–1673.

“Dear Brother,” gently refused to give up his land, and looked forward to spending leisure time with his celebrated neighbor. 55 Allan Ellenius, “Konstvetenskap och miljöstudium. Reflexioner kring några praktiska exempel” Historisk tidskrift (Stockholm) 35 (1972): 177. De la Gardie called Rosenhane’s house “wackert och måtteligen zijrligt.” 56 Quoted in Allan Ellenius, “Schering Rosenhane och det emblematiska språket” Lychnos (1997): 81. “Enfin, Monseigneur, c’est un homme du monde, des moeurs reglées, agréable en conversation, discret et accomodant.”

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83. Jean de la Vallée, Karlberg, ca 1670.

that Rosenhane put so much emphasis on the individuality of each house and its reflection of the owner. Gustaf Bonde likewise explained that he built his Stockholm residence more for the reputation of his family than for the comfort of living in it. This was no less true of the interior than of the exterior, since the palaces were to a surprising extent accessible to the touring classes. Duke Albrecht of Sachsen Gotha visited Stockholm in 1670, and was able to see Wrangel’s and de la Gardie’s palaces, “since the field marshal and his wife were not at home.”57 The buildings became substitutes for the absent noblemen themselves, a sort of mute theater in which the sets were understudies for the larger-than-life leading players.58

57 CStA LA A Nr 1647i, fol 69v-71v. For a partial transcription and discussion of the manuscript, see Annette Faber, “Von Gotha nach Gottorf. Prinz Albrechts Reise in die nordischen Königreiche, 1670” Jahrbuch der Coburger Landesstiftung 47 (2002): 1–66. 58 This observation has been made in a rather different way by Allan Ellenius, “Konstvetenskap och miljöstudium. Reflexioner kring några praktiska exempel”

Historisk tidskrift (Stockholm) 35 (1972): 161–180; and idem, “Die repräsentative Funktion der adligen Bauten und ihrer Ausstatung im schwedischen 17. Jahrhundert” Arte et Marte. Studien zur Adelskultur des Barockzeitalters in Schweden, Dänemark und Schleswig-Holstein, ed Dieter Lohmeier (Neumünster, 1978), 129–142.

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We have seen that within a very short period in the early 1660s Tessin was able to start several major projects in Stockholm, Drottningholm outside of the city, which would occupy him for the rest of his life, and Kalmar Cathedral, over 300 kilometers south of the capital. This was possible thanks to what may have been Tessin’s greatest strengths: administrative organization and the ability to design from a desk rather than on the worksite, which was still relatively rare in northern Europe. The basis for this was laid in the previous decade when he was occupied with the palatial hunting lodge for Carl X Gustaf at Borgholm. A major royal project had a distinct prestige, and the newly-trained architect could hardly turn it down. But it also had major drawbacks, most significantly that it isolated him on a small island off the southeast coast of the kingdom, far from the center of building activity and other significant patronage. Tessin’s isolation at Borgholm was no doubt frustrating for someone so ambitious, and several other circumstances made the situation worse. Axel Oxenstierna, his only real patron and protector before his trip to Italy, died in 1654, the year of Christina’s abdication. Tessin continued to work for and correspond with Carl Gustaf Wrangel, but the general resided primarily in Pomerania. The power structure of the court thus changed significantly around this time. Virtually all of Tessin’s early supporters disappeared, and it was unclear how he would fit into the new power structure of the court. This uncertainty was compounded by the apparent success of Jean de la Vallée, his only real competitor. (Matthäus Holl’s career never really took off, though at midcentury it may have seemed that he would supplant Tessin.) Though younger, de la Vallée received a stipend to study abroad first, from 1646–1650. In January of 1651, just as Tessin was preparing for his own travels, de la Vallée received a new position as royal “Architectus.” He was to serve as inspector of all royal buildings in the kingdom. The accompanying instruction, written four months later, specifies conspicuously fewer organizational or instructional duties than Tessin’s 1646 contract as royal “Architecteur,” which required him to oversee the work site quite closely.1 De la Vallée’s 1651 contract required him only to ensure that the workers were competent, and if not, to replace them.2 The stipulation that he inspect the work before the laborers could be paid implied regular visits – every week or two – but less personal engagement with the site than Tessin’s contract demanded. Moreover, de la Vallée’s salary was significantly higher than Tessin’s. These discrepancies have been overemphasized, however. De la Vallée’s broad powers were never officially enacted, and the difference in pay as significant as has been thought, since Christina declared early in 1654 that Tessin should receive the same salary as his competitor.3 1

De la Vallée’s nomination is in RA, Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 62 [series B], Jean de la Vallée, January 14, 1651, 92–95; the accompanying instruction is in UUB Gahm Persson samling, X 222, fol 391v-393r, May 24, 1651. 2 The terms “Architecteur,” “Architectus,” and other variants are often used more or less interchangeably in the documents, and cannot reliably be parsed for shades of meaning or relative importance. 3 RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 62 [series B], Nicodemus Tessin, February 18, 1654, 23. The discrepancy between de la Vallée and Tessin is

particularly stressed by Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 22. Robert Swedlund, At förse Riket med beständige och prydlige Byggnader. Byggnadsstyrelsen och dess föregångare (Stockholm, 1969), 29–30 points out that Jean de la Vallée’s new powers were never confirmed, and the relationship between the architect and the administration was revised. For further commentary on the development of the role of the architect in the seventeenth century, see Ulla Ehrensvärd, “Mångsysslaren, eller, Hur man blir slottsarkitekt” ArkitekturMuseets årsbok (1987): 9–21.

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She evidently regarded the higher salary as appropriate for a fully-trained architect who had studied in France and especially in Italy. Once Tessin attained these qualifications, he was entitled to pay equal to de la Vallée’s. Nonetheless, the very existence of the memo – as well as Tessin’s written reminder of Christina’s order – implies that he held a secondary position.4 In any case, while Tessin worked at Borgholm, de la Vallée worked on two projects for royal palaces in Stockholm: a major renovation to the old palace, and a completely new plan for a residence in the southern district of the city. He also prepared plans for the major new Catherine Church for the southern district. A number of nobles approached him with private projects in these years as well.5 Tessin was no doubt keenly aware that he was at a disadvantage in a competition for a limited number of royal and private commissions, a situation compounded by his isolation at Borgholm. All signs suggested that he would be left behind as de la Vallée solidified his position as the leading architect in the kingdom. At Borgholm Tessin found himself in a professional situation decades behind what he had seen in Italy. Where Carlo Rainaldi and his peers had been responsible primarily for producing drawings in a studio for the patron and the building master, with a relatively detached oversight of the construction itself, Tessin found himself functioning as both architect and construction leader.6 He was responsible for developing a plan for the project, but he also ordered materials, kept financial records, distributed monthly pay to the workers, taught them, cajoled them into productivity, and wrote detailed letters to the king describing progress and setbacks.7 He even had to arrange for borrowed boats to supply the stone necessary for construction.8 This was no easy task, and Tessin complained mightily of the pressure and limitations on his position. Tessin struggled to keep contact with the court and nobility despite his absence from the capital. It is therefore ironic that, in spite of his worries, his six years at Borgholm prepared him in several ways to overtake de la Vallée in the following decade and to establish himself as the leading architect in the kingdom. The discipline and methods he developed in this period can also be seen as the starting point of the career of his son, Nicodemus the Younger, who was born in 1654, during his father’s first year there. The first skills Tessin developed in these years were those of strict management and oversight. In the early 1640s he was responsible for a small group of workers for Axel Oxenstierna’s projects. His work in urban planning later in the decade was mostly as part of a small team, and he seems in any case to have been more concerned with documenting the urban fabric of smaller towns and making proposals for improvements than overseeing significant building work, which was mostly left to others. At Borgholm he had to manage costs, hire, fire, and pay laborers, and oversee virtually all aspects of the project. He learned what could be expected of workers, which tasks required the close oversight of a master and

4

RA Biographica, vol 7 fol 264r-v, undated. After this, there are regular notices in Tessin’s payment file that he was to receive the same salary as de la Vallée. See RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 62 [series B], passim. 5 Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003). 6 Elisabeth Kieven, “Römische Architekturzeichnungen des Barock” Von Bernini bis Piranesi. Römische Architekturzeichnungen des Barock, ed Elisabeth Kieven (Stuttgart, 1993), 8–31; idem, “’Mostrar l’inventione’ – The Role of Roman Architects in the Baroque Period:

Plans and Models” The Triumph of the Baroque, ed Henry A Millon (New York, 1999), 173–205. For the later baroque, see Bruno Contardi and Giovanna Curcio, eds, In Urbe Architectus. Modelli – disegni – misure – la professione dell’architetto. Roma 1680–1750 (Rome, 1991). 7 RA Stegeborgsamlingen E 188 for letters from Tessin to Crown Prince Carl [X] Gustaf; RA Kammararkivet, Slott och gårdar, vol 8 for the financial records for the construction. 8 UUB G 359, Tessin to Gabriel Oxenstierna af Korsholm and Wasa, May 2, 1656.

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which could be done by a day laborer. Although he would soon cast off these responsibilities, it was essential for him to know what could be expected of local work crews, and the extent of their abilities. And even as he distanced himself from the worksite, the practical business and management skills that he learned there underlay his rise as a professional, office-based architect. The second crucial skill he learned in this period was how to communicate architectural ideas concisely and from a distance. Very few drawings for Borgholm survive, which is especially noteworthy considering its scale. The known drawings are all plans and general views, rather than detailed studies. Presumably, few drawings were necessary, since he worked at the site and could give personal directions to the workmen. Drawings were more essential in proposals for projects in or near Stockholm, since he was there only rarely between 1654 and 1661, when he returned permanently to the city. As we have seen, Tessin studied architectural draftsmanship in Italy, and he put his new skills to work even before his return to Sweden with projects for Axel Oxenstierna and Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie.9 In the 1650s, while based at Borgholm, he prepared plans for a pavilion for Hedwig Eleonora at Gripsholm, the city residence of the Scottish mercenary general Robert Douglas, and various projects for burial chapels for the de la Gardie family. He was also involved with the design of the city residence of Carl Gustaf Wrangel. All of this was done largely by correspondence. The Gripsholm project, an early and immature design, is letter-folded, indicating that he sent the drawings to the queen, probably from Borgholm. He included a written description, clarifying and supplementing the drawings.10 Drawings were not a new part of the building process. They had long been used to give patrons an idea of the form of the project, or perhaps more precisely, to ensure that the patron and the building master had the same design in mind. A ground plan and a scenographic view were common ways of accomplishing this, although a wooden model could also serve this purpose. This is precisely the sort of drawing that survives from the Borgholm project (a signed contract drawing) and for the Gripsholm project for Hedwig Eleonora, as well as for projects pursued earlier in the century. The crucial development that Tessin did so much to implement was the expectation that the drawings alone could guide work at the building site. For this to work, the drawings had to display a clarity of conception and representation that was still very rare in the German lands, and unknown in the Baltic region. The logical approach to such a clear method of draftsmanship was the plan-andelevation format. The plan is the footprint of the building, as seen from above, and the elevation is the exterior façade. These are frequently complemented by a section, showing a cutaway of the building, as if the façade had been sliced off. All of these are shown without any perspectival effects, as if they had been pressed onto a flat sheet and then shrunk to a manageable size. The convention allows a much more useful representation of the building because the distorting aspects of perspective are cancelled; in short, all aspects of the building can be measured accurately. When the plan and elevation are accompanied by a section, the complex and three-dimensional relationship of the interior, exterior, and floor plan are united in a coherent and measurable schematic representation. When paired with a scale, all the necessary information is provided so that individual masters – masons, carpenters, decorative stonecutters, and so on – can contribute to a coherent design fully in accord with the ideas 9

Tessin may have sent drawings for Schering Rosenhane’s house from Italy as well.

10

NM Eichorn 955/1890, 956/1890 (figures 134, 135). This project is discussed in more depth in chapter eight.

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of the author. In this situation, the architect, the word now used in the fully modern sense of the term, does not need to be present at the site. Architectural Draftsmanship in Northern Europe The development and unconditional acceptance of modern architectural draftsmanship, by which is meant the production of plans, elevations, and (more occasionally) sections, conceived as a set and drawn to the same scale, has a longer and more complex history than is often recognized.11 Although the general principles were laid out by Vitruvius in antiquity and Leon Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century, neither writer explained in great detail the significance of the convention.12 Moreover, both texts were written in Latin (Vitruvius was first translated into Italian in 1521; Alberti in 1550), and neither was illustrated before the sixteenth century, making both largely inaccessible to builders of the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries.13 A number of intersecting circumstances brought the plan-and-elevation pairing into use at the works at the new St Peter’s basilica in Rome, begun in 1506. This site brought an unprecedented confluence of talent and a scale that required more forethought and structural clarity than had previously been necessary, as the details of smaller structures could usually be worked out as the project developed. Thus Raphael, who took over the works after the death of the first architect, Donato Bramante, was appointed jointly with a scholarly advisor, the elderly Fra Giocondo, who published an erudite early edition of Vitruvius.14 A manuscript translation of the ancient text was produced for Raphael, who could not read Latin, and it seems to have been he or someone in his immediate circle who wrote to Pope Leo X on the state of the ancient city, in which the principles of the plan and elevation are laid out.15

11 See, inter alia, James S Ackerman, “Architectural Practice in the Italian Renaissance” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 13:3 (1954): 3–11; Wolfgang Lotz, “Das Raumbild in der Architekturzeichnung der italienischen Renaissance” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 7 (1956): 193–226 (translated in Lotz, Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture (Cambridge, 1977): 1–65); Elisabeth Kieven, ed, Von Bernini bis Piranesi. Römische Architekturzeichnungen des Barock (Stuttgart, 1993); Christoph Luitpold Frommel, “Reflections on the Early Architectural Drawings” The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo. The Representation of Architecture, ed Henry A Millon and Vittorio Lampugnani (Milan, 1994), 101–121; James S Ackerman, “Conventions in Architectural Drawing, North and South, 1250–1550” L’Europa e l’arte italiana, ed Max Seidel (Venice, 2000), 220–235. 12 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed Ingrid D Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge, 1999), I.2.2.; Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, ed Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass, 1988), II.1. Christoph Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo. Zur Theorie der Architekturzeichnung der Renaissance” Hülle und Fülle.

Festschrift für Tilmann Buddensieg, ed Andreas Beyer, Vittorio Lampugnani and Gunter Schweikhart (Alfter, 1993), 565–585, has pointed out that Vitruvius and Alberti had somewhat different ideas of the role and significance of the plan-elevation-section format. Vitruvius saw it as a fundamental part of the conception of the building, while Alberti saw it more simply as a practical instrument useful for setting down and transmitting ideas. 13 The first illustrated edition of Vitruvius was produced by Fra Giocondo of Verona in 1511; the first illustrated edition of Alberti’s text was also the first Italian translation, published in Florence in 1550 by Cosimo Bartoli. 14 Lucia A Ciapponi, “Fra Giocondo di Verona and his Edition of Vitruvius” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 72–90. 15 For the translation made for Raphael, see Ingrid D Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colucci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 81–104. For the letter to Leo X (abridged), see Raphael Sanzio, Tutti gli scritti: lettere, firme, sonetti, saggi tecnici e teorici, ed Ettore Camesasca (Milan, 1956), 51–72.

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Although though these principles became functioning parts of the design process in the larger circle of the St Peter’s works, even in Italy they seem not to have been used to the extent that we might assume.16 Even later in the sixteenth century there were conspicuously few architects who rigorously followed the plan-elevation convention. Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Andrea Palladio stand out, but both are to some degree exceptional. Unlike most Italian Renaissance architects, neither was trained in the figural arts. Moreover, a large portion of Palladio’s drawings were made not for construction, but for publication in his treatise, The Four Books on Architecture (1570), and thus for a theoretical context in which the plan-and-elevation format was rigorously observed. (Sebastiano Serlio was less consistent in his use of the format, but it is very much present in his earlier publications as well.) It may be that the description of the format in Vitruvius and Alberti, even though it was not illustrated, associated the format more firmly with the architectural treatise than with actual architectural practice. Even in the seventeenth century the principle was not as rigidly observed as we might expect. Bernini in particular was interested in visual effect, and the view was often as useful for him as the plan and elevation. When the latter was required, he often drew freehand and let assistants transform the sketches into measured and legible sets of drawings.17 It may thus come as little surprise that a significant number of Tessin the Younger’s drawings made in Rome while he was under Bernini’s tutelage are not academic exercises in plan and elevation, but more impressionistic views of various buildings in the city.18 The plan-and-elevation format was well known in northern Europe from the middle of the sixteenth century through the publications of Serlio, who had been active at the works at St Peter’s, and the translations of his books made in the Low Countries, as well as the later publications of Palladio, Scamozzi, and others.19 These were however often used more as traditional pattern books offering examples of column capitals, entablatures, and ornament, rather than as models of proportion or of the representation of architecture.20 The introduction of the plan and elevation as an integral part of the design process in northern Europe seems rather to have come in the earlier seventeenth century. Inigo Jones in London has long been recognized as an outstanding early figure in this regard. Around 1614 he purchased a large number of Andrea Palladio’s drawings in the Veneto,

16

James S Ackerman, “Architectural Practice in the Italian Renaissance” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 13:3 (1954): 3–11, notes that most of the architectural drawings from the Italian Renaissance fall in two categories: undigested ideas scratched on paper, which could hardly have conveyed a coherent architectural thought, and carefully-drawn sheets. The latter consist primarily of presentation drawings, shown to patrons and not used in the building process, and details of windows, portals, etc, perhaps used by the stonecutters who realized these elements. Drawings, in his view, did not constitute the primary means of communication between the architect and the craftsmen. 17 For Bernini’s drawings, see Heinrich Brauer and Rudolf Wittkower, Die Zeichnungen des Gianlorenzo Bernini (Berlin, 1931; reprint Munich, 1998); Irving Lavin, ed, Drawings by Gianlorenzo Bernini from the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (Princeton, 1981); Elisabeth Kieven, ed, Von Bernini bis Piranesi.

Römische Architekturzeichnungen des Barock (Stuttgart, 1993). 18 This is noted by Elisabeth Kieven, “’Il Gran teatro del mondo.’ Nicodemus Tessin the Younger in Rome” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 5. 19 For the Netherlandish editions of the major architectural treatises, see Krista De Jonge, “Vitruvius, Alberti and Serlio. Architectural Treatises in the Low Countries, 1530–1620” Paper Palaces. The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed Vaughan Hart with Peter Hicks (New Haven, 1998), 281–296. The plan-andelevation format seems to have been adopted quite thoroughly in France already in the sixteenth century. 20 An example of this in the Swedish context is the sixteenth-century portal of the castle at Vadstena, carefully copied from Serlio, even though the castle in general shows little observance of Italian Renaissance conventions. Similar examples can be found at Kalmar castle. See Erik Forssman, “Dorisk stil i svensk architektur” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 28 (1959): 13–33.

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probably from the aged Vincenzo Scamozzi. Jones had first trained as a painter, and a deep and persistent interest in draftsmanship lay at the basis of his general conception of architecture in a way that was nearly unique in northern Europe (outside of France) to that point.21 The introduction of a drawings-based architectural method in the Netherlands in many ways mirrors that in England. Until the end of the sixteenth century, a building master from one of the trades would take responsibility for a project, and would make whatever drawings were necessary to work out a general idea and ensure agreement with the patron. These were very spare, and very few survive.22 This changed in the seventeenth century, but the narrative is complicated by the complete lack of drawings by Hendrick de Keyser, sculptor and city architect of Amsterdam at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He was a crucial figure in a number of ways, particularly in the introduction of a more Italianate architectural vocabulary. The lack of drawings makes it difficult to judge the degree to which he incorporated what may well have been considered Italianate methods into his architectural work. Aside from the remaining built works, his ideas are best known through the posthumous publication of his designs in 1631 by Cornelis Danckerts and Salomon de Bray in Architectura moderna.23 Here the plan-and-elevation format is found throughout, though we are left to wonder whether this closely reflects the original drawings, or if it was adopted so completely because it had been used by Serlio, Palladio, and Scamozzi, and was considered standard for printed architectural books.24 Although mindful of the looming uncertainties surrounding de Keyser’s methods, the great transformation in architectural practice in the Netherlands took place in the 1630s and 1640s, and particularly in the extended circle around Jacob van Campen.25 Like Inigo Jones, van Campen was trained as a painter. After the death of his parents, he inherited a considerable sum of money and the title Lord of Randenbroek. With this background, van Campen must be considered something of a gentleman architect, even if he pursued his work with great seriousness. Certainly his association and even close friendship with Sir Constantine Huygens, the secretary to the stadholder, whom he assisted in the study of Vitruvius and the design of his new residence, suggests that he was rather different from

21 Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, 2007); Jeremy Wood, “Inigo Jones, Italian Art, and the Practice of Drawing” Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 247–270. The drawings discussed here seem to be primarily from the 1630s, but Jones’s earlier Chatsworth sketchbook has recently been published; see Edward Chaney, Inigo Jones’s “Roman Sketchbook,” 2 vols (London, 2006). For Jones’s drawings generally, see John Harris and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones. Complete Architectural Drawings (London, 1989). Jones’s contact with Scamozzi – the only major architect he met in person – was more consequential than has often been assumed. See Howard Burns, “Inigo Jones and Vincenzo Scamozzi” Annali di architettura: Rivista del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 18–19 (2007): 215–224; and Giles Worsley, “Scamozzi’s Influence on English Seventeenth Century Architecture” Annali di architettura: Rivista del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 18–19 (2007): 225–233.

22

For an introduction to architectural draftsmanship in the Netherlands, see Elske Gerritsen, Zeventiendeeeuwse Architectuurtekeningen. De tekening in de ontwerp- en bouwpraktijk in de Nederlandse Republiek (Zwolle, 2006). 23 Salomon de Bray, Architectura moderna, ofte Bouwinge van onsen tyt (Amsterdam, 1631; facsimile Soest, 1971); Konrad Ottenheym, Paul Rosenberg, and Niek Smit, Hendrick de Keyser Architectura Moderna Moderne bouwkunst in Amsterdam 1600–1625 (Amsterdam, 2008). 24 The plates are in many cases different from the built structures, however, suggesting that the plates were based on de Keyser’s working drawings. 25 For van Campen, see P.T.A. Swillens, Jacob van Campen: schilder en bouwmeester, 1595–1657 (Assen, 1961); Jacobine Huisken, Konrad Ottenheym, Gary Schwartz, eds, Jacob van Campen. Het klassieke ideaal in de Gouden Eeuw (Amsterdam, 1995).

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the kinds of builders who had come before, both in theoretical outlook and in distance from the building site.26 Van Campen’s use of drawings also seems to reflect this more conceptual approach to building. Unlike previous generations of builders, he saw his task as the invention of designs, rather than their execution. This had a profound influence on the building process, for drawings became more central to the communication between the architect, now further removed from the building process, the patron, and the on-site craftsmen. Functioning as such an important medium between actors who were increasingly distant from one another, drawings now had to be far more legible than had previously been necessary. Van Campen’s evident full acceptance of the plan-and-elevation format should have made this a relatively straightforward transition. His own weaknesses proved problematic in this instance, however. He was not inclined to take on the laborious process of making highly-finished and measured drawings that would be legible to anyone familiar with the convention. More often, he made rather rough sketches that could be deciphered only with difficulty and uncertainty. The burden of making fair drawings instead fell to his assistants, who often struggled with the finer points of his sketches. Although they frequently misunderstood his intentions and suffered his wrath, there was a very definite positive aspect to this system: many of van Campen’s assistants – notably Pieter Post, Philips Vingboons, and Arent van ‘s-Gravesande – went on to distinguished careers as architects and draftsmen.27 In this way, by midcentury a truly drawings-based architecture became the standard throughout the Netherlands. Architectural Draftsmanship in Seventeenth-Century Sweden The methods of building in Sweden in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries closely reflect traditions in England, Germany, and elsewhere in northern Europe.28 The developments of the mid-seventeenth century likewise reflect contemporary shifts in method elsewhere, to which they are directly linked on many points. Growing up on the building site of the Luxembourg Palace, where his father worked, Simon de la Vallée must have seen drawings in use in one form or another.29 It is difficult to tell how much of an impression this left on his own approach to building, however. Jacob van Campen was then at work on the Huygenshuis and the Mauritshuis, as well as collaborating with de la Vallée on Ter Nieuwburg, but his dependence on drafting seems not to have made a particularly strong mark on the

26

This association seems to have included a familiarity far surpassing professional relations, as Huygens stayed with van Campen in October of 1635. For a review and revision of the literature on the relation between Huygens and van Campen, see Pieter Vlaardingerbroek, “De stadhouder, zijn secretaris en de architectuur: Jacob van Campen als ontwerper van het Huygenshuis en de hofarchitectuur onder Frederik Hendrik” Wooncultuur in de Nederlanden, 1500–1800, ed Jan de Jong et al. (Zwolle, 2000), 60–81. 27 This is explained by Konrad Ottenheym, “The Painters cum Architects of Dutch Classicism” Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth-Century Painting, ed Albert Blankert et al. (Rotterdam, 1999), 34–53. A corollary of this is that some of these architects – most notably Pieter Post and Adrian Dortsman – were able to supply drawings for distant projects on sites they never

saw. Post, for instance, supplied drawings to Friedrich Wilhelm, the elector of Brandenburg. 28 The methods described in Malcolm Airs, The Making of the English Country House 1500–1640 (London, 1975) are very similar to those in effect in Sweden during roughly the same period. 29 It is impossible to discuss de Brosse’s drawings or drafting method in any detail, but he evidently was fully conversant with the methods described here and relied heavily on them to convey information to the work crews. See Jacques Pannier, Un architecte français au commencement du XVIIe siècle: Salomon de Brosse (Paris, 1911) (who reproduces several drawings); and Rosalys Coope, “Un grand projet inachevé. La creation d’Henrichement par Sully (1608–1612). L’oeuvre de Salomon de Brosse à Henrichemont: à propos de trois dessins inédits” Cahiers d’archéologie et d’histoire du Berry 41 (1975): 21–25.

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Frenchman.30 De la Vallée did in fact make a more or less complete set of drawings for the House of the Nobility,31 but showed no inclination to do so for Oxenstierna’s Fiholm, for which there is only a group of plans. These were not sufficient to convey a complete architectural idea, and thus either tied the architect/building master to the site or transferred a significant part of the responsibility for the form of the building to local craftsman and overseers. The elaboration of this design process in the Swedish context was thus left up to Nicodemus Tessin, who had seen it in use in Italy, where he evidently had some access to the construction site of Sant’Agnese, and in the Netherlands, where the Amsterdam town hall was under construction. It need not have been so; Simon’s son Jean could easily have taken this step. For whatever reason, however, Jean did not develop the design process to the degree that he might have. He was a competent draftsman, but he evidently struggled to adjust to a paper-based architectural practice. It is often said that de la Vallée drew only plans – rather than elevations and sections – and while this is not strictly true, it suggests that he never broke entirely with the tradition in which the architect remained personally involved with each project through its completion. Tessin abandoned this approach altogether and was able to provide drawings for a much larger body of works than his competitor.32 As we shall see, Tessin very quickly became one of the finest architectural draftsmen in Germanic Europe, and outpaced his peers elsewhere in the Empire even further in the establishment of a modern, office-bound architectural practice. His travels in the Netherlands, France, and Italy were important for his awareness of modern building styles, but they were still more crucial for his concept of the work of the architect, which could never be diffused by prints and treatises alone, and which could be found only rarely in the Empire before the end of the seventeenth century. Tessin’s Drawings The importance of shifting the focus of his efforts to drawings should have been clear to Tessin from the moment he returned from his study travels, for it made it possible to manage the extraordinary demand for modern, representative architecture. Through his consummate skill as an organizer and draftsman, he was able to provide usable finished drawings for a large number of projects, which could be built simultaneously under the stewardship of other building leaders. More than any other single aspect of his work, this was the key that allowed Tessin finally to overtake Jean de la Vallée and establish himself as the leading – and most reliable – architect in the kingdom. Tessin’s early plans for Axel Oxenstierna’s residence at Fiholm (ca 1641; figure 17) represent the first evidence of his interest in this medium, if we discount Joachim von Sandrart’s apparently apocryphal story of Tessin’s early inclination to draw, which is almost certainly derived from a standard topos in artists’ lives of talent discovered through untutored drawing.33 The drawings for Fiholm are clearly dependent on those for the same project made by Simon de la Vallée, though they encompass the whole estate, including gardens 30 For a different view, see Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 14, 21, 27, who believes that van Campen left a profound mark on Simon de la Vallée’s style and methods. 31 See Tord O:son Nordberg, De la Vallée. En arkitektfamilj i Frankrike, Holland och Sverige/ Les de la Vallée. Vie d’une famille d’architectes en France, Hollande, et Suède (Stockholm, 1970), 132–150. 32 Claes Ellehag’s monograph on de la Vallée, which is quite free in its attributions to the architect, still

lists a rather smaller number of projects – and especially of completed projects – than a more conservative catalogue of Tessin’s projects would include. See Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003). 33 Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, vol 1 (Nuremberg, 1675), 347. See chapter two for further discussion.

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84. Simon de la Vallée, Plan of Fiholm, ca 1640.

and peripheral buildings. The drawings of both men are rather crude by any modern standard, including one that Tessin expected of himself after mid-century. It is however essential that these drawings served a specific purpose within a very particular kind of architectural practice. We can see this at once in the types of drawings that have survived. For the Fiholm project we have five plans by de la Vallée and two by Tessin. There are two scenographic views that may be related to the project, and no sections or elevations.34 The views are roughly drawn, and were intended to give the patron a general idea of the final appearance of the project, rather than to provide anything a mason or carpenter could follow. In contrast, the plans were drawn very carefully. De la Vallée developed finished drawings showing the room arrangement for each floor, including the placement of fireplaces and staircases (figure 84). Each is carefully measured, with a scale included on the drawing. Even for the most abstract representation of the layout, showing nothing more than the arrangement of structural blocks, Tessin gave a measured scale. This method of representation seems curious until we remember that his instructions were to survey the site and prepare measured lines for the diggers to follow in laying the foundation for the buildings and planning the gardens. This work required precise measurements, but the façades and decorative schemes could be devised on a more ad-hoc basis as a cooperative venture of the master craftsmen working at the site and the patron. In certain cases a master like Simon de la Vallée might verbally propose ideas for the façades, roofs, and so on, and visit the site only occasionally. A project 34

The drawings are in RA Böringe klosters arkiv, Kart avd, Nr 15 - Stort format.

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85. Tessin, Elevation of a Church (Sant’Agnese), ca 1652–1653.

86. Tessin, Plan of a Church (Sant’Agnese), ca 1652– 1653.

might then reflect the architect’s ideas in a general way, but without detailed drawings, the craftsmen could hardly be expected to follow a plan exactly. Tessin’s late-blooming skill as a draftsman must certainly be attributed primarily to his studies in Italy. This is visible most concretely in the copy or paraphrase of Carlo Rainaldi’s project for Sant Agnese in Piazza Navona (figures 85, 86). This project shows Tessin’s significant development in two important ways. First, the technical skill and care invested in the drawing far surpasses anything done by any architect active in the kingdom before. As with his first drawings, Tessin approached the blank page carefully. The spatial relationships are worked out first, so that he has lightly drawn a ruled axial line through the lanterns of the twin bell towers, the round cartouches (motifs that would return repeatedly in his work), and through the peak of the pediments in the lower stories. Virtually every regular line is drawn either with a compass or a straight edge. The façade is articulated with Ionic columns, and the whole form is richly and dramatically layered, an effect enhanced by three colors of wash. There are weak passages, to be sure. He seems undecided about how the two side doorways fit into the whole scheme, for example, and the column farthest to the right appears somewhat out of place. This sheet nonetheless represents a major advancement in his abilities. More important, the scenographic view is replaced with a projected elevation, paired with a plan drawn to the same scale. The importance of such a convention is that it allows a much more useful representation of the building because the distorting aspects of perspective are cancelled. In short, all aspects of the building could be measured accurately by anyone familiar with the convention. These sheets represent, for the first time in the Swedish kingdom and even more broadly in the Baltic/north German region, the basis for a truly modern architectural practice grounded in the most advanced formal vocabulary and incorporating the representational methods required to bring these ideas to fruition. With

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these drawings, Tessin announced his investment in the method, and staked a claim as one of the best architectural draftsmen in northern Europe. The Sant’Agnese drawings formed the basis for the rest of Tessin’s career. From the 1660s, his work for private individuals consisted of preparing drawings in plan and elevation for various commissions and sending them to the patron. Occasionally he made a recommendation for a building master to oversee the work. He might even visit the more significant projects from time to time, but for the most part, once the drawings left his office he was no longer responsible for the project. The drawings guided the craftsmen both in the generalities and in the details, and any confusion could usually be clarified with a short meeting between the building master and the architect in his office. Draftsmanship was the foundation of his mature career, and the process through which he developed a project is worth more attention. Aristocratic Burial Chapels Tessin designed one relatively minor class of structure, aristocratic burial chapels, often enough that we can compare the drawings profitably and examine the ways in which most of these are variants of each other. Well over twenty drawings for at least seven of these chapels survive, but there were probably more. There are usually at least two drawings for each project: a plan and an elevation. Enough sections survive to suggest that this format was also frequently or usually prepared. Occasionally an elevation was cut away on the vertical axis. The rigorous symmetry of Tessin’s work made this possible, and provided an economical means of showing the section and elevation on one sheet. A preliminary survey (figures 87, 88, 89) shows that Tessin typically set a drummed dome over a square chapel, which more often than not comprised one and a half stories.35 The chapel could be decorated in various ways, but some combination of blind frames or niches, garlands and arms, chosen to suit the wishes and profession of the patron, was usual. These stock motifs were a convenient way to enrich and personalize the structure. The chapels were all added onto the choirs of medieval churches, which limited the options somewhat. They had to be free-standing structures connected to the church by the rather narrow openings that could be punched in the medieval walls without compromising the structural integrity of the standing building (figure 90). Within these strictures, Tessin used a standardized format, the source of which is clear: Domenico Fontana’s Sistine Chapel at Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome (figure 91). Fontana published the plan, sections and elevation in his book on the transportation of the Vatican obelisk in 1590.36 The prints can be connected to Tessin’s workshop through a copy made by Tessin the Younger in the later 1660s or early 1670s, when he was an adolescent training with his father.37 35

For a survey of these chapels, see Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947); Ingrid Rosell, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies kyrkobyggnadsverksamhet i Sverige (Stockholm, 1972), 34–45. For discussion of them in an international context, see Howard Montagu Colvin, Architecture and the AfterLife (New Haven, 1991), 253–282. 36 Domenico Fontana, Della trasportatione dell’obelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di Nostro Signore papa Sisto V (Rome, 1590; facsimile Milan, 1978). 37 Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 50–51. The drawing is on Dutch paper, indicating that it was made in Stockholm rather than in Rome. There is no indication of the source on

the drawing, suggesting that it is an early workshop drawing (and that other assistants may have copied the same print) rather than one of Tessin the Younger’s meticulously-documented study drawings. The drawing after Fontana provides an instructive lesson in the historiography of art in Sweden. Here we have a clear model from which Tessin and his assistants developed plans for burial chapels in local churches. Mårten Liljegren, writing in 1947 on burial chapels in Sweden in the later 17th century, argued that Tessin’s study in Rome “had not changed the feeling for the uniqueness of the role of the building in Sweden. … Their form is determined by local tradition, and one will search in vain for analogies to his compositional methods on the continent.” Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 157.

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87. Tessin, Burial Chapel (de la Gardie Chapel, Veckholm Church).

88. Tessin, Burial Chapel (de la Gardie Chapel, Veckholm Church).

The copy of Fontana’s design by the younger Tessin makes us wonder to what extent Tessin used these relatively simple chapels as study cases. The quality of draftsmanship in this group of drawings is generally high, but ranges widely. The vigorous pen drawing of one of these chapels falls far from Tessin’s preferred pen-and-wash, for example, yet the design is clearly related to those associated with his workshop (figure 92). The coarse hatching associates it with the Silesian Johann Peter Kirstenius, a virtually unknown figure who worked both as a fortifications engineer and as a civil building leader. He was in charge of the construction of the de la Gardie chapels at Veckholm from 1655, and was thus responsible for realizing Tessin’s plans. Kirstenius’s other major project was the ongoing work on de la Gardie’s Stockholm palace, suggesting that his attachment was to the nobleman, rather than the architect.38 Kirstenius’s only known drawing is on a note, probably addressed to Tessin, asking for further information on the chapel and a “profill” – presumably an elevation – of the

38

Göran Axel-Nilsson, Makalös. Fältherren greve Jakob de la Gardies hus i Stockholm (Stockholm, 1984), passim. Although Tessin was involved in the renovation of de la Gardie’s residence, the details of which are difficult to parse, Kirstenius is not known to

have worked with him on projects for other patrons. It was in any case usual for a patron to contract a building master directly, though the architect might on occasion recommend one.

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THE BUILDER tomb itself (figure 93).39 This sketch is admittedly weaker than the larger drawing in numerous respects: he has, for instance, shown the roundness of the drum in such a way that it appears stepped rather than curved. It is however only a sketch in a letter, and there are good reasons to believe that Kirstenius was in fact a competent draftsman. In the 1660s he spent four years organizing the maps and drawings of the fortifications corps. By his own estimate, he copied and catalogued some 2000 sheets in the course of this posting – a commission he would hardly have received had he not shown competence as a draftsman.40 This plan, section, and elevation have been associated with an unknown project for the church at Skokloster, but the design is very close to Tessin’s various projects for the de la Gardies at Veckholm (figure 87).41 The larger scale required to accommodate more windows in the drum distinguishes it from other burial chapels, such as Gustaf Bonde’s smaller one at Spånga, and it corresponds with Tessin’s more refined presentation drawing on a number of points.42 The other drawings for burial chapels generally fit much more coherently into Tessin’s drafting style, making it more difficult to gauge the degree to which assistants were involved.43 The sheets themselves provide a start, however. Figure 89, for Gustaf Bonde’s chapel,

39

The sheet was attributed to Kirstenius on the basis of the context and the handwriting by Ingrid Rosell, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies kyrkobyggnadsverksamhet i Sverige (Stockholm, 1972), 15. On 26 November, 1658, Kirstenius wrote that he was waiting for “die Profill und abrisse von Mr: Nicodemo wegen des kirchen baues auf Weckholm.” See Ingrid Rosell, Veckholms kyrka (Stockholm, 1974), 49. 40 Alf Åberg, “Svenska fortifikationsväsendets utveckling” Fortifikationen 350 år, 1635–1985, ed Bertil Runnberg (Stockholm, 1986), 49; Ulf Söderberg, “Fortifikationen och de militära kartsamlingarna” Att illustrera stormakten. Den svenska Fortifikationens bilder, 1654– 1719, ed Ulf Söderberg et al (Stockholm, 1999), 11. 41 Ingrid Rosell, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies kyrkobyggnadsverksamhet i Sverige (Stockholm, 1972), 38; Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 127–128. The identification

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89. Tessin (workshop?), Burial Chapel (Bonde Chapel, Spånga Church). of the drawings with various chapel projects is difficult, and has been pursued in part by comparing the details of the connection of the proposed chapel to the church with the architecture of the church. On this point, these drawings also compare best with the de la Gardie projects at Veckholm. 42 In the mid 1650s, when Tessin worked for the de la Gardie family while based at Borgholm, he did not yet have a structured workshop as he would a decade later. These drawings would thus be part of a communication between Tessin and Kirstenius, rather than workshop drawings in the more usual sense. This would also explain why these drawings are so very different from Tessin’s usual style, while other likely workshop drawings show much more subtle differences. Another sheet (NM THC 4801) may be by the same hand. 43 Two vigorous graphite drawings (NM THC 4804– 4805) are also somewhat unusual in Tessin’s oeuvre, although there are several autograph sheets in this medium.

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90. Spånga Church, with the Bonde Burial Chapel.

shows conspicuous weakness in the tricky representation of the cupola that is not evident in figure 87. It was commissioned around 1667, when Tessin’s workshop was fully developed. He may simply have placed an assistant in charge of the project and given it little further thought. Other chapels may be partially or wholly by workshop alumni or freelancing assistants. This seems particularly likely with several chapels that are close to the Tessin group, but which cannot be traced to him through documents or drawings (perhaps because they were never preserved with the workshop’s drawings), and deviate from the more secure group in a number of details.44 But given the relatively diffuse nature of these projects, the surviving drawings are remarkably consistent, suggesting that there was considerable emphasis at all levels of the workshop on consistent and quality draftsmanship. Two chapels cannot be associated with the larger group of rather standardized designs. The first is a project for a sepulchral chapel for the old general Carl Gustaf Wrangel (figures 94, 95). The notes on the drawings indicate that the general was deceased, so the sheets must be dated between his death in 1676 and Tessin’s own death in 1681.45 Here we have a more plastic space, which is much more inventive generally. The usual polygonal exterior has been retained, but it has been enriched with pilasters and semi-detached pillars to the point that the regular shape is effectively disguised. Tessin abandoned the box-like 44 This is the case, for example, with the chapel of Lorentz von der Linde, a friend of Wrangel, which has been considered “in the style” of Tessin, or the Johan Rosenhane chapel at Flens Church, which poses similar problems. See Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 170–171, 174.

45

See Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 169–171.

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interior entirely in favor of a fully-circular interior. As before, there are three large niches with windows set off behind free-standing columns, but even these have curving walls that mirror the round form, giving the interior the effect of a rotunda. The niches with paired columns allude more specifically to the rotunda of the Pantheon in Rome, which seems appropriate for a man who over a period of twenty years was intimately involved in the production of a printed pantheon of military heroes to be called the “Schwedisches Heldenbuch.”46 Tessin’s drawings for this late project show a much more developed facility with the representation and handling of structural elements than is evident in the earlier chapels, some of which may be workshop productions. Although the Wrangel chapel was never built, it demonstrates Tessin’s willingness to prepare a more singular and creative proposal for a major patron (or his or her heirs) when he thought it was in his interest to do so. This principle is very much in evidence in the second of these more distinguished chapels. The royal burial chapel, begun in 1671, was to preserve and honor the remains of the royal family from Carl X Gustaf to Carl XII, known collectively as the Carolines (figures 96, 91. Domenico Fontana, Sistine Chapel, Sta Maria Maggiore, 97). It was added to the medieval Riddarholm Rome, Begun 1581. church, where it became a kind of pendant to the earlier chapel for Gustaf II Adolf. The church was itself the subject of various plans for reconstruction and modernization, and the chapel was conceived as the crowning addition to a royal pantheon.47 It was a royal commission submitted to the regency, and thus had to be approved by Hedwig Eleonora, Carl Gustaf Wrangel, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, and others with an interest in representative architecture. The reconfiguration of the burial chapel type is more fundamental here than with the Wrangel chapel. Once again Tessin began with a basic cube, but enlivened it with sets of twin half-columns crowned by a broken pediment.

46

The Schwedisches Heldenbuch, to have been produced by the Merian press in Frankfurt, was never completed, though a great deal of the preparatory work was finished. Already in 1655 Matthäus Merian could show Christina eighty finished engravings for the project. The house was still at work on the project in 1674. See C Björkbom, “Schwedisches Heldenbuch. Ett planerat svenskt porträttverk” Rig 19 (1936): 107– 112; Arne Losman, “Förlagshuset Merian och Sverige” Stormaktstiden. Erik Dahlbergh och bilden av Sverige, ed Leif Jonsson (Läckö, Sweden, 1992), 51–59.

47

The drawings for the various renovation projects are published in Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 67–69. For Jean de la Vallée’s proposed renovations of the church, see Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 85–87.

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92. Johann Peter Kirstenius (?), Burial Chapel (de la Gardie Chapel?).

93. Johann Peter Kirstenius, Letter with a Drawing for a Chapel.

Where the corners had before been left unbroken, bounded only by shallow pilasters, he gives us bulging, rounded edges with trophies in relief. Domenico Fontana’s cupola is abandoned altogether, replaced with a sort of tempietto enclosing an allegorical figure of fame. Most of all, the surviving drawings show how carefully he developed the project. There are alternative plans for the arrangement of pilasters, entablature, window casings, column profiles and more, many of which survive in two copies. In every case the relationship of each element to the others is carefully worked out and measured, and conceived with consideration of the future placement of each tomb.48 The care invested by the architect clearly 48 The building history of the chapel is laid out in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 58–70; and Martin Olsson, Riddarholmskyrkan, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1927), 202–244, where a number of the drawings are reproduced. More of the drawings are published in Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 141–148. A second set of drawings for the

Caroline chapel – including some replicas of drawings in the Nationalmuseum, is preserved in RA Överintendentsämbetet, Kyrkliga byggnader, S 287: 21–30, 32, 33. Two drawings (a plan and elevation) in the Royal Library are very rough copies after drawings for the Caroline chapel. Although catalogued as by Tessin, they are hardly comparable to his work at any point, and certainly not at the height of his career. They may be copies by a new or otherwise incompetent workshop assistant, or perhaps an on-site workman. KB KoB Ark.- ritn. Stockholm.

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95. Tessin, Burial Chapel for C.G. Wrangel, 1676–1680.

94. Tessin, Burial Chapel for C.G. Wrangel, 1676–1680.

distinguishes the project from the others we have seen above, and even that for Wrangel, which is known through only two sheets.49 Seven Projects for the Stockholm Town Hall A project for a town hall for Stockholm, which would have been one of Tessin’s most important monuments had it been built, reveals a great deal about the early stages of the development of an important project.50 The magistrates’ protocol for “various matters” for the 1660s have been lost, so our knowledge of the project is reduced to a handful of drawings and a few disparate references, from which we must infer a great deal. From these few sources we learn that there had been in the mid-1660s some discussion of a new town hall to replace

49

Wrangel’s chapel was never built, however. It perhaps would have received considerably closer attention to detail had it progressed into construction. Two other sketches (NM THC 4804, 4805) may be related to the chapel, but this relationship is unclear. See Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger. Sources – Works – Collections. Architectural Drawings I (Stockholm, 2004), 128–129. 50 Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och någre samtida byggnader, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 251–257; Nils Östman, “De äldre

rådhusbyggnaders historia” Stockholms rådhus och råd, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1915), 63–116. Ragnar Josephson, Stadsbyggnadskonst i Stockholm intill år 1800 (Stockholm, 1918), 138–142 discusses the project in passing, but only in relation to the regularization of the square on which it was to stand. This is also the focus of Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 361–366. See also Claes Ellehag, Bondeska palatset (Stockholm, 1989), 73.

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the unsatisfactory medieval structure on the main square of the old town. The site of the old town hall, along the south side of the cathedral, was one of three sites adjacent to the square that were considered. It may have been considered unsuitable, or perhaps the council could not resolve how to manage without a building during construction, for early in 1667, probably around the time that Tessin’s proposals were finished, the royal chamber council informed the aristocratic owners of the other two plots that they may be asked to sell their plots for the town hall, to “improve the view from the palace … and for the decoration and embellishment of the city.”51 The crown had agreed to shoulder some of the cost for a fundamentally municipal building, making it a royal commission to some degree and justifying the intervention of the royal council. The stated reason for this subvention was the financial state of the city, which evidently could not afford to build a suitable town hall on its own. Tessin must have taken financial constraints into consideration in preparing his plans, which may explain the considerable variation in the proposals. The royal intervention also reflects the ongoing tussle for power in the city, however, which may 96. Tessin, Tessin the Younger, and Carl Hårleman, Caroline be reflected in the crown suspended above Burial Chapel, Riddarholm Church, Stockholm, Begun 1671. the blank cartouches that would have held the city’s arms in each of Tessin’s drawings. With these considerations in mind, Tessin developed plans for all three of the proposed sites: one on the north side of the square adjacent to the cathedral, one on the south side, and one on the west side.52 The drawings for each of the sites include floor plans for the proposed building. Two of the three (for the north and west sides) have flaps of paper pasted on, so that two stories can be shown on one site plan. The proposal for the north side of the square is eleven bays across, that for the west side is nine bays, and that for the south side seven. With this in mind, we can match the extant elevations to the sites quite easily. None of the surviving drawings in the Nationalmuseum that can be associated with this project has nine bays. Perhaps these sheets were lost or it became clear fairly early on that the plot on the west side of the square would not be available. More likely, the site was problematic for other reasons and the project was rejected early on, before Tessin prepared further drawings. Although the building would have been only nine bays wide (the space available between the extant side streets), it extended quite far to the rear. It is the only one of the three projects

51 Quoted in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och någre samtida byggnader, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 252–253. 52 This is somewhat confused in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och någre

samtida byggnader, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), as he published two of the sites with a worked-up plan, and one showing the extant situation. A third site plan is in the collection of the Nationalmuseum (NM THC 2983), but was not included in Sirén’s book.

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to have an open courtyard, but this feature would have cut off the street behind it, creating two L-shaped alleys that would have forced traffic into the square – an impossible traffic pattern. Construction would also have been complicated by the position of this plot on a fairly steep embankment. Together, these considerations may have made the project unfeasible. All that we can say of the plan is that the entrance was to be elevated and reached via an eleven-step double staircase. Inside, a monumental staircase in the right wing of the building led to the main floor, where the council took care of the city’s business. A large hall, the meeting or audience space, looked over the courtyard in the rear. With the nine-bay project abandoned, Tessin worked up an eleven-bay plan for the north side of the square and a seven-bay one for the south side. Four elevations exist for the north side, the site of the medieval town hall (figures 98, 99, 100, 101, 102). They are clearly related, because all are drawn to the same scale and can be matched to the site plan, and each is numbered in an early hand “Project 97. Tessin, Caroline Burial Chapel, 1671. for the town hall in Stockholm, N° 1 (2, 3, 4).” Less certain is whether these numbers indicate the order in which the projects were developed, or whether they are simply catalogue numbers. This cannot be answered with absolute certainty, but there is a great deal to suggest that these drawings should be examined in the given numerical sequence. Project number one is a well-balanced classical structure, symmetrical in every way. Only the statues along the balustrade and on the staircase break the clean lines of the design. The three central bays project slightly and are crowned by a triangular pediment. The central section is set off from the rest of the façade by double pilasters, but the grouping of three is balanced on each side by three bays. The whole composition is framed by a slightly wider bay on each extremity, also set slightly forward and demarcated by clustered pilasters. A lantern or “tempietto” form – not unlike that proposed slightly later for the Caroline burial chapel – crowns the whole composition. The general source of Tessin’s form is clear. The Amsterdam town hall designed by Jacob van Campen and finished in 1655 was considered by Constantine Huygens to be the eighth wonder of the world, and it was a natural model for any town hall in northern Europe in this period (figure 29). In its last stages of construction, it would certainly have been the most interesting thing Tessin would have seen when he visited Amsterdam in 1653.53

53

The complete plans for the Amsterdam town hall were published by van Campen. See Jacob van Campen, Afbeelding van’t stadt huys van Amsterdam, in dartigh coopere plaaten (Amsterdam, 1661). Tessin the Younger owned the book, which he may have

inherited from his father. If the elder Tessin did not own it, he probably would have been able to borrow Carl Gustaf Wrangel’s copy. See Arne Losman, “CG Wrangels litteratur om byggnadskonst - ett urval” Arkitektur 14:4 (1972): 9.

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Even the lantern is taken quite literally from the Amsterdam model. But no matter how clear an inspiration to town-hall builders everywhere, van Campen’s town hall is on a totally different scale than Tessin’s project. It is twenty-three bays across, rather than eleven. Tessin could not rebuild van Campen’s plans at half-scale, nor did he wish to. Beyond the lantern and the use of a variant of Palladian classicism closely associated with Dutch architecture, Tessin’s plans in their specifics are very independent of van Campen’s design. The projecting end bays, for instance, do not have separate gables, which changes the character of the roof entirely. Tessin’s portal is clearly indicated on the façade, and reached by a double staircase. The main floor of the Amsterdam town hall is elevated as well, but there is no visible entrance to van Campen’s building, which may be a simple function of its scale. Most of all, however, the Dutch building projects a vastness that is quite the 98. Tessin, Plan for an Eleven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, antithesis of Tessin’s design, which is Stockholm, ca 1667. grand, but much more focused and compact. A much closer match for Tessin’s design can be found in Philips Vingboons’s rejected proposal for the Amsterdam town hall (figure 103). It was published in a somewhat revised form by the architect in 1648, and was without doubt known in Stockholm through Vingboons’s younger brother, Justus, who led construction on the House of the Nobility between 1653 and 1656, and may have brought the town hall project with him to Stockholm.54 Here we have a closely related central grouping under a pediment. Each has elevated the entrance and proposed a double staircase derived from Michelangelo’s at the Campidoglio. Where Tessin proposed three evenly-spaced bays bounded by slightly differentiated endpieces, Vingboons envisioned two bays on each side with a three-bay pavilion set sharply forward at the end, each capped with a dome. The net effect is that Tessin’s project is again more tightly composed around the pediment, while Vingboons’s emphasizes the center and the edges almost equally. Tessin’s second plan for the Stockholm town hall is designed for the same site and perhaps even the same foundation, but has a remarkably different character overall. The main

54 Philips Vingboons, Afbeelsels der voornaemste gebouwen uyt alle die Philips Vingboons geordineert heeft (Amsterdam, 1648). Konrad Ottenheym has argued that Justus Vingboons’s plan for the House of the Nobility is also closely related to Philips

Vingboons’s plan for the Amsterdam town hall, and suggested that Justus brought a number of his brother’s drawings with him to Stockholm to serve as references. Konrad Ottenheym, Philips Vingboons (1607–1678). Architect (Zutphen, 1989), 134.

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99. Tessin, Elevation #1 for an Eleven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, Stockholm, ca 1667.

100. Tessin, Elevation #2 for an Eleven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, Stockholm, ca 1667.

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101. Tessin, Elevation #3 for an Eleven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, Stockholm, ca 1667.

102. Tessin, Elevation #4 for an Eleven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, Stockholm, ca 1667.

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entrance is now near ground level, reached by a few low steps. The central portico is set off even more forcefully here with a tripartite entrance on the ground floor. There is no pediment, excepting the small one above the central bay on the second floor, but the effect is approximated with an integrated domelike form in the Mansard roof above the three central bays. He has here replaced the giant order of pilasters with the standard order, and the entablature necessitated by this revision divides the stories cleanly. The tall lantern is replaced with a low one that appears regularly in Tessin’s designs (the so-called manor roof). The overall effect is an increased emphasis on horizontality, even though it is the same width as the first plan and, aside from the lantern, slightly taller. This project, too, has its roots in a proj103. Philips Vingboons, Project for the Town Hall, Amsterdam, ect for the Amsterdam town hall. A project, 1647. From Vingboons, Afbeelsels der voornaemste Gebouwen, known only through prints identifying the 1648. author as SGL (or possibly SCL), provides a general model for the structure (figure 104).55 Conveniently, the Dutch project is eleven bays wide, and the Mansard roof, the elevated portal, the central grouping under a bulbous pavilion, the attic story windows, the flanking towers, and even the pedimented central opening on the second floor of Tessin’s project can be traced to it. Tessin reworked a number of other aspects of the project. He simplified the rather elaborate towers and reworked as closed windows the open arcades, which could hardly have been practical either in Amsterdam or in Stockholm. Most significantly, the available space was much shallower than that proposed by the expansive Dutch project, which comprises four broad wings around a large courtyard. Tessin used only the façade, which became the broad side of a much more compact building without a courtyard. The third and fourth plans for the town hall are syntheses of the first two proposals. The façade pediment returns in the third plan, now somewhat larger than in the first, and used to harmonize with the bulbous roof retained from the second. The entrance is still at ground level, but now only the central portal is in the form of a Roman arch. The façade is now vertically divided into two parts (rather than three, as in the second plan), with the pilasters retained on the second story only. The flanking towers are retained, but moved to the rear of the building where they play a less active role in the articulation of the façade. The fourth plan is essentially a reworking of the second plan. The two heavy entablatures are retained, as is the tripartite arched entrance, which is now echoed in partially blind arches throughout the lower story. Towers very similar to those used in the third plan, though slightly taller, are moved to the front of the façade. There are three drawings in the Nationalmuseum collections that can be related to the smaller town hall project (figures 105, 106, 107, 108). The connection to this commission is 55

W Kuyper, “Wat een mooi stadhuis! Plattegrond en herkomst van het monogrammist ontwerp” Jaarboek Amstelodamum 69 (1977): 73–88.

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not as clear as with the four sheets discussed above. Sirén omitted them from his monograph, perhaps because, unlike the other four sheets, they carry no descriptive inscriptions. They are moreover drawn on two different paper formats, discouraging their association, and at least two of these are workshop copies.56 Nonetheless, all three are to the same scale, all have seven bays, and all fit (more or less) the plan drawn up for the south side of the square. The three sheets are also related in a way comparable to the interplay between the four sheets for the larger town hall project. Although we know very little about the circumstances surrounding the commission, everything about this series suggests that these were less costly alternatives to the grander structures 104. Monogrammist SGL, Project for the Town Hall, Amsterdam. planned for the other side of the square. The first of these drawings is a rather simple structure. Except for the quoins on the corners of the structure, brackets on the firstfloor windows and a basic pattern on the small cornice, there is virtually no decoration outside of the pedimented central focal point of the façade. Even here the decoration is rather spare. The portal is in the form of a Serliana, which is echoed in the central window on the second story, where we also find stucco strapwork and two putti. There is a classicizing bust in a niche above each of the two flanking doors and, on the second floor, above the two flanking windows. Beyond this the decorative richness comes from a few architectural elements gathered toward the center of the façade: the grouping of half-columns and pilasters, the juxtaposition of columns of different scales at the central window, and a short balustrade banding the three central bays together. The general format of the first plan is retained for the second plan, but is significantly enriched. The peripheral windows, previously undecorated, now have segmental pediments on the second floor and elaborate window moldings with brackets on the first. A balustrade encompasses the roofline, and the gable is crowned with a large, square lantern. The tripartite portal structure with four elevated busts is retained, but the whole is enriched by the addition of a segmental pediment between the large pediment of the façade and the small one of the central window on the upper story. Four putti, presumably to be made of stucco, hold up a cartouche. The central grouping in particular emphasizes the more plastic nature of the whole design. The third design of this group is once again a synthesis of the earlier designs. The balustrade and window moldings of the second plan are retained, as is the other surface decoration. Four pilasters still enclose three bays at the portal, but now there is only one door with a window on each side. This constricted portal allows three bays on each wing rather than two, changing the rhythm of the façade significantly while working within the strictures of the site and plan. On the second story Tessin reused the design from the first plan with minor variations. Rather than providing a pediment per se, the architect has extended the central group to an attic level, creating a sort of belvedere on the façade similar to certain palaces in Rome (such as on 56 NM THC 2291 and 2292 are very difficult to accept as autograph on numerous grounds.

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the Palazzo Pamphili), Genoa and elsewhere. The same motif found a place at just about the same time on the country house at Mälsåker. The adaptation of various elevations to a single plan raises a methodological question. Did Tessin really believe that any of the four façades for the larger project could simply be attached to the single plan? This can hardly be the case. We shall see that he gave considerable weight to proportional relationships in interior suites. The primary differences between these projects lay in the proportional groupings around the portal, for instance, and in the manipulation of the heights of the sto105. Tessin, Plan for a Seven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, ries, which changed the relationship of these Stockholm, ca 1667. elements to the fixed width of the building. At the most basic level, this would force an awkward distribution of windows within the rooms on some of the plans. It also seems to run counter to everything we know about Tessin’s working principles. Rather, the three site plans around the square were provisional drawings to provide the necessary basic information on the available space in the plots, and their relation to other aspects of the urban fabric that would exert limitations on the project. This is most clear in the three elevations for the smaller project for the town hall. Here the differences are substantial, and do not reflect a single plan – the elements of the façade are grouped differently, the steps spill out into the square in a different manner, one has projecting walls at the corner, and so on – but all are well suited to the space available, as the plan makes clear. The elevations alone may have provided the heart of the proposal to the city council – the contract for the Caroline burial chapel likewise evidently consisted of a single elevation; no plan signed by the regency is known – while the very general plans demonstrated that the designs would incorporate the requisite interior spaces. Once a façade was chosen, the architect would develop a more siteand project-specific plan in accordance with the approved design. No doubt various alterations and refinements to the façade would be part of this process as well. It was however not an efficient use of Tessin’s time to draw up fully independent plans for seven or more variant projects at this early point in the development process. Indeed, he saved himself considerable trouble in this case, since the project never progressed past the early stages. Tessin’s approach to the town hall seems to reflect a standard method that was quite consistent over the years. For the cathedral in Kalmar in 1660, he presented three different projects, for which he received an honorarium. One of these was chosen, possibly with the expectation that certain changes would be incorporated, and then work began.57 In the mid-1670s he presented two sets of drawings – one more ambitious (and expensive), one less so – for his intervention to the standing church of Mary Magdalene in Stockholm, one of which was chosen by the church for construction.58 For no other project do we have such a complete set of variant drawings, however, perhaps because the project was shelved at an early design stage. In all of these plans for the Stockholm town hall, as in his other projects, Tessin used a relatively limited number of motifs arranged in different ways. Columns might be substituted for pilasters; the entrance might be at street level or elevated by half a story. The window pediments 57

Sten Karling, Kalmar Domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984), 30.

58

Efraim Lundmark, S:ta Maria Magdalena kyrka (Stockholm, 1934), 80–83.

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106. Tessin, Elevation #1 for a Seven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, Stockholm, ca 1667.

107. Tessin, Elevation #2 for a Seven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, Stockholm, ca 1667.

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108. Tessin, Elevation #3 for a Seven-Bay Project for a Town Hall, Stockholm, ca 1667.

might be segmental or not; the roof balustraded or not. Tessin’s intention in this project, as in most of his compositions, was not a grandly theatrical effect in the way that Bernini might have conceived it, the occasional stucco putto on the façade notwithstanding. His town hall, like many of his palaces and churches, is more closely observant of a conservative classical canon of forms and proportions. His works depend on the skillful navigation of this limited vocabulary for their effect, for with a few recurrent exceptions – the porthole-like dormer windows, and the large, low lanterns – few extraneous elements find their way into his designs. The Stockholm town hall would have been one of Tessin’s most important projects, had it been built. Similar structures designed by the architect were built in Gothenburg (much rebuilt early in the nineteenth century, and again in the twentieth by Erik Gunnar Asplund) and in the southern district of Stockholm. The latter encompassed a variety of civic functions, including courts. Although it filled an important role, it was less central to the representation and administration of Stockholm than the project for the town hall discussed above, since it did not serve as the meeting place of the city council. Although much survives, it is nonetheless difficult to describe Tessin’s plans in detail. The surviving drawings are for an early project that was revised before work began in 1664 (or perhaps after, since there was little progress until 1667), and the upper part of the building was rebuilt by Tessin the Younger after a fire in 1680. Externally, the building approximated an inflated version of Seved Bååt’s residence with open arcades in the courtyard. Internally, a simplified version of the Drottningholm staircase offered access to work spaces along corridors overlooking the courtyard, though it is very difficult to determine which functions the various rooms may have filled. Although we

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cannot trace the development of this project as closely as some others, the graphic approach must have paralleled that of Tessin’s other major projects taken on from the 1660s. Tessin’s Peers – Style and Method We have seen that Tessin’s remarkable development in the middle of the century reflects a much larger contemporary shift in the practice of architecture across Europe, which came only slowly to those working around him in the Baltic and central European lands. Although the bases of this, including the plan-and-section method of draftsmanship, were familiar from earlier developments in Italy and elsewhere, true standardization and professionalization were still ongoing processes even in Rome. Bernini’s drawings tend to be rather impressionistic, more concerned with a general idea than with the measurements and practical considerations required for construction.59 The sketches for his architectural projects were very often then passed on to assistants for transformation into measured designs. Indeed, it was arguably in Bernini’s younger assistants Mattia de’ Rossi and Carlo Fontana that the architectural aspect of his enormous production really became a focused, professionalized architectural practice. After Bernini’s death, de’ Rossi took over the fabbrica of St Peter’s and headed the Accademia di S Luca, and in this capacity he oversaw the training of a generation of architects. This role was shared by Fontana, who also headed the academy for a time and also worked closely with a generation of young architects from Italy and elsewhere, including Tessin the Younger, as well as Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt, who later worked in Vienna, James Gibbs from London, Filippo Juvarra from Turin, and other major figures.60 The clarity and regularity of the drawings of de’ Rossi and Fontana were to some degree corollaries of the scale and number of the projects that the Bernini workshop took on.61 Architects working elsewhere were also responsible for a large number of projects, and responded with similar graphic solutions. Sir Christopher Wren met Bernini in Paris in 1665, where he was deeply impressed with the latter’s designs for the Louvre. This brief meeting, and perhaps more important, his encounter with Bernini’s drawings, was Wren’s only encounter with Italian architecture, aside from prints and written accounts.62 But after the great fire in London in the following year, he took on a commission to build fifty parish churches 59 For Bernini’s drawings, see Heinrich Brauer and Rudolf Wittkower, Die Zeichnungen des Gianlorenzo Bernini (Berlin, 1931; reprint Munich, 1998); Irving Lavin, ed, Drawings by Gianlorenzo Bernini from the Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig (Princeton, 1981); and Elisabeth Kieven, ed, Von Bernini bis Piranesi. Römische Architekturzeichnungen des Barock (Stuttgart, 1993). For his workshop practice, see Jennifer Montagu, Roman Baroque Sculpture: The Industry of Art (New Haven, 1989); Helga Tratz, “Werkstatt und Arbeitsweise Berninis” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 23–24 (1988): 395–485; and Alice Jarrard, “Inventing in Bernini’s Shop in the late 1660s: Projects for Cardinal Rinaldo d’Este” The Burlington Magazine 144 (2002): 409–419. See also George C Bauer, “Bernini and the Baldacchino. On Becoming an Architect in the Seventeenth Century” Architectura 26 (1996): 144–165. 60 Hellmut Hager, “Carlo Fontana: Pupil, Partner, Principal, Preceptor” The Artist’s Workshop [Studies in the History of Art, 38], ed Peter Lukehart (Washington, D.C., 1993), 122–155. For Fontana’s drawings, see

Allan Braham and Hellmut Hager, Carlo Fontana. The Drawings at Windsor Castle (London, 1977). 61 This was hardly the only factor, though; Borromini also made extraordinary drawings. See Heinrich Thelen, Francesco Borromini: Die Handzeichnungen (Graz, 1967); Paolo Portoghesi, Disegni di Francesco Borromini (Rome, 1967); Joseph Connors, “Francesco Borromini (1599–1667): Die Revolution des Graphits” Von Bernini bis Piranesi. Römische Architekturzeichnungen des Barock, ed Elisabeth Kieven (Stuttgart, 1993), 33–38. 62 The meeting is described in a letter published in the Parentalia, with the famous passage that “Bernini’s Design of the Louvre I would have given my Skin for, but the old reserv’d Italian gave me but a few Minutes View; it was five little Designs in Paper, for which he hath receiv’d as many thousand Pistoles; I had only Time to copy it in my Fancy and Memory.” Stephen Wren, ed, Parentalia: Or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London, 1750; facsimile Farnsborough, 1965), 261–262.

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and rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral. This came alongside a number of other major projects – the Trinity College library in Cambridge, hospitals in Chelsea and Greenwich, and so on – and constituted more work than one architect could really hope to accomplish, at least within the older approach to building. It was only by delegating a great deal of the responsibility and relying heavily on drawings that any significant part of this came to fruition.63 But if Tessin’s efforts correspond broadly with architectural trends in the middle of the seventeenth century, there is also a smaller group of draftsmen with whom he is more precisely comparable. In a general sense, these are the “Palladian” architects of the 17th century, including Inigo Jones and Jacob van Campen and their circles.64 Indeed, insofar as it is legitimate to speak of a Palladian architecture before the self-conscious homage paid to the Vicentine architect by the circle of Lord Burlington in the earlier 18th century, Tessin is very much a part of this group.65 Unlike many northern architects of his generation, he had been in the Veneto, and seems to have found it more useful than Rome. His work shows the same restrained use of a restricted set of forms unified within a fairly loose set of proportional and compositional precepts associated with this strain of classicism. While Tessin’s draftsmanship is broadly comparable to that he encountered in van Campen and his circle in the 1650s, his drawings may recall the work of a Netherlandish architect who worked in Poland more than any other. Born in 1632, Tilman van Gameren was nearly a generation younger than Tessin, and though their lives and work differ in a number of respects, their careers were broadly similar.66 Van Gameren did not come from the war-torn German lands, but came of age in the newly-recognized Dutch republic, just as the 63 For Wren’s drawings, see Anthony Geraghty, The Architectural Drawings of Sir Christopher Wren, All Souls College, Oxford. A Complete Catalogue (Aldershot, 2007). 64 For this group of architects, see Guido Beltramini, ed, Palladio in Northern Europe: Books, Travellers, Architects (Milan, 1999); Jörgen Bracker, ed, Bauen nach der Natur – Die Erben Palladios in Nordeuropa (Ostfildern, 1997); Werner Oechslin, Palladianesimo. Teoria e prassi (Venice, 2006). 65 For a different view, see Lars Olof Larsson, “Palladios Erben in Schweden: Probleme der Legitimität” Palladio. Bauen nach der Natur. Die Erben Palladios in Nordeuropa, ed Jörgen Bracker (Ostfildern, 1997), 213–228; reprinted in Lars Olof Larsson, Wege nach Süden, Wege nach Norden. Aufsätze zu Kunst und Architektur (Kiel, 1998), 36–57. Erik Forssman has also questioned the influence of Palladio on the Tessins, but in a rather different way. See Forssman, “Il palladianesimo nei paesi scandinavi” Palladio: la sua eredità nel mondo (Vicenza, 1980), 97–113. Palladio’s influence was less hegemonic than has often been implied, and the notion that he had a firmly defined set of principles – as argued in a classic text by Rudolf Wittkower – is very questionable. For responses to Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1949), see Deborah Howard and Malcolm Longair, “Harmonic Proportion and Palladio’s Quattro Libri” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41 (1982): 116–143; Branko Mitrović, “Palladio’s Theory of Proportions and the Second Book of the Quattro Libri dell’Architettura” Journal of the Society of Architectural

Historians 49 (1990): 279–292; and Alina Payne, “Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 (1994): 322–342. Scamozzi and (later) Longhena were also important models in the Veneto, while Jones, van Campen, and Post soon became authorities themselves; many of these were moreover open to other architectural traditions, in particular Roman and French. For the significance of Scamozzi abroad, see the essays collected in Franco Barbieri and Guido Beltramini, eds, Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548–1616 (Venice, 2003); and Annali di architettura. Rivista del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 18–19 (2007). For the Netherlandish architects as models, see inter alia Konrad Ottenheym, “Fürsten, Architekten und Lehrbucher. Wege der holländischer Baukunst nach Brandenburg im 17. Jahrhundert” Onder den Oranje Boom. Das Haus Oranien Nassau als Vermittler niederländischer Kultur in Deutschen Territorien in 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed Horst Lademacher (Munich, 1999), 287–298; and Badeloch Noldus, Trade in Good Taste. Relations in Architecture and Culture between the Dutch Republic and the Baltic World in the Seventeenth Century (Turnhout, 2004). Longhena has not generally been seen as a source of interest for foreign architects, though this is abundantly clear with Tessin and Tilman van Gameren. 66 For van Gameren, see Stanisław Mossakowski, Tilman van Gameren. Leben und Werk (Munich, 1994); and Eymert-Jan Goossens and Konrad Ottenheym, Tilman van Gameren. A Dutch Architect to the Polish Court (Amsterdam, 2002).

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local variant of classicism was developing under van Campen and others. Although this architectural world may have been of interest for him, it can hardly have been a preoccupation. His father was a tailor and cloth merchant, and he trained as a painter. His chosen profession was closely related to architecture – the tradition of the painter-architect was very much alive in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century – but he did not initially pursue this line, and around 1655 he went to Venice to work as a painter.67 Nonetheless, architecture never disappeared from the horizon, and it may have been a more significant part of his training than one might suspect, for in 1660, van Gameren accepted an offer from the Polish hetman Jerzy Lubomirski to work in the Polish fortifications corps. This otherwise incongruous turn now seems to have been warranted by early studies in Leiden with Nicolaus Goldmann and in the Duytsche Mathematique program in military engineering.68 If we assume that van Gameren studied both civil and military architecture in Leiden, this dual background allowed him to move easily from defensive to civil architecture around 1670. He evidently did not require the retraining that Tessin took on, and completed with his mid-career travel period in the early 1650s. Although the bulk of van Gameren’s civil work falls in the last years of Tessin’s career, their points of reference in the major continental centers were nearly identical, if balanced somewhat differently. He left the Netherlands just as van Campen’s town hall was nearing completion, and thus saw this crucial project at a more fully-developed stage than Tessin did in the Spring of 1653. Although Tessin may have seen more of Italy than van Gameren, both architects were most at home in the Veneto, and both, moreover, seem to have been deeply impressed with the work of Baldassare Longhena, whose work they encountered at roughly the same time. Certainly a number of patently Venetian traits are evident in the work of both men, such as the stacked groupings of Serlian portals, as well as the more general interest in the villas scattered about the Veneto that they reinterpreted around Stockholm and Warsaw. Their common interests extended well beyond the Veneto, however. Even more than Tessin, van Gameren looked to sixteenth-century Rome for his ecclesiastical ideas. This was equally true of the projects for full churches as for individual chapels, like Tessin’s, added to standing structures. Particularly in their domestic projects, both seem to have been very much aware of the work of Louis Le Vau and François Mansart – if often through prints – as well as the developments in the Netherlands in the second and third quarters of the century. Although they never knew each other and were a generation apart in age, van Gameren and Tessin took a similar approach to these raw materials, and a number of their designs are remarkably close in conception. This is perhaps unsurprising, given their similar backgrounds and duties. Both worked for courts, though van Gameren’s position was less stable than Tessin’s, and he owed much of his success to the continued support of the Lubomirski family. Indeed, it was a private commission, the Krasiński palace in Warsaw, built 1686–1700, that would be his most important palace project, his answer to Tessin’s Drottningholm. Yet their work is similar in several more significant ways as well. The façade of the country house of Stanisław Lubomirski in Czerniaków, designed in the 1680s, is remarkably close to a project by Tessin for an unidentified country house (figures 109, 110, 111).69 In a way, the similarity is easily dismissed as a result of their shared derivation from Pieter Post’s Huis ten Bosch, near

67

A 1660 verse by Marco Boschini mentions van Gameren as a painter, but says nothing of architectural works or interests. See Stanisław Mossakowski, Tilman van Gameren. Leben und Werk (Munich, 1994), 2–3. 68 Konrad Ottenheym, “Tilman van Gameren in Holland. Education and Sources of Inspiration”

Tilman van Gameren. A Dutch Architect to the Polish Court, ed Eymert-Jan Goossens and Konrad Ottenheym (Amsterdam, 2002), 32–36. 69 For the Lubomirski country house, see Stanisław Mossakowski, Tilman van Gameren. Leben und Werk (Munich, 1994), 121–122.

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The Hague (figure 112).70 But both reworked the basic design supplied by Post and attached it to a fundamentally different kind of structure. Van Gameren’s façade covers a very simple arrangement of suites, one in each corner pavilion, arranged around a central hall. The conception is very lucid, though without pretensions to the complexity of the Huis ten Bosch. Tessin’s variation on the façade is richer, with blind niches and garlands, as well as a lantern echoing and capping the repeated gables found throughout the design. In this play of triangular forms, he elaborated significantly on Post’s design. But his plan is no less different from van Gameren’s than from Post’s. It reflects more closely the sort of apartment developed by Louis Le Vau, with more or less symmetrically balanced apartments divided by an oval room opening into the garden. Van Gameren’s and Tessin’s comparable use of their sources is notable and quite pronounced, but hardly unique. As we shall see, variations on this manner of synthesis of models and traditions would become a standard approach for generations of architects in the region.71 It is in their draftsmanship that the two men are most strikingly similar. In a manner nearly unique in the Germanic world in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, their 109. Tilman van Gameren, Project for a Country House for work consisted entirely of making drawings.72 Stanisław Lubomirski in Czerniaków, ca 1683. Tessin left several hundred drawings, nearly all of which can be associated with one or another of his projects, but this pales in comparison with the 900 that van Gameren left. To some extent, the difference in their graphic legacies can be attributed to the unusual survival of 70

Van Gameren used something similar to the plan of the Huis ten Bosch in his plan for the Lubomirski Palace in Przeworsk. See Stanisław Mossakowski, Tilman van Gameren. Leben und Werk (Munich, 1994), 57–58. Likewise, Post contributed to the design of Sonnenburg in Cleve, Germany, which has a similar façade. See J.J. Terwen and Konrad Ottenheym, Pieter Post (1608–1669). Architect (Zutphen, 1993), 76–82. 71 See chapter eight. 72 Arnold Bartetzky, ed, Die Baumeister der “Deutschen Renaissance.” Ein Mythos der Kunstgeschichte? (Beucha, 2004) argues that the German architects active around 1600 – Heinrich Schickhardt, Elias Holl, Lüder von Bentheim, Anthonis van Obbergen, and others – were more like traditional building masters, more concerned with practical problems arising from the worksite than with conceptual issues, than has generally been understood.

Broadly speaking, this understanding is supported by the drawings, particularly those by Schickhardt, which are more abundant than those by the others. Likewise, Holl compiled a notebook of accumulated experience in building, which is concerned nearly exclusively with practical concerns. Later in the century, the Saxon court architect Wolf Caspar von Klengel made many drawings that show a more conceptual interest in architecture, but few of these have any concrete relation to the buildings for which he was responsible. For Holl’s manuscript, see Hanno-Walter Kruft, “Das Geometrie- und Meßbuch von Elias Holl” Architectura 15 (1985): 1–12. For Klengel’s drawings see Eberhard Hempel, Unbekannte Skizzen von Wolf Caspar von Klengel (Berlin, 1958); and Günter Passavant, Wolf Caspar von Klengel, Dresden 1630–1691. Reisen – Skizzen – Baukünstlerische Tätigkeiten (Munich, 2001).

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110. Tessin, Elevation for an Unidentified Country House.

111. Tessin, Plan for an Unidentified Country House.

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many of van Gameren’s preliminary sketches.73 A few of Tessin’s working sheets survive, but most of his drawings are finished presentation drawings or records. For the many projects he took on outside of his official positions, the surviving body of drawings is even less complete. Although nothing more than speculation is possible, Tessin’s total output of drawings likely approached van Gameren’s. Like Tessin and many other architects, van Gameren conceived his designs within a proportional framework that is plainly evident in many of his drawings, so that the relationships of the various elements take on as much importance as the forms themselves (figure 113). These are not necessarily unusual or exceptionally complex relationships, and it was rather to the advantage of both architects to keep the compositions and the drawings as lucid as possible. Two related conditions encouraged this. First, both worked in centers where a professional, office-based architectural practice had not previously existed in a developed form. Although there had been competent builders in Stockholm and Warsaw before, none had 112. Pieter Post, Huis ten Bosch, The Hague, begun 1645. defined his work so strictly as the production of drawings, which accordingly had to carry all the information that might previously have been given on the site. Second, both Tessin and van Gameren worked across a wide geographic area. Tessin provided drawings for projects in Kalmar, Malmö, Karlskrona, and Gothenburg, all far from his office in Stockholm. Van Gameren designed the university church in Krakow (overseen by Francesco Solari), as well as various noble residences scattered across the kingdom. They thus could not develop working relations with a small set of workmen in the capital, but had to make their plans as clear as possible to virtually any building master a patron might hire (though this could nonetheless lead to disaster, as we shall see). In their work, Tessin and van Gameren may be the most closely comparable within a larger set of architects who worked in a refined and restrained manner often associated with Palladio. Inigo Jones and Jacob van Campen can be considered in the same group, but active slightly earlier than Tessin and well before van Gameren. All four men imposed much stricter interpretations of classicism on local traditions of architectural fantasy, and, just as significantly, all introduced a truly drawings-based architecture to their milieux. Indeed, the draftsmanship of Tessin and Jones is also notably comparable on many points. Tessin and van Gameren had the full range of Netherlandish models to draw on, however, giving them a more fully-developed tradition to work with and a richer background. They fit well within this group, more because the methods and relatively simple designs that define it suited their 73

For van Gameren’s drawings and working procedures, see Elske Gerritsen, “Tilman van Gameren, Architect and Draughtsman. An Architect at his

Drawing Board” Tilman van Gameren. A Dutch Architect to the Polish Court, ed Eymert-Jan Goosens and Konrad Ottenheym (Amsterdam, 2002), 85–109.

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113. Tilman van Gameren, Project for Radziwiłł Palace, Warsaw (?).

practical needs than for any more ideological reason. (Palladianism has often been associated with the Protestant parts of Europe, but van Gameren worked in a deeply Catholic kingdom; if van Gameren often turned more heavily to Roman models for church designs, so did Tessin.) Both were always very much aware that this strand of classicism was only one constituent part of the universe of modern architecture, and both consistently sought to integrate the elements of other traditions within this basic structure. Drawing on a much richer architectural heritage, they represent the next logical step after the achievements of Jones and van Campen in the development of this line of architecture in northern Europe.

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In the Architect’s Office Johann Tobias Albinus and Matthias Spihler We have seen that some drawings are closely related to Tessin’s style but not by his hand. The Silesian building master Johann Peter Kirstenius, who evidently worked under Tessin on the unfinished de la Gardie burial chapel, may be responsible for some of them. The group of assistants and followers was fairly large, however, and others were certainly involved as well. We know, for example, that Matthias Spihler worked closely with Tessin, though he is largely unknown as a draftsman.1 From Tessin’s own records we know that Johann Tobias Albinus from Kulmbach in Franconia worked as a building master under him until the end of 1668.2 After his departure, a Georg Tessin, almost certainly the younger brother of Nicodemus, and Abraham Wijnandz, Nicodemus’s stepson, filled this post. Tessin’s assistants must have received some general architectural training beyond the simple copying of drawings and overseeing of their execution. This is of course true for Tessin the Younger, who worked as a copyist in his father’s studio from 1667 to 1672, and whose early drawings are notoriously difficult to distinguish from his father’s. He was groomed for a major architectural career from his early years, however, so this comes as no surprise. More interesting in this context is that Spihler, Albinus and Wijnandz all worked as independent architects as well.3 Although none of these would have been competent to take on a major project like the royal palace or Drottningholm, Spihler and Albinus in particular were able to take on significant commissions for aristocratic and merchant residences. In some cases, patrons might first have approached Tessin, but found that he was too busy to take on new projects and turned instead to current or former assistants. In others, it seems that Tessin accepted projects and then left much of the work to assistants (even beyond the relatively simple burial chapels discussed in chapter five). Neither Albinus nor Spihler are well known. Albinus’s main works in Stockholm are houses for the merchants Joachim Potter and Jacob Momma in the southern district of the city, both more modest than most of the aristocratic residences that Tessin designed (figure 114). He

1

Claes Ellehag, “Matthias Spihler – adelns arkitekt, och kronans” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 75 (2006): 244– 268 illustrates a signed drawing by Spihler and attributes several others to him. 2 Tessin’s official assistants – those who received their salaries from the crown – are recorded with their years of employment in RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 62 [series B], Nicodemus Tessin, 26. This does not include Matthias Spihler, who worked with Tessin on various other private commissions. Spihler is recorded as an assistant to Jean de la Vallée from 1667–1681. 3 There is very little literature available on this group. For Wijnandz, who was later ennobled with the name

Svansköld, see Ingrid Rosell, “Arkitekten Abraham Svansköld. Tessin d.y:s halvbror och medhjälpare” Från romanik till nygotik. Studier i konst och arkitektur tillägnade Evald Gustafsson, ed Margareta Biörnstad (Stockholm, 1992), 109–116. For some drawings from the Tessin circle that have recently been attributed to him, see Börje Magnusson, “Tessin as a Draftsman. Problems of Attribution” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 124–133; and Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004).

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114. Johann Tobias Albinus, Momma-Reenstierna Residence, Stockholm, Designed 1668, Built from 1673.

might well have built more in the capitol, but perhaps because of fierce competition from established masters (Tessin and de la Vallée) and those who fought for the remaining commissions (Matthäus Holl, Spihler and Nils Israel Eosander, who may have worked occasionally in Stockholm), Albinus moved to the eastern Baltic in 1668–1669. The contract for the Potter house specifies that the building master should raise the building “exactly as it has been committed to paper by Albinus the architect.”4 Although this contract was signed in 1673, the drawings had been prepared five years earlier, when Albinus was formally employed as an assistant in Tessin’s workshop.5 This seems to imply that Albinus took on the project as an independent agent, rather than as a representative of Tessin’s studio, though it is also possible that he took on primary responsibility for a project that was nominally the product of Tessin’s workshop. As we shall see, this distinction is not always so easy to determine. We know little more about Spihler. He has usually been considered an émigré from Germany, but it has recently been shown that he was the son of the master of the herring packers’ guild in Stockholm.6 Like Tessin, he began his career in the fortifications corps, where he is noted in 1665 as a copyist, rising to conductor two years later.7 He served as an assistant to Jean de la Vallée, whose daughter he married, and at the same time to Tessin 4

Cited in Badeloch Noldus, Trade in Good Taste. Relations in Architecture and Culture Between the Dutch Republic and the Baltic World in the Seventeenth Century (Turnhout, 2004), 85. 5 RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 61 [series B]. Albinus worked under Tessin until the end of 1668, when he went to Livonia.

6 Claes Ellehag, “Mathias Spihler – adelns arkitekt, och kronans” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 75 (2006): 244– 268. There is a forthcoming monograph on Spihler by Ellehag. 7 Ludvig Munthe, Kongl. Fortifikationens historia, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1906), 402.

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115. Tessin and Matthias Spihler, Sjöö Manor, 1670.

in his capacity as associate architect to the city of Stockholm. Before long he seems to have worked more broadly as an assistant to Tessin, but since he does not appear in the official payroll, we must assume that Tessin hired him to help with his many private commissions for aristocratic estates, which is indeed where he is most evident as a civil architect. An obscure reference in de la Vallée’s court payment records, “Conductor Matthias Spiler half salary for 1668, which the Architect Mr Nicodemus Tessin has taken upon himself,” may refer precisely to such an arrangement.8 It appears to imply that Tessin borrowed Spihler from his official appointment in de la Vallée’s workshop, taking on responsibility for part of his salary. As de la Vallée over the ensuing years received fewer commissions, Spihler may also have had fewer responsibilities as his assistant, and been able to reprise this role for Tessin in a less official capacity. Soon after this note from late in 1668, work began on a series of country residences at Salsta, Sjöö, Ållonö, and Ericsberg. All are private commissions that fit more or less well stylistically within Tessin’s oeuvre, and all have been connected to Spihler.9 It is however very difficult to determine exactly how he was involved. Every one of these projects poses knotty problems of attribution, and the degree of responsibility that each man bears for the design is very unclear. At Sjöö manor, for example, Spihler seems to have been acting as a representative of Tessin’s workshop, expected to work in his style and implement his ideas (figure 115). He served more or less as the “conductor” – or work leader – that Tessin hired in 8

RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 61–62, Jean de la Vallée, 75. “Conducteuren Matthias Spiler halfwa 1668 åhrs löhn, som Architecten H:r Nicodemus Thesin till sig tagit.” 9 Johan Eriksson and Peter Liljenstolpe, Sjöö slott. Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och Johan Gabriel Stenbock

som aktörer vid ett stormaktstida slottsbygge (Uppsala, 2001); Axel Unnerbäck, Ållonö. Studier kring ett östgötskt 1600-talsslott (Stockholm, 1970).

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116. Tessin (?) and Matthias Spihler, Salsta Manor, 1670s.

1668, though with a greater responsibility for the details of the design than was usual in that role. Thus, we hear of him executing a staircase after Tessin’s “dessein,” while also working out many other elements himself.10 This situation fits perfectly within the relationship of Tessin and Johan Gabriel Stenbock, who commissioned Sjöö. The country residence was begun around 1670, just as a protracted reconstruction of his city residence was coming to an end. With the Stockholm house, Stenbock had deferred to Tessin’s judgment repeatedly on all manner of details from the roof to the fireplace. All of this stretched out the construction period, however, and Stenbock’s exasperated secretary noted: “Your excellence knows well Tessin’s slowness.”11 Stenbock obviously respected Tessin, but when work began on Sjöö, he quite naturally wanted another solution. Spihler could act as a representative of Tessin, but also give much more attention to the project at hand. He visited the site frequently, made adjustments and new drawings as necessary, and allowed work to progress much more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. At Salsta we find no mention of Tessin in any of the records, though Spihler turns up frequently (figure 116).12 Although the general form is close to Sjöö, numerous details seem

10

Johan Eriksson and Peter Liljenstolpe, Sjöö slott. Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och Johan Gabriel Stenbock som aktörer vid ett stormaktstida slottsbygge (Uppsala, 2001); Claes Ellehag, “Matthias Spihler – adelns arkitekt, och cronans” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 75 (2006): 244–268; Karl Johan Eklund et al., eds, Sjöö slott – tradition och manifestation (Uppsala, 2008). Ellehag

sees Spihler as a much more independent architect in this relationship. 11 RA Bergshammarsamlingen, J.G. Stenbocks brevböcker, 20 August 1670, fol 293r. 12 See most recently, Karin Wahlberg Liljeström, Att följa decorum. Rumsdispositionen i det stormaktstida högreståndsbostaden på landet (Stockholm, 2008).

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foreign to Tessin’s work.13 Nils Bielke, who commissioned Salsta, may well have had Sjöö or a similar country residence in mind when he planned the project in the 1670s. He may have approached Tessin and received basic drawings that were elaborated and executed by Spihler. Alternatively, he may have been referred to Spihler by Tessin, or approached him directly, knowing that he was schooled in the kind of work that he wanted and more available than Tessin, who had many other responsibilities. The possibilities are nearly endless, and the problems of attribution become almost unsolvable. Moreover, these issues are unlikely to be resolved in the archives, since it is only through a marginal note added by chance to a letter by Stenbock that we know Tessin supplied drawings for Sjöö. The usual payments and correspondence generally do not account for an architect who supplied drawings but was otherwise uninvolved in the building process. With both Albinus and Spihler, the demarcations of Tessin’s studio become very blurry. It is frequently very difficult to determine what they designed under the master’s immediate oversight and what they produced more or less independently. It seems clear, however, that Tessin provided his assistants with enough technical and theoretical training that they could work as competent independent architects. Both had respectable libraries stocked with the usual texts by Vitruvius, Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio, as well as more abstract works on perspective and other aspects of mathematics, iconography, and so on. Spihler in particular seems to have had broader intellectual interests to complement and enrich his architectural works. On his shelves we find works by classical authors and modern humanists, all evidently in Latin.14 Even the most obscure of Tessin’s assistants may have found work as an independent designer. Magnus Gabriel Crell came to Stockholm from the eastern Baltic provinces and succeeded the younger Tessin as copyist in 1672. After leaving Tessin’s studio in 1676, he joined the fortifications corps, rising to a leadership position under Erik Dahlbergh by the 1680s. He may have continued to work occasionally in civil architecture; he has been credited with the design for the town hall in Kalmar, which shows the restrained form and insistent symmetry typical of Tessin’s work but none of the refinement or deeper understanding of classical principles (figure 117).15 Drawings by some or all of these figures are likely included among the Tessin drawings in the Nationalmuseum and Royal Library.16 Offices and Responsibilities The large body of drawings provides the heart of the evidence of the working methods in Tessin’s shop. There is however some supplementary source material that expands 13

Among other things, the design of the roof, with the roofline wrapped around a clock and, in effect, a double lantern or “säteri” roof is very difficult to reconcile with Tessin’s other works. The idiosyncratic cornice is likewise difficult to associate with Tessin, and, more fundamental to the design of the building, the staircase is hidden away behind what appear to be closet doors, fundamentally in contrast to the grand staircases that Tessin included in so many of his designs. With the exception of the staircase, any or all of these elements could have been on-site changes by the building master (a function largely filled by Spihler, to judge by the records) or at the suggestion of Bielke. Taken as a whole, however, they point away from Tessin’s personal involvement.

14

Postmortem inventories of Albinus’s and Spihler’s goods, which list their books, are found in SSA Bouppteckningar 1679 (II) 1344r–1358r (Albinus), and 1694 1204–1213 (Spihler). 15 The attribution of the Kalmar town hall to Crell is proposed by Manne Hofrén, Kalmar. Karolinska borgarhus i sten (Stockholm, 1970), 35–37. 16 There are a few drawings in the Royal Library from Tessin’s circle, none of them autograph. KB Kalmar Ark Ritn Tessin: 1, 99–203 22 09–1; KB Kalmar Ark. Ritn. Tessin: 2, 99–203 22 10 – 5; KB Kalmar Ark. Ritn. Tessin: 3, 99–203 22 18 – 0. There are also drawings for the Caroline burial chapel, though these are much rougher and may have been made on-site.

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117. Magnus Gabriel Crell (?), Town Hall, Kalmar, 1684–1690.

this picture. We are particularly well informed as we move out of the transitional period of the 1640s and 1650s, when he worked both as a designer and a building master. This situation changed significantly in the early 1660s when Tessin took on three essential posts. In 1661 he was named city architect of Stockholm, the first to hold the position in a city that had become the permanent seat of the court earlier in the century and was now growing very quickly. Two years later he succeeded Jean de la Vallée as palace architect, the house architect responsible for all renovations, changes and enlargements to the Stockholm palace and other royal works in the capital. In 1662 work began on Hedwig Eleonora’s Drottningholm. Each of these posts was different from the others. We have relatively little knowledge of the office of the city architect, making it is difficult to draw too detailed a picture of Tessin’s daily activities in this capacity. It seems to have involved a few significant buildings – such as the project for a new town hall in the later 1660s – and an endless string of minor assignments: drawings for bridge repairs, surveying plots, and so on.17 From 1667, at least, he was allocated funds for a copyist, who may have taken on a broader range of duties in this office.18 We have more specific knowledge the offices of the architect to the royal palace and to Drottningholm, however, both of which outline the major changes underway. As palace architect, Tessin reported to the chief governor (överståthållaren), a court official, who had overseen virtually all construction in Stockholm since the inception of the 17

SSA Stockholms magistrate och rådhusrätt A III a: 1–20, passim. 18 RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 61–62 [series B], Nicodemus Tessin, 19 June 1667. These funds were tied to his post as city councilman, strongly suggesting that he was essentially to use this very

respectable office as the city architect, since it is hard to imagine other councilmen requiring a copyist, rather than a secretary. He likely had other assistants within his ongoing capacity as city architect before and after this date, all functioning as a single office but drawing their salaries from different pots.

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post in the 1630s. He had considerable managerial responsibility, however, for he ran an office. He had under his direction a building leader to oversee construction, a copyist and two further assistants, as well as a horse, paper and ink, and other supplies.19 In testament to the new importance of drawings in architectural practice at the court, a room in the palace was now dedicated to the preservation of all drawings for civilian architecture commissioned by the crown, so that they could be examined as required. It is not clear whether this chamber was for the storage of drawings alone, or whether it also functioned as a drafting studio. The office of the palace architect now included a copyist with no apparent ties to the building site, however, and this man needed a place to work. This alone suggests that the room used by Tessin and his assistants functioned as an office. We may assume that Tessin also spent a great deal of time at the Drottningholm site. A letter of 1663 mentions that the state chancellor, treasurer, and other high noblemen would linger about the Drottningholm construction site, waiting to speak with Tessin, and in 1670 we hear that he typically spent two days a week there.20 He may have had some kind of office there as well. He generally signed the receipts for his Drottningholm salary in Stockholm, however, suggesting that he usually used the Stockholm palace office (or perhaps some other space in the city) as his work space.21 From the mid 1660s, Tessin probably had at least seven assistants at any time working in various capacities in the various offices and on his freelance projects. Because we occasionally encounter Spihler and other even more obscure figures who do not turn up in the official payrolls, the number of assistants may have been closer to ten through the last two decades of the architect’s career.22 The demarcations of the studio were often unclear for numerous reasons. Not only do we know little about the roles of the figures in Tessin’s shop, the duties previously expected of the architect or building master might now fall not on assistants to the architect, but on assistants to the patron. This was the case at Drottningholm, which was consistently the center of Tessin’s attention, and also fundamental to the shifting definition of an architect’s responsibilities. Here, with Hedwig Eleonora’s blessing, Tessin was isolated from the nuts and bolts of construction far more than as palace architect. Most administrative duties now fell to the queen’s courtier and overseer, Balthasar Gyldenhoff, whose primary responsibility was to ensure good progress on the project and to see that the drawings, supplied by Tessin, were followed faithfully both for the exterior and the interior. Beyond this, Gyldenhoff was to procure and pay for wood, stone, and other building materials for the palace and the gardens. He was to hire and oversee the laborers and master craftsmen, write a contract for each, oversee their work, and distribute pay.23 He took over the administrative duties that had been such a burden for Tessin at Borgholm in the previous decade, leaving the architect free to take care of conceptual matters. The queen made similar arrangements at Strömsholm, begun in 1669, 19

KB MS s 35. All of this is contained in a written description of the post drawn up for Jean de la Vallée in 1660, but likely little changed when Tessin took over three years later. This manuscript is supplemented by a letter written on 12 December 1660, by chief governor (överståthållaren) Schering Rosenhane to Jean de la Vallée in RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 62 [Series B], Jean de la Vallée, 126–128. 20 RA Skoklostersamlingen E 8437, Nils Olofsson to Carl Gustaf Wrangel, 14 March 1663, cited in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 64; RA Tottska samlingen E 5786, Anders Strömsköld to Claes Tott, 30 August 1670. 21 See SA Drottningholms slott, reviderade räkenskaper, G1, vol 2 (1662) and vol 3 (1663), with further

volumes for each year. Virtually all of the other workers’ payment receipts were signed at Drottningholm. 22 For instance, in a late letter to Hedwig Eleonora, Tessin mentioned an engineer named Bergman to whom he entrusted important aspects of Strömsholm. RA Kungliga arkiv, Svenska drottningars arkiv, Drottning Hedvig Eleonora: Skrivelser och memorial K 191. Nicodemus Tessin to Hedwig Eleonora, September 27, 1679. 23 RA Kungliga arkivet K 666, Handlingar rörande Drottningholm, 8 August 1664. All of this is laid out in a directive for Gylldenhoff signed by Hedwig Eleonora. The document is fragmentary, as the bottom quarter of each of the four sheets is lost. Nonetheless, the great majority of the information is preserved.

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where her courtier Gustaf Soop took charge of administrative affairs. Tessin may have visited this royal commission on occasion, but so infrequently that Soop had to travel to Stockholm in 1672 to pick up drawings at Tessin’s office, and Hedwig Eleonora arranged for a master mason to travel to Drottningholm to meet with Tessin to clarify the plans.24 It is notable that the queen herself orchestrated this meeting. She was clearly deeply interested in the process of building as well as the finished product, and wished to remain personally involved to the degree that a noblewoman could while maintaining a seemly distance from the dirty work of building. She expected regular written reports from Gyldenhoff on the financial outlay and on the overall progress of the palace “for her royal highness’s gracious pleasure.”25 But more important still, she facilitated Tessin’s withdrawal from the building site. If Tessin – evidently with the approval of the queen – excused himself from the worksite of a royal commission, a lower-ranking patron had little hope of bringing the architect to a distant worksite. Around 1666, Count Claes Tott requested drawings from Tessin for his estate at Ekolsund, which the architect sent with a written explanation of the design. Upon Tott’s acceptance of the project, the patron and the architect worked out various details regarding design, costs, and materials, after which Tessin explained that the next step was for Tott to find a suitable conductor, or building master. He would ask within the architectural community for a recommendation, but it is clear that he did not consider this the architect’s responsibility.26 We hear nothing more about Tessin until three years later, when work was underway on the gardens. Tott wanted to bring the architect to Ekolsund to explain how the cascades should be assembled, but Tessin flatly refused to leave Stockholm.27 In the meantime, all minor design and construction issues that inevitably arose along with a building had to be resolved by the building master, or, in some cases, by someone like Spihler with a background in an architect’s office. Relatively few drawings survive for these private commissions, since they were not generally preserved with the official projects archived in the palace from the 1660s. Where the drawings and the initial dialogue between the patron and Tessin are lost, the architect’s separation from the project makes it nearly impossible to determine the degree to which he was involved. Professional Reforms Hedwig Eleonora seems to have been ahead of her peers in emancipating her architect from the construction site and other extraneous duties. Indeed, it seems that there was still some conflict over the architect’s accountability to the worksite at the end of the 1660s, as at Ekolsund. High demand for private commissions allowed Tessin to set his own terms, however. It was more difficult to change the structure of his official posts, which came with contractual obligations to pursue his work in an established manner. These terms could

24 SA Strömsholms slott, G1 vol 3 (1672), 49; SA Strömsholms slott G1, vol 1 (1669), 41. For Strömsholm, see Eva Lena Karlsson and Rebecka Millhagen, eds, Strömsholms slott (Stockholm, 2005). 25 RA Kungliga arkivet, K 666, Handlingar rörande Drottningholm, 8 August 1664, 2. 26 For the role of the mason in this process, see Henrik Alm, Murmästare-ämbetet i Stockholm (Stockholm, 1935). A typical example of a contract between a patron and a building master can be found in Erik Andrén, Mälsåker. Ett tessinslott vid Mälaren (Stockholm, 1945), 17–20.

27

RA Tottska samlingen E 5786, Nicodemus Tessin to Claes Tott, undated (1666) and 17 January 1667; RA Tottska samlingen E 5786, Anders Strömsköld to Claes Tott, 30 August 1670. Cited in Claes Ellehag, Fem svenska stormanshem under 1600-talet (Stockholm, 1994), 114. For a brief discussion of Tott and the gardens at Ekolsund, see Magnus Olausson, “The Aesthetic and Social Reception and Development of the Baroque Garden in Sweden” Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion, ed Michel Conan (Washington, D.C., 2005), 188–191.

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be adjusted only by lobbying the crown. In a report to the court made in the early 1670s, Tessin proposed reforms in the practice of architecture in the kingdom.28 This remarkable text served several purposes. It laid out the architect’s own experience and qualifications as a justification for a more elevated view of the profession. This also served as an invitation for a promotion from the court, and foreshadowed his ennoblement soon thereafter. In what may be another turn in the long-running rivalry between Tessin and Jean de la Vallée, it proposed a bureaucratic restructuring through which the king’s architect (Tessin himself) would approve all major building projects. Perhaps more important, it also distilled Tessin’s understanding of the proper work of the architect. He himself justified the emphasis we have given to drawings by claiming that the proper work of the architect – a term he now used quite self-consciously – is to develop “inventions and designs” for buildings that are “necessary, useful and decorous” (“nödig, nÿttig och zierligh”), echoing in somewhat different terms the Vitruvian triad of firmitas, utilitas and venustas – durability, convenience and beauty. The actual construction, he wrote, is not the concern of the architect. Tessin argued that the architect should be allowed to focus on his professional duties, which he defined quite narrowly, and not be laden with extraneous demands. Jean de la Vallée wrote a longer essay on the same theme that is clearly related in some way to Tessin’s.29 They are too similar in content and format to have been written entirely independently – both give an introduction and three numbered points – and they were later filed together. But aside from the shared complaints about the low quality of available workmen, the two essays could hardly be more different in character. Where Tessin’s is concise, practical and specific, de la Vallée’s is rambling and much more difficult to read. Unfortunately, de la Vallée gave little hint of what he considered to be the proper work of the architect. He focused instead on the configuration of the bureaucracy responsible for official building projects. The recommendations amount to a fairly significant reorganization of that structure and were, at least in certain cases, utopian. His proposal, for instance, that bureaucrats should be familiar with arithmetic, geometry, mechanics, civil architecture, and related topics, derived from Vitruvius’s ideal education for the architect, was unrealistic.30 But while de la Vallée proposed significant changes in the bureaucracy to bring more accountability and efficiency to the process of building, he did not suggest any changes to the way the architect himself worked, as Tessin had. There are several indications that Tessin’s “short and unassailable essay,” as he called it, and de la Vallée’s tract were requested by the crown in or around 1671. There is a vague directive in the registry of official correspondence on December 8, 1671, requesting the opinion of the Chief Governor and the four superintendents in charge of various civic functions in Stockholm on the reconsideration of some unnamed matter.31 The Chief Governor oversaw all

28

RA Stockholms stads acta 8, Kort och oförgrijpeligh opsatz och wnderrättelse Till Wälb:ne H: Secreteraren, opå hwadh sätt Kongl: Maÿtt:, denne stadhe sampt hela Rÿket wthi Bÿgningz wäsendet her effter aller wnderdånigst kundhe blifwa betient (“Short and unassailable essay and brief to the well-born Mr Secretary, on which way His Royal Majesty this city and the whole kingdom in building affairs hereafter may be most humbly served”). See Appendix Four. 29 RA Stockholms stads acta 8, J. La Wallé angående Bÿgnings Wäsendet. 30 RA Stockholms stads acta 8, J. La Wallé angående Bÿgnings Wäsendet, 2. “… huilka medh rätta om

Arithmeticam, Geometricam, mechanicum, och den civiliska Architecturen med deß Dependentier borde wara kunniga. …” Cf. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed Ingrid D Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge, 1999), I.I. 31 RA Riksregistraturet, Dec 8 1671. Shortly thereafter, on February 17, 1672, there was a notice in the official registry (Riksregistraturet) encouraging more care in matching people with a profession to enhance the quality of the work. There is no mention of architecture in this case, but restructuring the bureaucracy for greater efficiency and quality was clearly an issue in the court in these years.

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building projects undertaken by the crown, and Jean de la Vallée was one of the four superintendents from June 8, 1671, a fact noted by Tessin in his text. Because the directive does not name Tessin or any of the offices he held, it is not self-evident that he should have given a written opinion in this case, but neither is it obvious that he would not. This may in any case explain why his text is much shorter than de la Vallée’s, which is more concerned with the structure of the bureaucracy than with practical matters. This royal request came in the last months of the regency and was signed by its members, officially led by Hedwig Eleonora. It is very possible that the queen invited her favorite architect – whom she must have heard grumble endlessly about the state of the building practice, and who was in any case a significant expert on the matter employed by the court – to submit his own views on architectural practice in Stockholm and how it might be improved. Certainly, it is clear from her own reforms at Drottningholm and Strömsholm that she was sympathetic to Tessin’s proposals. Whether or not the queen was involved in Tessin’s memorandum to the court, his proposals were well received. Noting the care and faithfulness with which he had worked on the crown’s and Hedwig Eleonora’s buildings, Carl XI freed Tessin on July 7, 1674, of all the petty duties previously expected of him, allowing him to focus on “the singular and foremost” aspects of the architect’s work. Far from the all-encompassing duties he had held at Borgholm in the 1650s, the architect’s work now officially consisted only of “preparing proposals, drafting plans, and giving orders and information to those who should lead and execute the work.”32 A direct connection between Tessin’s proposal from the early 1670s and the royal decree is easily established. Among Tessin’s requests had been the time-saving possibility of attending meetings at the town hall only on Fridays, when matters requiring the presence of the city architect were discussed. Among the king’s reforms was the simple declaration that the architect’s presence should not be required at the town hall except on Fridays, “provided no extraordinary event takes place that demands his presence.” It was a simple change that made Tessin’s life less hectic. Tessin evidently brought a similar vision to the office of the city architect, though this is harder to describe in detail. He was the first architect to hold the post, which was created in 1661, and he may have had considerable freedom to shape the duties of the office holder. Much of his work consisted of an endless series of smaller projects, site surveys, and such.33 The preparation of drawings was very clearly a major part of his work in this office, though it is unclear how much responsibility he bore for the execution of these municipal projects. But whatever his responsibilities had been when he took this post, when he retired in 1680 the city fathers recognized that “… councilman well-born Mr Nicodemus Tessin made various important works consisting of drawings and plans for the city.”34 By the latter part of his career, then, all of his major professional responsibilities involved working at a drafting table. From the Drawing Board to the Building Site By all appearances, Tessin was well insulated from the construction process after the 1650s. He was also in great demand from all strata of the upper classes, to the point that he had to tell high aristocrats that he was too busy to prepare drawings for them without

32

SSA Rådhusarkivet, Kungliga brev, E1a:5 #113, July 7, 1674. “Att han j gemeen drager försorg om dhet som der till hörer, gör förslag der öfwer, affattar desseiner, gifwer dem som arbetet drÿfwa och förrätta skole, nödige ordres och underättelser. …” 33 SSA Stockholms magistrat och rådhusrätt, A III a: vols 2–20.

34

Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 80. “… alldenstund Rådmannen wälborne Herr Nicodemus Tessin ett och annat angeläget arbete bestående uti afritningar och desseiner för Staden giort.”

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delay.35 In the following years he would meet the demand by sharpening his draftsmanship and focusing on the most important projects, as we have seen. In a great shift from earlier practice, he now spent most of his time in his office in the royal palace or at Drottningholm. Beyond these two ongoing works, he knew his buildings primarily through occasional inspections to the more important projects. Tessin’s approach to building, which must have struck some of his older clients as outright absenteeism, required competent assistants and construction leaders. These were in short supply. While at Borgholm, Tessin complained regularly of the shortage of quality workers. This situation seems not to have improved significantly in the subsequent decades. Tessin and de la Vallée both complained bitterly of incompetent workers claiming to be experienced master masons and carpenters, and the instructions for the posts held by both men always contained clauses regarding the firing of incompetent workers. Even where the building leader was not dishonest, drunk, or incompetent, there was often a significant drop in refinement from the drawing board to the finished structure. There was accordingly a constant demand for competent masters, and especially for those with a record of good and efficient work. There is a steady stream of names in the records, but a few appear repeatedly in conjunction with various projects. One in particular, a mason named Andreas Fischer, was highly regarded by Tessin and entrusted with carrying out a number of his more important designs. In 1652 he had signed a contract to build Schering Rosenhane’s residence “after the architect Nicodemus’s designs.”36 We encounter him again in a letter from Tessin to crown prince Carl Gustaf in 1654. Tessin was at Borgholm overseeing ten masons, two of whom were ill, and one hundred soldiers. The latter were acceptable laborers, but could do no skilled work. Tessin asked the prince to send more masons, and in particular Fischer, who had previously realized his plans for Schering Rosenhane’s house and proven himself capable.37 In 1658 Fischer gave an estimate for work at the Stockholm palace.38 Later he reappears in the construction records at Drottningholm, very likely on Tessin’s recommendation, where he and his team were paid very well for their work.39 Relatively little is known about Fischer. He appears to have come to Sweden from Germany, and was a registered master in the mason’s guild in Stockholm from 1639.40 He was prosperous enough to own property, perhaps because he was highly regarded by patrons, who were responsible for finding their own building masters. No matter how earnest a local mason might have been, he was unlikely to be able to interpret schematized architectural drawings and produce a credible modern structure. There was simply little point of reference for this kind of architecture among the lower building classes in Sweden. The risks were considerable. It has long been thought that Tessin provided drawings for a parish church in Järlåsa, not far from Uppsala. An elegant but modest project recalling the Netherlandish tradition has occasionally been connected with the project, largely because it reflects a drawing in the church’s record books that has recognizable roots in Tessin’s workshop (figures 118, 119, 120).41 The church is outside of the city and not of

35

Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 64; Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 31. 36 Sten Karling, Kalmar domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, 1984), 26. 37 RA Stegeborgsamling E 188, Nicodemus Tessin to Carl Gustaf, April 7, 1654. 38 Tord O:son Nordberg, “Slottets historia under sextonhundratalet” Stockholms slotts historia, vol 1, ed Martin Olsson (Stockholm, 1940), 274.

39

SA Drottningholms slott, reviderade räkenskaper, vol 2 (1662), 54. 40 Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, vol 16 (Stockholm, 1964– 1966), 62–63. 41 For Järlåsa church, see Ingrid Rosell, Järlåsa kyrka. Ett kyrkobygge på Gustaf Rosenhanes initiativ (Lund, 1962). The drawings have also been associated with various other projects. See Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 79.

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118. Tessin, Elevation for a Church (Järlåsa Church?).

119. Tessin, Plan for a Church (Järlåsa Church?).

particular importance except in its roster of patrons, which included Queen Christina (in 1647), Axel Oxenstierna and other nobles, and Jean de la Vallée. Tessin seems not to have contributed money, but may instead have donated a set of drawings. Construction began in 1672

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under the leadership of a local master mason named Lars Arfidson.42 Assuming that Tessin did in fact provide plans for the church, Arfidson completely misunderstood them and built in the manner with which he was familiar (figure 121). The basic central structure with a vestibule survived the construction process, but little else of the original idea remained. The walls are thick and heavy, with small windows. The classical motifs – garlands, pediments and so on – are completely missing. It is, in short, a medieval rural parish church with a central plan. The introduction of modern architecture required much more than an architect trained abroad and enlightened, or at least fashion-conscious, patrons. It required an army of master masons, woodcarvers, stuccoists and painters who could transform the master architect’s ideas, captured in symbolic form on the drawing board, into a coherent, living structure. These were particularly rare early in the century. In 1624 the Amsterdam building master Caspar Panten had to return to the Netherlands to recruit competent workers (mostly sculptors). Later on, skilled craftsmen came to Sweden on their own. Among them we find, for instance, the stuccoists Carlo and Giovanni Carove, probably from Lombardy, who were responsible for much of the stucco decoration in aristocratic homes.43 The payment records for most major building projects in the seventeenth century abound with foreign names, some highly skilled, some merely reliable masters familiar with modern methods of construction and decoration. Even if a decorative wood- or stonecarver from Bremen, Schleswig, or elsewhere in Germany was unfamiliar with many aspects of Tessin’s practice, he was still more likely to be able to copy a motif from a drawing with better results than a sculptor trained in the early seventeenth century in Sweden, simply because his standards of training were likely to have been significantly higher.44 There was, in other words, work for a great many skilled craftsmen as well as more creative artists in Sweden, and the opportunities attracted masters and journeymen from all over northern Europe. * * * All of the changes in draftsmanship and the general practice of building that Tessin worked so persistently to introduce were familiar to anyone with a passing interest in architecture from the middle of the sixteenth century. The plan-and-elevation format was illustrated on every page of Palladio’s treatise, and in many of Serlio’s woodcuts. As a matter of practice, however, it could be introduced only when it suited the actual tasks of the builder; Tessin had no great need to prepare carefully-measured drawings of Borgholm when he could just as well tell the workers what to do, since he was expected to oversee the site himself. Likewise, the method made sense only when the workload surpassed his ability to oversee it. Perhaps more important and less understood, it could be implemented only when the building society – from the patron to the mason – understood and accepted it, and this often required a sympathetic and influential collaborator in the patron class who understood the importance of drawings and allowed the builder to remove himself from the site. For Tessin, the primary enabler was Hedwig Eleonora. Her interest in building is unquestionable; her interest in the building process is clear from her request to Gyldenhoff to inform her regularly of progress at Drottningholm, while simultaneously giving him the duties previously held 42

Ingrid Rosell, Järlåsa kyrka. Ett kyrkobygge på Gustaf Rosenhanes initiativ (Lund, 1962), 18. 43 See Sten Karling, “Les stucateurs italiens en Suède” Arte e artisti dei laghi lombardi, vol 2, ed Edoardo Arslan (Como, 1964), 291–301. Martin Pozsgai is currently working on the Carove. 44 There were some skilled painters, sculptors, and other craftsmen in Sweden from the middle of the sixteenth century, but these were very few and almost

without exception called in from the Low Countries, Germany, and elsewhere in central Europe. These figures worked for the court, and although they were encouraged (and even required) to take on local students, the effects of this were more to slow down their productivity and discourage them from staying in the kingdom than to elevate artistic standards outside the court.

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by the architect. Perhaps more significant is her bold signature at the top of every contract drawing presented to the regency between 1660 and 1672, and the enormous number of drawings that Tessin prepared for Drottningholm, many of which were clearly made for presentation to the queen rather than for the construction process (figures 56, 57). She understood architectural draftsmanship, and encouraged it in every way in her projects. We may wonder if it was at Hedwig Eleonora’s suggestion that Tessin petitioned the court to restructure his responsibilities, and through her influence that it was quickly approved. Certainly, the reforms proposed by Tessin were generally well suited to the goals of Carl XI, who was very much concerned with professionalizing the bureaucracy and making all aspects of the state more efficient. This in turn 120. After Tessin? Järlåsa Church. played directly into the move towards centralization and absolutism beginning in these years. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine that the king would have been much concerned with architectural methods without an intercessor. His mother, Hedwig Eleonora, had the position and the interest to see that Tessin’s proposed changes were incorporated in his court position. Her role as a model in architectural patronage in the kingdom can hardly be overstated, and her approval of Tessin’s working methods legitimized them. The Architect’s Place in Society Less than three weeks after the king freed Tessin of the various petty duties that had cluttered his working life, he named the architect to the peerage. The ceremony in July of 1674 made the architect and his heirs gentlemen, and was in recognition of Tessin’s service to the crown.45 In principle, this was hardly unusual. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, the larger part of the nobility was comprised of professionals who had been recognized for their service in the court. But in another way, Tessin’s ennoblement was unique and important. He was the first to come from an artisan milieu, rather than an intellectual, military, or professional class. The letter of investiture recognized his patrician origins in Stralsund and restored the arms of his parents and ancestors. Tessin may have understood the recovery of the family’s former status as the reclamation of his lost birthright.46 Because he was now a well-placed figure 45 The letter of investiture is preserved in the archives of the Finnish House of the Nobility in Helsinki, evidently transferred by a descendant of the family. A copy of the text is in RA Riksregistraturet, July 20, 1674. 46 On all of these points, the court seems to have responded to Tessin’s own memorandum, written shortly before, just as it responded by releasing him from the non-architectural affairs of the city council discussed

above. He pointed out that other “high potentates” rewarded their architects with (social?) advancement, and made a general argument for the artistic and intellectual work of the builder. More specifically, he also pointed out his family’s previous social status, which found an immediate echo in his letter of investiture. RA Stockholms stads acta, 8, Kort och oförgrijpeligh opsatz. See Appendix Four.

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in a major court, rather than a merchant town, and because he had achieved this position through his own skill and learning, the elevation may moreover have brought the satisfaction of an exceptional achievement that was rather unexpected. From the point of view of the court, however, his family’s status can hardly have been a primary consideration, for the court painter David Klöcker, the son of a Hamburg tailor, received the honor in December of the same year and assumed the surname Ehrenstrahl. Rather, there may have been a growing awareness at court – indeed, Tessin himself brought it to the crown’s attention47 – that this was an honor that other rulers conferred on courtly architects and painters. This was true not only in Italy and France, but among the German princes as well. Wolf Caspar von Klengel, court architect in electoral Saxony, was ennobled in 1664, a full decade before Tessin. 121. Järlåsa Church, Begun 1672. For whatever reason it was that Carl XI ennobled Tessin, there was a fairly long and continuous process of social and professional elevation leading to his “arrival” in 1674. The first significant point in this development was the nomination to the post of royal “Architecteur” nearly thirty years earlier, in 1646. Three years later, Christina gave him three estates on Rügen, an island off the coast of Pomerania.48 The crown regularly gave land instead of cash for services, so the donation was neither exceptional nor especially significant. He does not seem to have drawn significant income from them, but they nonetheless gave him the symbolic status of a landowner. Following the study years and first successes of the 1650s and 1660s, Tessin was named city architect and palace architect in 1661 and 1663. But while these were important positions that guaranteed him a decent income and a certain respectability, they were practical requirements for the continued function of the growing city and court, and do not really show Tessin stepping beyond the traditional social limitations of his position. In June, 1667, Tessin was elected city councilman in Stockholm, with significant income from the office.49 This was a more important honor than he had yet earned, implying an elevated social status comparable to the Patrizier in other Germanic cities and comparable to his family’s former status in Stralsund. Virtually all subsequent correspondence and references to him include the title of councilman. Yet even this post was closely related to his professional obligations. As the city architect, he worked closely with the councilmen, and it was sensible to have the architect serve as a regular member of the body, particularly as he was developing a major project for a new town hall to house the council in just these years.

47

RA Stockholms stads acta, 8, Kort och oförgrijpeligh opsatz. See Appendix Four. 48 RA Biographica vol 7, fols 266r-v, January 5, 1649; RA Biographica vol 7, fol 267r, July 27, 1649.

49

SSA Stockholms magistrat och rådhusrätt A III a: 7, fol 197v, June 12, 1667; RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Series 61–62 B, Tessin, June 19, 1667.

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We know very little about how and why Tessin received these various positions. The post of palace architect may have replaced the older court post that Tessin had held since 1646, since there was no change in his pay from the crown.50 The work of the city architect was new, however, a response to the rapid growth of the city. He reported nominally to the city council, and was often occupied with more mundane projects. Yet, it may well have been Tessin’s court connections who installed him in the municipal post. There was no clear divide between the court and the city; thus, the crown was also involved in the unexecuted project to build a new town hall. He may have been suggested for the post by the regency or by the chief governor, a court official with oversight over various areas nominally within the jurisdiction of the city council, including all building works in the city.51 The chief governor when the post of city architect was created and Tessin named its first holder was Schering Rosenhane, a man deeply interested in architecture and an early supporter of the architect, from whom he commissioned a residence in the 1650s. Rosenhane was present in this capacity when Tessin took his oath of office in 1661, swearing to uphold his duties first to the chief governor, and then to the magistrates and council.52 Tessin thus answered to the same man both as city and palace architect. Tessin’s nomination as councilman was likewise orchestrated by the crown. In June of 1666, about a year before he assumed the post, the regency decreed that both de la Vallée and Tessin should be named councilmen, with de la Vallée taking the first available place, and Tessin the second.53 The regency explained that this was part of a plan to fill the council with “skilled and experienced” people; de la Vallée should work within the committee on manufacturing and Tessin should work within the building sphere. For Tessin, this was to some degree a redundant measure, for it was at least in part a consolidation of his position of city architect with a more elevated title and very likely a higher salary. He was to work in his new position without pay until there was a place for him on the council, at which point he would draw a full salary from the post. In the meantime, he no doubt continued to draw his salary as city architect. The arrangement allowed the crown to give Tessin a new title and perhaps a raise at the city’s expense. The city also saved money, however, since Tessin forfeited his income as city architect once he received the councilman’s salary.54 It may also have been part of a broader effort by the crown to increase control over the affairs of the city, in this case by installing men dependent on royal patronage on the council.55

50 RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer, 61–62 [series B], Tessin, 2. 51 For the structure of the building administration in Stockholm, see Robert Swedlund, At förse Riket med beständige och prydlige Byggnader. Byggnadsstyrelsen och dess föregångare (Stockholm, 1969), especially 14–16, 28–29. 52 SSA Stockholms magistrat och rådhusrätt, A III a: 1, fol 86r, May 10, 1661. 53 RA Biographica, Jean de la Vallée, June 23, 1666; RA Biographica, Tessin, June 19, 1667. This royal request evidently followed a proposal by de la Vallée to create a new structure for the building process in Stockholm, which, among other things, would have placed him well above Tessin again. See Carl-Fredrik Corin, Självstyre och kunglig maktpolitik inom Stockholms stadsförvaltning 1668–1697 (Stockholm, 1958), 49–50.

54

This is made clear in RA Biographica, Jean de la Vallée, June 23, 1666: “Så han [Tessin] full Rådhmans löhn åthniutas och then löhnen han nu opbär theremot till Staden besparas kann” (“So he [Tessin] may enjoy full councilman’s pay and the salary he now draws instead can be saved by the city”). 55 As councilman, Tessin’s salary of 750 Riksdalers silver was equal to his pay as royal architect and building master before his return from his studies abroad, though seventy-five Riksdalers of this sum was set aside for a copyist. This stipulation would seem to make it clear that Tessin was seen as an architect on the council rather than a more conventional councilman. For the city’s struggle for autonomy, including many references to Tessin and Jean de la Vallée, see Carl-Fredrik Corin, Självstyre och kunglig maktpolitik inom Stockholms stadsförvaltning 1668–1697 (Stockholm, 1958). Jean de la Vallée was never installed as a councilman.

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122. Plaque from Axel Sparre Palace, Stockholm, 1670s.

The elevation from city employee to city councilman seems not to have made any difference in his architectural work for Stockholm. Nor did he take part in the everyday affairs of the council, or at least not productively. The references to him in the council meeting minutes in the years after his nomination to the prestigious group are indistinguishable from the earlier references.56 Moreover, in his letter to the court from the early 1670s discussed above, he complained of spending time in council meetings that did not directly involve architecture, and he was no doubt very pleased when the king released him from this obligation. These positions and titles were nonetheless significant to Tessin, even if the duties that came with them were sometimes onerous. They were also significant to the aristocracy for which he worked. A remarkable plaque from the residence of Axel Sparre, evidently from the 1670s, states that the house was built for Sparre, senator of the realm, castellan of the royal palace, and governor of the city. It continues to explain it was designed (“delineavit”) in 1671 and 1672 by Nicodemus Tessin, royal architect and city councilman, whose name appears on the plaque almost as prominently as Sparre’s (figure 122).57

56

SSA Stockholms magistrat och rådhusrätt A III a, passim. There is no perceptible difference between his work as described in the records of the city council before and after 1667. 57 “Hanc domum extrui curavit Illust:mus Dn: Axelius Sparre Regni Sue:ae senator arcis Holmensis

Casstellanus et civitatis gubernator Annis 1671 & 1672 quam delineavit Nicodemus Tessin Architectus Regius & Civitatis Consiliarius.” The plaque is in the vestibule of the academy of art in Stockholm, housed in Sparre’s much-rebuilt residence.

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Such official titles and positions give us some insight into the view of the architect held by Tessin’s peers. But as Tessin himself apparently found little joy in participation in city council meetings, it is difficult to give too much emphasis to the role of the councilman in the question of his self-image. There is another way of judging the architect’s opinion of himself, however, and that is through his own residence. The three-story house facing the water, not far from the palace, was destroyed at the turn of the twentieth century, and although some of the motifs from the original façade were worked into the new building, we must rely on a few old photos and drawings for an idea of the structure as Tessin left it (figure 123).58 Unfortunately, there is little surviving record of the interior, which might have told us a great deal. We know only that there was a smallish entrance vestibule articulated with pilasters, and that towards the rear was a spiral staircase leading to the main apartment on the second floor. Tessin bought the plot in 1668, soon after his nomination to the city council. Recognizing 123. Tessin, Tessin House, Stockholm, Begun, 1668. that the available space was insufficient for his needs, he bought more land on the adjacent properties in the following year. Nonetheless, the plot is relatively narrow in relation to its depth, which limited his options considerably. It was impossible, for instance, to build anything with a courtyard, such as he had designed in various forms for Gustaf Bonde and Seved Bååt, and as Nicodemus the Younger would build for himself at the end of the century. The general tenor of the façade, and specifically of the portal, suggests a source outside of the Tuscan-Roman tradition. Roman Renaissance and early baroque palaces tend to have rather restricted portal decoration, usually limited to the area immediately around the door, with the decorative articulation sometimes extended to the central window or balcony on the second story. Tessin’s more richly decorative apron, covering the central part of the lower two stories, demands a more convincing explanation, and this leads us once again to Longhena’s Venice. Stacked groupings of Serlian portals are common in Venice, where the portal on the ground floor is repeated or echoed in balconies on the upper stories. These central groupings provide the focal point of the façade and also constitute the greater part of the decorative scheme; the extremities of the façade frequently feature broader expanses of unbroken wall and simpler window dressings. Quoins or pilasters often mark the edges of

58

For Tessin’s own house, see Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och

några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 213–240.

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124. Baldassare Longhena, Palazzo Giustinian-Lollin, Venice, 1619–1623.

the façade. Significantly, it is also in densely-packed Venice, where useable space is at a premium and open courtyards accordingly rare, that we most often find pyramidal roofs.59 A series of prints by Luca Carlevarijs published in 1703 attributes to Baldassare Longhena two buildings that bring together precisely this combination of motifs: the Palazzo Widman and the Palazzo Giustinian-Lollin on the Grand Canal (figure 124).60 Both of these are probably among Longhena’s earlier works, likely dating to the 1620s and 1630s, and would have been important recent projects that Tessin would have been sure to inspect during his study years in the early 1650s. Tessin may not have worked exclusively from Longhena and the Venetian tradition. Another of Dahlbergh’s prints shows Tessin’s house as it stood in the later seventeenth century. Here the decorative apron of the façade is crowned with a hipped roof with a gently sweeping curve to the sides and twin chimneys marking the ends of the gable. Tessin may have realized that the low pyramidal roof of the Venetian palace would not be steep enough for the snowfall in Stockholm, and made the appropriate changes. The high gabled roof

59

The high pyramidal roof that was on the building in the later nineteenth century was however so bizarre that Sirén questioned whether it bore any relation to Tessin’s original plan. Many structures received simplified – and often more awkward – superstructures in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was the case with Louis de Geer’s residence in Stockholm, Sjöö, and the Bååt residence, among

others. Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 226. 60 Luca Carlevarijs, Le fabriche e vedute di Venetia (Venice, 1703). For the Giustinian-Lollin and Widman palaces, see Martina Frank, Baldassare Longhena (Venice, 2004), 120–122, 133–136.

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changed the character of the building significantly, bringing it closer to what one might see in the Netherlands. Indeed, Sirén compared the house to a design by Philips Vingboons rather than to Venetian models.61 This does not necessarily imply a significant stylistic or conceptual discontinuity, however, for the Netherlandish architects were working essentially from the same sources, with the same goal of adapting Italianate principles to a northern European climate and building tradition. It is hardly extraordinary that Tessin’s solution would be similar to Vingboons’s, if somewhat more rigorously observant of Longhena’s models. Indeed, much of the appeal of Netherlandish architecture was certainly its Italianate qualities. It is in any case notable that Tessin’s residence and another house built by his circle on the same street have similar plans, and both façades look out over the water in a manner analogous to the way the Palazzo Giustinian-Lollin looks out over the Grand Canal or Vingboons’s residences sit on the Heerengracht in Amsterdam. Tessin was of course familiar with the Amsterdam patrician house, and he may have thought it appropriate for his own situation, even as he retained more of the Venetian elements than Vingboons generally did. We have seen that Tessin found the various projects for the Amsterdam town hall immensely useful for his own town hall project. Why would the newly-minted city councilman not wish to live just a few blocks from that grand project in something akin to the residence of an Amsterdam civic elite? Tessin’s house was elegant, but it was not one of the sights of the city. Unlike Tessin the Younger’s house, no foreign visitor ever made a note of it. Neither in grandeur nor in location could it compare with the residences of Wrangel, de la Gardie, Bonde, Bååt, or any number of others whose palaces were grouped near the ongoing project for the House of the Nobility and in other prominent locations. Rather, Tessin’s immediate neighbor was the treasurer Henrik Falkenberg. After 1674 the assessor Magnus Stiernmarck lived a few blocks down the same street in a house probably from Tessin’s workshop. The secretary of revenue Börje Cronberg lived somewhat farther away on the same street in a much larger residence. A block or so in the other direction lived the mint master Isaac Kock Cronström in a palace often attributed to Jean de la Vallée. Other neighbors were burghers and foreign merchants. This, then, was the physical and social milieu to which Tessin belonged after he purchased his plot in 1668. It was decent and respectable, surrounded by professionals and lower court officials. It was also grander than he could really afford. As he wrote in 1673 (in a letter excusing himself from contributing to the outfitting of a ship for the East India Company), he had contributed to the beauty of the city, for which he had saddled himself with debt.62 The End of a Career Tessin the Elder lived in his house for only two or three years, if indeed so long. It was unfinished at least until 1674, and in 1677 he sold it to the mint master, Daniel Faxell. The 1670s were a time of general economic downturn, and Tessin received fewer aristocratic commissions in these years. This was partly because of renewed war with Denmark in 1675– 1679, which had a ruinous effect on the economy. Even more damaging was the cloud of the coming reduction, or reclamation by the crown of lands previously granted to the nobility.

61

Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 228–229.

62

Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 221.

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This came to a head in 1680, in the last full year of Tessin’s life, but the uncertainties this brought to the finances and estates of the high aristocracy clouded Tessin’s later years.63 The reduction was a consolidation of wealth and power in an increasingly absolute monarch. One of the effects of this was the concentration of all major artistic activity within the innermost circles of the court, and particularly within the royal family. The individual projects would be grander, but there would be fewer of them. It is therefore unsurprising that the next generation produced only one really significant architect, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, who was intimately connected to the court and was a diplomat and politician as much as he was an architect. Nonetheless, the world that the younger Tessin worked in was already well along in his father’s later years. Thus, by the middle of the 1670s, a greater portion of the elder Tessin’s projects were official commissions that fell under his duties as palace and city architect. The state bank, a new mint, the Caroline burial chapel, royal stables near the palace – these were the kinds of projects that Tessin worked on in his last five years. Tessin the Younger would dedicate nearly all of his efforts to such royal projects, and indeed took over responsibility for many of these from his father. Commissions from private noblemen, which supplemented his other salaries, did not entirely dry up in these years – he produced designs in the 1670s for major projects for the noblemen Gustaf Soop (Mälsåker) and Johan Gabriel Stenbock (Sjöö), for instance – but they were much less numerous than they had been in the 1660s. Tessin was accustomed to a significant portion of his income coming from aristocratic projects, and the decline in this source of income was not offset by an increase in court salary.64 His economy thus suffered significantly in the 1670s, and this unfortunate situation does not seem to have improved in his last years. Had the pace of building continued as before, Tessin, who seems to have had a very sober view of his finances, probably would have been able to stay in his house. But he overextended himself in this most personal project just as the private patronage he had come to depend on declined. Carl XI seems to have realized the strain on him, and at the end of 1676 ordered the city council to increase his pay by nearly half.65 In the following year, when he sold his house, he proposed to the king to build a small house for himself, his family and his heirs, on a site where the church for the Finnish-speaking congregation had been planned a decade earlier, but never carried beyond preliminary work. Carl XI not only agreed, but contributed 1000 Riksdalers – equivalent to his annual salary as palace architect – to help him with the construction costs.66

63

There are many accounts of the reduction. See most recently Anthony Upton, Charles XI and Swedish Absolutism (Cambridge, 1998). Already in 1674 an Italian observer, Lorenzo Magalotti, saw the coming struggle between the lower nobility and the upper nobility which allowed the crown to reclaim the lands of the magnates, severely limiting their ability to commission architectural works: “… it is therefore to be feared that with the help of the new nobility the king of Sweden may succeed in doing what the king of Denmark did with the help of the Burghers, who hated the nobility and therefore served as his instrument to free him from dependence on the Estates, and become absolute. The same can happen in Sweden, where it may easily fall out that the new nobility, which hates the old (from which as a rule members of the råd [council] are recruited), will unite with the king (upon whom it mainly depends) and will destroy

and abolish the authority of the råd in order to free the king from that yoke.” Cited in Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (Minneapolis, 1967), 264n55. 64 The records for Tessin’s payments from the court are conveniently collected in RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 62 [series B], Nicodemus Tessin. Tessin’s base pay was the same (900 Rdr silver) from 1655 until his death, although he did receive a higher allowance from 1669 for a second assistant. 65 Tessin’s initial pay as city councilman was 750 Riksdalers Silver, of which seventy-five was to pay for a copyist. By royal order of 29 December 1676, the council was to increase his pay by 300 Riksdalers. See Stockholms rådhus och råd, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1918), 185. 66 RA Kammararkivet, Likvidationer, Konstnärer 61–62 [series B], Tessin, 14 November, 1677, and 11 January, 1678.

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The last letter we have from Tessin’s hand, almost certainly written in the spring of 1681, has a melancholy, even morbid, tone.67 Writing to Hedwig Eleonora, it is clear that he was in his last days. He thanked the queen for her patronage and protection over so many years. He had lived a decent and moral life, but was unable to save for the welfare of his wife and son. He pointed to the sale of his house as evidence of his poor financial state. Would the queen reward his faithful service to the crown over forty years by keeping them in her protection? There was no doubt considerable truth to this description of his state; he did, after all, sell his house soon after completing it. But there is also a distinct quality of hyperbole in Tessin’s writing. Over and over he tells of his extreme weakness, which will not allow him to dictate any further, and that it would soon fall on his wife and son to bury him. Nicodemus the Younger was hardly likely to go hungry. He was twenty-seven years old and had already returned in 1677 from an extensive study period abroad, followed almost immediately by a shorter trip to England and France. He was at this point easily the most capable architect in the kingdom. While still abroad, he had already received the post of court architect in March, 1676, in part in recognition of his father’s services to the crown.68 Tessin’s last letter was rather to secure an income for his wife, Maria, who would live another thirty years, and, perhaps more specifically, to request the queen’s continued protection for Nicodemus the Younger’s career. In his last days, Tessin knew well that the good will of Hedwig Eleonora was more important than that of Carl XI for a young painter or architect. His letter was rewarded with a yearly pension of 1,200 dalers for his wife.69 The old queen had already noticed Nicodemus the Younger’s talents and had shown significant support for him within the court, to the point that one wonders if it was at the queen’s suggestion that the absent young Tessin was appointed court architect. Hedwig Eleonora’s support did not diminish. In 1681 Nicodemus the Younger became her court architect and took over responsibility for Drottningholm, Ulriksdal and Strömsholm from his father with an annual salary of 1,000 dalers.70 He became the Stockholm palace and city architect in the same year, each providing significant income. With his family’s affairs in order, Nicodemus Tessin the Elder died on May 24, 1681.

67 Transcribed in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmhus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 238–240. 68 Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. – Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 97. See the conclusion. 69 Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmhus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 222.

70

For Tessin the Younger’s relation to Hedwig Eleonora, see Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. – Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 78–87.

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CHAPTER VII ARCHITECTURAL THEORY I: ADOPTION

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Tessin the Younger’s theoretical interests and writings are fairly well known. He wrote on a range of topics, and for various purposes. His polished treatise on interior decoration of 1717 was the first of its kind, as he himself noted with satisfaction, and he probably intended to publish it.1 It was written in French, and was almost certainly intended for an international audience. He of course expected that his colleagues at home would read it as well, but it was conceived primarily as a contribution to an international dialogue on taste rather than as a set of instructions for his workshop.2 A shorter tract called Observations regarding both Public and Private house-building’s Strength, comfort and beauty, adapted to our Swedish Climate and economy, on the other hand, is something quite different.3 It is closely focused on the conditions of building in a cold, damp climate with local wood and sandstone. It provides very specific and practical instructions for the preparation of the building site and materials: when the stone is to be cut, how thick the walls should be, how damp the bricks should be when laid, and so on. There is a theoretical aspect to the text in its concern for the suitability of the building to the patron and to the surrounding environment, but this is subdued and supports the more practical information. It is written in Swedish and there is no indication that he intended it for publication. It is plainly for local use, to guide patrons and especially building masters in the everyday business of building. Like his father, Tessin the Younger generally delivered a finished set of drawings to his patrons and then left the construction to local building masters. These men were usually trained in the guilds in masonry or carpentry, and were not equipped to manage all the logistics and technical problems of construction, especially in a more complex project. Moreover, many of these masters came from elsewhere in Europe where the traditions, materials and climatic conditions were different. The Observations may have been intended primarily as a guideline for the overseer, who was responsible for all the practical aspects of construction.4 This kind of theoretical writing is grounded in and always closely related to the technical requirements of the building practice. It contrasts with a very different kind of theory that Tessin the Younger encountered in books and in Christina’s librarian in Rome, Giovanni Pietro Bellori. The old Bellori and the young Tessin spent considerable time together. We know, for example, that they visited the various studios and collections in Rome together, and while we can assume that they discussed art theory, the effects of this friendship on the art and thought of the younger Tessin have yet to be explored fully.5

1

Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Traictè dela decoration interieure 1717, ed Patricia Waddy (Stockholm, 2002). 2 Bo Vahlne, “Tessin’s Traictè and the Swedish Royal Court” Traictè dela decoration interieure 1717, ed Patricia Waddy (Stockholm, 2002), 26–39, interprets the treatise as a guide for Carl Gustaf Tessin, who would be responsible for the decorations of the royal palace in Stockholm. 3 Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, Observationer Angående så wähl Publique som Priuate huus bÿggnaders Starkheet, beqwämligheet och skiönheet,

in rättade, effter wår Swänska Climat och oeconomie [ca 1714] (Stockholm, 2002). 4 Other shorter reflections by Tessin on theoretical issues are collected in Björn R Kommer, Nicodemus Tessin der Jüngere und das Stockholmer Schloß (Heidelberg, 1974), 157–166. 5 Tessin’s relationship with Bellori is discussed briefly by Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 1 (Stockholm,1930), 55–57; and Elisabeth Kieven, “’Il gran teatro del mondo.’ Nicodemus Tessin the Younger in Rome” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 7. It receives only passing mention elsewhere.

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Tessin the Elder carefully oversaw his son’s education and prepared his career as an architect, and to a large degree the son’s experiences must be seen as reflections of the father’s interests and biases. Nicodemus the Younger’s first formal studies were at the German academy in Stockholm, where he was broadly educated in literature and languages (he studied French, Italian, and English, in addition to Latin), Lutheran religious instruction, and various topics in natural philosophy. Indeed, except for the emphasis on foreign languages, which anticipated an international career, the younger Tessin’s education was very much like the one his father received in Stralsund in the 1620s. He worked alongside his father in the studio even early in his study years, and his academic and architectural education were concurrent and complementary. 1669 saw Tessin the Younger’s first publication: a Latin oration on Carl XI’s acceptance of the English Order of the Garter.6 In the same year, the fifteen-year-old was paid for his first work as a professional architect: a drawing for Hedwig Eleonora’s Strömsholm, which his father redesigned in these years.7 Some time later, he recalled that “… my parents had given my upbringing all necessary and useful care, both in bookish arts and in useful practices and knowledge, and especially in regard to what is to be learned in the French and Italian languages. ...”8 Tessin’s insistence that his son study foreign languages would be crucial when Nicodemus the Younger set off on his study trips. It also ensured that he would be able to read and assimilate virtually the complete body of theoretical literature on architecture published across Europe.9 It amounted to the basis for a humanistic complement to the practical training he received in his father’s studio. The elder Tessin’s engagement with architectural theory appears to have been primarily a practical matter, however. We shall see that he made use of some Renaissance compositional principles and may well have taken an intellectual interest in them, encouraging his son to do likewise. There is little to suggest that he engaged in theoretical speculations that were not directly related to architectural problems, and no evidence that he wished to devise an independent theoretical structure for his work. In this he was much like many other famously laconic architects of the seventeenth century. But since he evidently wanted Tessin the Younger to have a conceptual basis for his work, it is likely that he gave some instruction in the broader principles of architecture in the context of his workshop.10 Only if he were too preoccupied with his heavy workload to take on pedagogical work as well would Tessin the Younger’s first formal encounter with architectural theory have come in 1670, when he went to Uppsala University to study with the polymath humanist Olaus Rudbeck.11 6 Ordo garterius: id est; Actus narrationis solennis (Stockholm, 1669), 13. In the following year, the schoolmaster published another of his exercises in Styli exercitationes de naturae mirandis, publice habitae in schola teutonica holmiensi (Stockholm, 1670). These are not in any way significant texts, but rather to be compared to junior-high school reports; Tessin wrote on comets, while another wrote on lions. (Tessin’s classmate wrote “Nomen Leonis quadrupedum Regis sat spelendidum est atque amplum” – roughly: “The lion is the king of the quadrupeds, splendid and large.”) 7 Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1931), 31–33. 8 Merit Laine and Börje Magnusson, eds, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Travel Notes 1673–77 and 1687–88 (Stockholm, 2002), 441. “Sedan mina föräldrar hade dragit om min uppfostran all nödig och tiänlig försorg så wäl uti bokliga konster, som nyttiga exercitier och wettenskaper, i synnerhet hwad informationen uti fransyska och italienska språken angick.”

9

Certain texts in Slavic languages may however have remained inaccessible to Tessin the Younger, such as Lukasz Opalinski(?), Krótka nauka budownicza (Krakow, 1659). 10 There are a number of drawings from Tessin’s workshop that are best explained as ideal projects or exercises, which are consonant with this view of a broader architectural interest never allowed to escape into purely theoretical speculation. 11 An older tradition, restated by Ulla Ehrensvärd, holds that Tessin went to Uppsala in 1664, when he was ten years old. Josephson rejects this, claiming that he did not go to the university until 1670. The later date is more tenable, as Tessin’s Latin orations in the German school were published in 1669 and 1670 (see above). Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – Mannen – Verket, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1931), 31; Ulla Ehrensvärd, “Mångsysslaren, eller, Hur man blir slottsarkitekt” ArkitekturMuseets årsbok (1987): 15.

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Rudbeck was the closest thing in the kingdom to a universal man. He wrote a remarkable and fantastic revisionist history that placed Uppsala at the center of the ancient world.12 He also discovered the lymphatic system and was an amateur architect who designed several university buildings. Among Rudbeck’s goals as rector of the university was the establishment of a post for a full-time “architectus” who could offer professional architectural training based on Vitruvius and the sixteenth-century authorities. This post was never established, so Rudbeck took it upon himself to instruct students in these authors.13 Most of his students were aristocratic children who were unlikely to become professional architects. Although knowledge of the theoretical bases of classical architecture was useful for men who might one day become architectural patrons, Rudbeck’s lessons were unlikely to have much effect on the practice of architecture.14 The only exception was the rare occasion that his lessons reached a young gentleman who also happened to be an architect in the making. Except for the occasional dilettante like Carl Gustaf Wrangel or Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie, the younger Tessin was the only young man in the kingdom to fit this description.15 Of course it was not the adolescent Tessin the Younger who arranged these lessons with Rudbeck, but his overworked father, who was determined to provide a rigorous theoretical training for him. We have seen that one major aspect of Tessin the Younger’s theoretical concerns was the adaptation of a classical tradition to an alien northern environment. This was a very practical application of theory, and one that at some level confronted every northern architect working in an international manner. Tessin the Elder of course faced the same challenge in his work. He apparently did not write about it at the same length that his son did, but a crucial passage in the 1652 letter sent from Rome to Axel Oxenstierna shows that he was very aware quite early in his career of the implications of adapting a southern tradition to a northern climate. So also [are] the material and the type of land all splendidly good and suitable, so that it is impossible to build in such a way in other places, and especially to the north. This entire winter I have seen no snow in Rome, and thus the fountains run both winter and summer. There are a great number of them, such as a newly-made one that stands on the place called Navona, which, like a cliff with four monumental large statues of white marble under an old and quite high Obelisk, is worth seeing. In their gardens however the most exceptional [objects] are the grottos, fountains, statues and alleys of Cypress trees, all of which cannot be repeated elsewhere.16 Everything in this passage of Tessin’s letter suggests the practical limits of transferring what he saw in Italy to Baltic Europe. He does not imply in any way that an unadulterated Italianate style is inherently inappropriate in the north, either because of problems of 12 Olaus Rudbeck Atlantica (Uppsala, 1679–1702; reprint ed Axel Nelson, Uppsala, 1937–1939). For a summary and commentary on the text, see Gunnar Eriksson, The Atlantic Vision. Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science (Canton, Massachussetts, 1994). 13 Ulla Ehrensvärd, “Mångsysslaren, eller, Hur man blir slottsarkitekt” ArkitekturMuseets årsbok (1987): 9–21. For a more general discussion of Rudbeck’s technical teaching at Uppsala, see Per Dahl, Svensk ingenjörskonst under stormaktstiden. Olof Rudbecks tekniska undervisning och praktiska verksamhet (Uppsala, 1995). 14 This is comparable to the lessons in draftsmanship and artistic theory offered by Johannes Schefferus, a

professor of rhetoric at Uppsala. See Allan Ellenius, De arte pingendi. Latin Art Literature in SeventeenthCentury Sweden and its International Background (Uppsala, 1960). See also below. 15 Jean de la Vallée’s son, Christoffer Johan, also studied at Uppsala in the 1670s, when his father was essentially a high-ranking bureaucrat. He turned to fortifications work, and in 1682 entered the service of Venice. He died in 1700. Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 19. 16 RA E 739, Nicodemus Tessin to Axel Oxenstierna, February 5, 1652. See Appendix Three.

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derivation and originality or because of inconsistency with the local tradition. The passage does however carry certain implications for other aspects of his work and that of his son. First, the passage may explain the fairly wholehearted and early turn by both Tessins to French models for formal gardens. This was quite apart from the fact that by the end of the seventeenth century this model was increasingly the international standard. French gardens had to be able to survive a cold, snowy winter, and thus met the basic criterion set out by Tessin in his letter to Oxenstierna. The French orientation for formal gardens was firmly in place in Sweden from midcentury, when André Mollet, the Désignateur de Plants et Jardins du Roi at the Tuileries, worked in Stockholm. He would also work in the Netherlands and in England, but it is certainly significant that it was in Stockholm that he published Le jardin de plaisir, an early and important theoretical treatise on the principles of the French garden.17 Mollet stressed a visual harmony of the garden and its structures, such as pavilions and fountains, and the main residence – a principle we have seen in use at Drottningholm. The essential point of his text, which would become a fundamental principle of seventeenth-century landscape design, was that the garden must be considered part of the overall architectural scheme of an estate. Mollet’s work had a wide influence and appeal. It was published in French, German and Swedish, and an English edition appeared nineteen years after the first editions. Its principles were taken up and reworked in the next generation by André Le Nôtre, Louis XIV’s chief gardener. We have already noted Le Nôtre’s close friendship with Tessin the Younger, which strengthened the influence of the French garden in the north. But the seeds of the cultural orientation that led to the much closer association with French gardening than with French architecture are surely to be found equally in the elder Tessin’s early recognition that he could not adapt the Italian horticultural tradition to the north without violating its effects, and in the theoretical framework produced in Stockholm – albeit with a lifetime of experience in France, England, and the Netherlands – by André Mollet. Tessin’s unwillingness to adapt the Italian garden must be contrasted with his very literal use of Italianate architecture in certain cases, particularly the cathedral at Kalmar (begun 1660; figure 39) and the state bank in Stockholm (begun 1675; figure 45). But where Tessin was willing to employ a Roman style, he was quite conscious of the problems involved in reproducing Italian forms in a wet and cold environment. This compromise can be seen for example in the roof of the cathedral. The gabled upper section follows the profile of the pediment. But where the strictly vertical clerestories of il Gesù and other churches are penetrated by windows, Tessin added steeply-pitched copper panels. These approximate a Mansard roof to a degree, but since this is tacked on to a fairly standard gabled roof, the effect is skewed. These panels are mostly hidden behind volutes on the narrow façade. But on the broad façade, which faces the square, they are clearly visible despite the partial cover provided by the four large towers. They are certainly the most awkward aspect of the design. Tessin solved the problem of the Roman roofline in a Baltic climate much more skillfully in the state bank, designed fifteen years after Kalmar Cathedral. He used a fragmented 17 André Mollet, Le jardin de plaisir (Stockholm, 1651; facsimile with introduction, Paris, 1981). The treatise was published in French, German and Swedish editions in 1651 (all published in Stockholm); an English edition followed in 1670. See Sten Karling, “The Importance of André Mollet and his Family for the Development of the French Formal Garden” The French Formal Garden [Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture],

ed Elizabeth Macdougall and F. Hamilton Hazlehurst (Washington, DC, 1974), 1–25; Florence Hopper, “De Nederlandse tuin en André Mollet” Bulletin KNOB 82 (1983): 98–115; and Erik de Jong, “Of Plants and Gardeners, Prints and Books: Reception and Exchange in Northern European Garden Culture 1648–1725” Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion, ed Michel Conan (Washington, D.C., 2005), 37–84.

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pitch or skirt above the cornice that is not allowed to come to a point and does not have a gable. There is precedent for this in Roman palace design, for example in Domenico Fontana’s Lateran Palace, where the roof structure is clearly visible, and later in Carlo Fontana’s Palazzo Bigazzini from the end of the century. But because the bank faces a rather small square, the viewing angle of the superstructure of the building is steeper than the pitch of the roof, making Tessin’s roofline invisible. The pitch of the belvedere’s roof follows the same angle, and is also invisible to the viewer in the square. Tessin and Written Architectural Theory Given the elder Tessin’s concern with the intellectual aspects of his son’s education and his own “theoretical” awareness, we might expect that he would have written on aspects of his own practice and conceptual outlook. There are few known tracts by him that treat theoretical concerns, however, and these are more systematic than speculative. One of these is an undated tract in German, eighty-seven pages long, inscribed Extract of a description of fortifications.18 It is little more than a reduction of the first two books of Adam Freitag’s Architectura militaris aucta et nova, which, despite its Latin title, was written in German. Freitag’s treatise was first published in Leiden in 1631, but was reprinted in numerous German and French editions until 1668.19 Freitag was a Polish-German intellectual.20 His father was a professor of Greek at the University of Toruń, where Adam was born in 1602. He doubtless began his education at an early age, and took doctorates in philosophy and medicine. Either before or after finishing his studies, he entered the service of Władysław Zygmunt of Poland, but later served under the stadholder, Frederik Hendrik. In the Netherlands, he took part in the sieges of ‘s-Hertogenbosch (1629) and Maastricht (1632) as an authority in fortifications, and worked in civilian life as a doctor and a lecturer in mathematics. It was in these years that the first edition of his treatise was published in Leiden. His experiences in the Netherlands affected his theoretical views profoundly, and the treatise he wrote in these years made him one of the foremost exponents of the Netherlandish manner of fortification, characterized by earthen ramparts and wet ditches. Even on the title page of the first edition Freitag described himself as “Mathematum Liebhaber,” a lover or amateur of mathematics. The treatise is heavily technical, abounding with angles and trigonometric ratios. It also contains musings on the origins of fortifications, an explanation of ichnographic versus orthographic drawing conventions, and some other ideas that can be traced back to Vitruvius, and which demonstrate a somewhat broader humanistic view of fortifications architecture. The emphasis on choosing a suitable site for the structure, for example, while obviously a crucial part of fortifications planning, is also fundamentally applicable to civil architecture. Warnings that marsh air is unhealthy and can easily bring illness are also comparable to similar comments in Vitruvius.21 On the whole, however, 18

NM graphic collection, unnumbered, Extract einer beschreibung der Fortification. 19 Adam Freitag, Architectura Militaris nova et aucta, oder Newe vermehrte Fortification von Regular Vestungen, von Irregular Vestungen und Aussen wercken, Von praxi Offensiva und Defensiva (Leiden, 1631). Other editions were Leiden, 1635 (in French and German); Paris, 1640 (French); Leiden, 1642 (German); Amsterdam, 1665 (German); Paris, 1668 (French). 20 For Freitag, see Max Jähns, Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften vornehmlich in Deutschland, vol 2

(Munich, 1890), 1111–1114; Ulrich Schütte, ed, Architekt und Ingenieur. Baumeister in Krieg und Frieden (Wolfenbüttel, 1984), 365–366. 21 Adam Freitag, Architectura Militaris nova et aucta, oder Newe vermehrte Fortification von Regular Vestungen, von Irregular Vestungen und Aussen wercken, Von praxi Offensiva und Defensiva (Leiden, 1631), 4. “Ist auch die lufft/ wegen der auffsteigenden dünste/ vor sich sehr ungesundt; daher auch leicht kranckheiten kommen.” Cf. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, ed Ingrid D Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge, 1999), 1.4.1–12.

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these kinds of reflections find little space in the content of the three books – on regular and irregular fortifications, and on special problems in fortifications – that comprise the work. Tessin’s distillation of Freitag reveals little of his own theoretical ideas, but it does tell us something about his sources and interests. Freitag was in fact in a perfect position to leave a mark on Tessin and the Swedish fortifications corps, although his influence was so vast that it is difficult to make anything more than a general observation on this point. If a suggestion that Freitag was engaged by Gustaf II Adolf in 1631 to work with the Swedish fortifications corps in Stettin could be substantiated, the association would potentially be very illuminating.22 Freitag would then have been a major figure in the Swedish fortifications corps in Pomerania in the very years that Tessin was beginning his career. If both worked in Stralsund or Stettin, they could easily have met, and Freitag could even have known or supervised Tessin’s early work, as well as have given a very influential recommendation for the ambitious young man. There is no clear evidence that Freitag ever worked for the Swedish army, however. Indeed, his treatise is dedicated to “Władysław Zygmunt, crown prince of Poland and Sweden,” stoking the abrasive Polish claims to the Swedish crown that lead to intermittent warfare until the 1650s. This alone would seem to rule out Swedish employment, particularly as later editions retain the dedication. Rather, Freitag’s book, with or without its dedication page, appears to have circulated through the Swedish fortifications corps in fairly large numbers simply because it was the most modern, widely read, and useful treatise on fortifications. There were only minor changes to the seven editions, and Tessin’s reduction is so terse that it is impossible to tie it to a particular printing and thereby give the manuscript a tentative date. It is less difficult to explain what Tessin intended to do with his reduced manuscript. The material is summarized so briefly (several chapters are nothing more than a title) that it could not have been useful to another reader. Rather, it must have been a distillation of the most useful information in a form that could be easily consulted in the field. The original book was a quarto-sized volume; Tessin’s slim distillation, perhaps fifteen centimeters tall, could be slipped in a pocket and carried about easily. It is therefore no surprise to find that Freitag’s third book – on combat architecture, such as bridges and field batteries – is not included at all. Basic concepts, terms, and conventions are generally omitted. This information could easily be checked in the original if needed, but for the most part required no place on the building site. On the other hand, the notebook contains numerous fold-out pages filled with obsessively copied trigonometric tables (figure 125). The information that Tessin wished to extract from the treatise was evidently the purely mathematical framework for building. This may help us date the manuscript, for Tessin was in essence an on-site building leader and surveyor in the 1640s, and a project manager at Borgholm in the 1650s. From the 1660s he was not closely involved with the measuring, digging and framing of his designs. The manuscript in the Nationalmuseum best matches his duties in the 1640s, and is very likely one of the few records we have of his activity in this period. If we are correct to assume that Freitag’s Architectura militaris is the earliest theoretical work (aside from the classical texts he read as a boy in the Stralsund Academy) that can be demonstrably associated with Tessin, we can speculate somewhat further on the early formation of his architectural ideas. This is particularly significant in one regard: Freitag, like other

22 This is proposed (as an established fact) by Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 214. Neither Max Jähns, Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften vornehmlich in Deutschland, vol 2 (Munich, 1890), 1111–1114,

nor Ulrich Schütte, ed, Architekt und Ingenieur. Baumeister in Krieg und Frieden (Wolfenbüttel, 1984), 365–366 mention any work by Freitag for the Swedish fortifications corps, and it would have come in the midst of his work in the Netherlands.

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125. Tessin, Notes after Adam Freytag.

fortifications theorists, did not describe architecture as a simple process of setting stones atop one another, more thickly for defensive structures. The book overwhelmingly emphasizes the geometric and proportional bases of architecture. It is through a complex series of angles, measurements and ratios that one develops fortifications. Although Freitag does not state explicitly that fortifications architecture is in essence applied mathematics, this is the implication of his book. Tessin recognized this, for he omitted all general discussion from his reduction, and included only the mathematical content. Only one short passage of Tessin’s notebook is not taken from Freitag, and it appears to confirm his high regard both for mathematics and for classical precedent. The first five pages of the notebook are filled with notes on the application of Euclid to bridge building, likely filtered through another writer. This short passage is interesting in part because the character of the writing is so different from Freitag. Freitag’s work is relentlessly mathematical, but the content is always applied very directly to the needs of the fortifications engineer. Whatever the source of the first notations in Tessin’s book, the emphasis is on geometric theory and proofs, rather than on bridges. Hence the regular references to Euclid, who propounded pure rather than applied mathematics, and who was accordingly of little use for the practical Freitag, who did not mention him at all. Whatever this second source was, it counterbalances Freitag’s work nicely, and reflects the balance, or perhaps the tension, between the buildable project and the more grandiose and ideal plans, such as Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie’s Arensburg, that can be found in Tessin’s work. Both of these fragments show that even in the early stages of his career, Tessin found time to read theoretical works. Moreover, the passages from Euclid show that Tessin continued to read classical works, the basis of his education in Stralsund, but now with an interest in how they could be related to architecture. We assume that he had an impressive library of architectural treatises and handbooks. He almost certainly had at least a serviceable collection of classical literature as well, as every other significant architect in the kingdom had at least a basic library of classical works. An inventory of his personal collection has not surfaced, however, and his books formed the basis of Tessin the Younger’s enormous library, which

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was catalogued in a published edition in 1712. Unfortunately, the two stages of the collection cannot now be separated.23 Because Tessin approached military architecture through geometric mathematics, as this early manuscript shows, we have a powerful justification for assuming that he transferred this basic approach to civil architecture. From his earliest work, then, Tessin was aware of the central importance of geometry and proportion in architecture. It awaited only the refinement and international currency that he could acquire abroad to develop a modern representative architecture. Tessin closed his notebook with sketch of an all’antica head shown in profile with a laurel wreath. Even within fortifications architecture, the intellectual or mathematical basis of building, with roots in antiquity, endowed the work and perhaps the architect himself with a more noble quality. This may moreover serve as an indication that from the beginning of his career he was eager to move on to what he evidently considered the more dignified business of civil architecture. How did the emphasis on proportions and ratios shape Tessin’s work as he shifted his attention to civil architecture? It is abundantly clear from Tessin’s drawings that he understood proportion and the interrelationship of elements to lie at the heart of his conception of architecture. Almost every surviving sheet is incised with a carefully laid-out grid of vertical and horizontal lines. Some early drawings have graphite substructures, but these serve the same purpose. These do not mark out regular intervals, but rather the relationship of column to capital to cornice to balustrade (on a vertical progression), or column to window frame to window center (on a horizontal progression). Most often each regularly-spaced motif is measured with calipers, and the finished sheet is thoroughly pricked by their repeated use. This constant awareness of proportion is visible in other ways as well. Tessin (or perhaps his workshop) prepared plans for houses for various merchants and petty nobles at various times. Some of these were similar to his own rather more elaborate house. These buildings are hardly representational residences in the usual sense, and are much more like elegant rowhouses. One such project has the usual kinds of ornament: Doric pilasters that in the third story are abstracted in simple white moldings, entablatures, window moldings, and so on, all rather simplified in this case (figure 126). It is in an entirely unremarkable project, except that the architect has marked out the measurements for each of the component elements. He has further noted precisely how each element is to relate to the others. Other drawings, such as the ones for the Caroline burial chapel, elaborate how these relationships are worked out within the context of the larger structure. Much work remains to be done before we can describe Tessin’s use of proportional relationships fully and confidently, but we now have some insight into one important case. Fredric Bedoire has recently argued that a Palladian proportional system underlies the spatial relationships in the apartments at Drottningholm.24 The ideal form for Palladio, as for Vitruvius, Alberti, and Serlio before him, was the circle. Next in importance was the rectangle with the proportion of 1:2, followed by a rectangle of 2:3. The main body of the palace is 50 x 100 ells, or 1:2. This was of course of course determined by the foundation that was first laid out by the Netherlandish builder and sculptor Willem Boy in the 1570s, but Tessin elaborated very skillfully on the basic proportional framework he inherited.25 Following the Palladian dictum, 23

Per Bjurström and Mårten Snickare, Introduction to Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Catalogue des livres, estampes & desseins du cabinet des beaux arts (Stockholm, 2000), 12. 24 Fredric Bedoire, “Drottningholm under Hedvig Eleonora” Drottningholms slott. Från Hedvig Eleonora till Lovisa Ulrika, ed Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen (Stockholm, 2004), 61–65.

25

For Boy, see Christopher Eichhorn and Herman Odelberg, Guillaume Boyen (Willem Boy), peintre, sculpteur et architect Belge: etude biographique (Brussels, 1872); August Hahr, Studier i Johan III:s renässans 2: Villem Boy, bildhuggaren och byggmästaren (Uppsala, 1910); Nils Sundquist, Willem Boy i Uppsala (Stockholm, 1971). We know nothing about Boy’s theoretical leanings.

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY I: ADOPTION the central formal staircase has a breadth and length of 2:3, and the vestibule and galleries adjoining the staircase on the upper floors have proportions derived from the square, at 1:2 and 1:4. In the lower of these galleries the width and height are equal, but in the vaulted upper gallery the height is somewhat greater than the width. In the northern wing, the queen’s formal bedroom and the attached reception salon have a width-to-breadth proportion of 2:3. In the corresponding suite to the south, the rooms are very nearly square, or 1:1, with the only exception a relationship of 1:2. Otherwise a ratio of 2:3 dominates throughout the palace, and in the smaller pavilions that were added as the project grew. Tessin presumably used a similar scheme in other projects, but this has yet to be explored. Palladio’s hierarchy of forms was hardly innovative in the Renaissance and his proportional ratios were both relatively simple and fairly traditional, and it may be unjustified to identify this system too closely with the architect.26 Palladio arguably laid out these principles more clearly than earlier writers, however, and with Scamozzi was the most influential of the Renaissance architectural theorists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.27 Perhaps reflecting his early studies with his father, Tessin the Younger later recommended Palladio as the authority on the composition of apartments, even as he pointed to Rome for facade designs and Paris for interior decoration.28 Working within the proportional ideals established in the Renaissance, fortifications and civil architecture were fundamentally related by their mathematical bases. It is true that the mathematical relationships were different, as 26

Bruce Boucher, Andrea Palladio. The Architect in his Time (New York, 1994), 239. 27 For Palladio’s influence in northern Europe, see Jörgen Bracker, ed, Palladio. Bauen nach der Natur Die Erben Palladios in Nordeuropa (Ostfildern, 1997); Guido Beltramini, ed, Palladio and Northern Europe. Books, Travellers, Architects (Milan, 1999). For an introduction to Palladianism in England, see John Harris, The Palladians (London, 1981). For Scamozzi in northern Europe, see Annali di architettura. Rivista del Centro internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 18–19 (2007).

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126. Tessin, Project for a City Residence.

28

Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, Observationer Angående så wähl Publique som Priuate huus bÿggnaders Starkheet, beqwämligheet och skiönheet, in rättade, effter wår Swänska Climat och oeconomie [ca 1714] (Stockholm, 2002), 45. Paris and Rome have been so heavily emphasized in discussion of Tessin the Younger that his interest in other places and traditions has largely been forgotten. See Henry Ley, “Tessin’s Opinions of Italian Renaissance Architecture” Evolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art: actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art, vol 2, ed György Rózsa (Budapest, 1972), 101–103.

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was their purpose – deflecting canon shot was quite unlike distilling an ideal sequence of forms – but the means to derive both were largely the same. Tessin understood this from the very beginning of his work in fortifications. It made his conversion from engineer to architect relatively painless. It required retraining in a different set of proportional principles and the development of a new architectural vocabulary, though these were assimilated into a conceptual framework that was already present in his architectural thought. This mathematical conception of architecture made it easier to assimilate into his work any given motif – dormer windows, open loggias, or cut sandstone garlands – provided it made sense in the Swedish context and could be incorporated within the proportional or mathematical framework within which he always conceived a project. Tessin as Writer The distillation of Freitag’s tract gives some access to important aspects of Tessin’s work as an architect, but it does not in any way suggest that he was active as a writer or theorist himself. Until recently, there was so little evidence of this kind of more conceptual activity that it was impossible to discuss him in these terms. A manuscript by him has recently turned up that significantly changes this view, though Tessin’s very practical bent remains evident in this work. The new text, hidden away for at least a century and a half in England in the library of the earls of Macclesfield, is entitled Architectura Militaris oder Fortification ohne Calculation, Welche allein auß der Proportional Linia proponiret undt proportioniret wirdt (Military Architecture or Fortification without Calculation, which shall be Proposed and Proportioned only with the Proportional Ruler). As the title implies, it lays out a method to devise fortifications geometrically using only a compass and ruler, rather than complex mathematical ratios. At the bottom of the title page is inscribed “Nicodemus Tessin m[anu] p[ropr]ia.” The text is written in German, in a rather more elaborate script at the beginning but losing some of its careful fussiness at the end. It is neat throughout, however, without changes to the text or marginal notations. The drawings are very clean, and were clearly copied onto the pages from preparatory drawings made on other sheets. Overall, the reader gets the distinct impression that the manuscript was intended for publication. The manuscript has been attributed to Tessin the Younger, but all signs point rather to Tessin the Elder.29 Although both Tessins wrote comfortably in German, Nicodemus the Younger’s more formal writings were invariably in French. Notably missing from the son’s enormous work is significant expertise in fortifications, and a text on this subject would stand out conspicuously in his oeuvre. If Tessin the Younger had taken on a tract on fortifications, moreover, we would expect the tract to reflect the legacy of Louis XIV’s fortifications master, Vauban. The handwriting, too, is very comparable with the elder Tessin’s, though generally more self-consciously elegant. Although these characteristics seem to disqualify Tessin the Younger as the author, a theoretical tract seems equally difficult to reconcile with the image of the overworked and relentlessly practical Tessin the Elder. Most of Nicodemus the Younger’s writings came between 1709 and 1727, when work stopped on the royal palace in Stockholm because of the endless wars of Carl XII – a long period of relative inactivity never experienced by his father. Yet, the text is, in its own way, very consonant with the character and goals of Nicodemus the Elder. 29 The manuscript was sold to a private collector at Sotheby’s New Bond St, London, on October 30, 2007, lot 3814, as the work of Tessin the Younger. The text came to my attention shortly before the manuscript

of this book went to press, and the discussion here is very cursory. My thanks to the owner for the opportunity to examine the work.

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The nature of the tract fits Tessin’s architectural character very well. Its goals are eminently practical, with no extraneous philosophical speculation. He was careful to include passages demonstrating his erudition, with citations of Vitruvius and Julius Caesar, as well as an easy familiarity with French terminology. He may have considered these citations evidence of his qualification to write such a tract. But these are always peripheral to the central focus of the work, which was to find a more broadly accessible way to derive the angles and forms required in fortifications work. We have already seen that mathematical tables formed the basis of Adam Freitag’s fortifications treatise; indeed, it was to a large extent these tables, rather than the descriptive textual passages, that Tessin copied in his notebook. This mathematical basis effectively disqualified a significant population from fortifications work – at least at the design stage – because of insufficient preparation in mathematics. Tessin’s goal was not to introduce a new system of fortification – in this sense, his tract is not a theoretical treatise – but rather to simplify the procedure and obviate the “Calculation” that made the work so complex. A system of fortifications design based on geometric relationships is of course no less mathematical than one based on numeric ones, but it offered certain advantages. Chief among these was that it could be taught visually. Thus the 136 pages are complemented by fifty-two pages of diagrams, moving from simple tasks – such as bisecting a curve – to deriving various more complex forms. As we might expect, however, Tessin moves very quickly from the bases of geometry to their application. Already the second demonstration is the construction of a regular (i.e., symmetrical) fortification derived from a circle. The accompanying text explains in a step-by-step manner how to bisect the circle and connect the appropriate points to develop the form. The text as a whole comprises a coherent course in fortifications, laid out systematically as a series of “propositions” followed by “operations” explaining the process for solving these problems.30 This format is flexible and not always observed, but it gives the work the logical structure of a formal tract or treatise – something Tessin very consciously sought. On the first page of text, he explained the structure and terminology of his “Tractat,” evoking the tradition of the architectural treatise, while giving it the more rigorous structure of the mathematical tract.31 Euclid’s Elements is comparable in format and was probably the source for his non-architectural terminology, such as “Proposition” and “Lemma,” though these terms had broader applications as well.32 Euclid would have been an obvious model in mathematics and especially geometry, particularly since Tessin made notes on the author some years earlier. Tessin’s series of propositions is divided into sections on regular and irregular fortifications, however, and this general structure more specifically reflects Freitag’s Architectura militaris aucta et nova, which was still current and republished until the end of the 1660s. As we shall see, it is this synthetic nature of his text – surveying a wide range of sources and reworking them according to his needs – that is most consistent with his architectural work. It was a fundamental part of his thought process, and it manifested itself no less in his written work than in his buildings. 30

In this aspect the text recalls the approach of Simon Stevin’s Duytsche Mathematique in Leiden earlier in the century, which offered extremely practical training in fortifications, in the local language and with no unnecessary embellishment. 31 Nicodemus Tessin the Elder, Fortification ohne Calculation. … “Bey diesem Tractat gebrauchet man sich dieser gegen uberstehenden Proportional Linie. O.A. durch welcher behülff die Regulier Figuren biß an den zwöff Eck inclusivè beschrieben warden können. Auch

werden hierbeÿ zweÿ termini observirit; alß Proportio undt Lemma. Beÿ der Proportion allein, wirdt verstanden, waß eÿgentlich zu der Fortification gehörigt. Wann aber Proportio undt Lemma beÿsammen gestellet werden, so wirdt dadurch verstanden, waß nicht eÿgentlich zur Fortification gehörigt, sonder zu der Figur.” 32 Selections of the major texts on Greek mathematics are conveniently collected in Ivor Thomas, trans, Selections Illustrating the History of Greek Mathematics, 2 vols [Loeb Classical Library] (Cambridge, Mass, 1951).

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CHAPTER VIII ARCHITECTURAL THEORY II: SYNTHESIS

Although it is in many ways disappointingly unrevealing, Tessin’s short distillation of Adam Freitag’s treatise is telling in several crucial ways. It shows that even at the beginning of his career – and very likely before his studies abroad – Tessin was quite current in his knowledge and use of architectural literature, and that he was especially sensitive to the mathematical and proportional bases of the profession. The longer tract on the geometric construction of fortifications shows how he was able to give that grounded knowledge the more rigorous logic and structure of a classic mathematical proof. The whole is directed towards eminently practical ends, but it also shows a more conceptual mind at work. His method in this project was essentially synthetic. Some aspects of the work reflect Freitag, while others reflect Euclid. This was central to Tessin’s architectural thinking, and we shall see that it was thoroughly grounded in an intellectual tradition and part of a much broader tradition. Eclectic Thought in Northern Europe The passage from Euclid in the Stockholm notebook was hardly Tessin’s first encounter with classical literature. Already as a young boy in Stralsund he had studied a number of texts, some of which speak quite directly to the arts. Although the surviving description of the curriculum is not always as precise as we would like, it included study of Cicero’s letters and other works, with emphasis on the rhetorical forms; Virgil’s Bucolia, and some unspecified work by Horace.1 The passage in the Freitag notebook with notes on Euclid, which was not part of his school curriculum, is ultimately less important for its content than as evidence that Tessin read classical authors and considered their significance for his work even in the 1640s, when such thought was hardly required for his work. These texts did not exist in isolation in Tessin’s mind as memories of a cultivated youth as a Stralsund patrician. The Stockholm court that Tessin worked for from the 1630s was at the very beginning of a process of integration into the European culture of letters that paralleled its artistic integration. Christina was in fact more successful in bringing outstanding intellectuals to Stockholm than she was in bringing artists of a comparable quality. Although the question of the interaction of Christina’s circle of intellectuals with the court and kingdom at large is still very unclear,2 there was a remarkable group of minds at work in Stockholm – or, like Hugo Grotius, the Swedish resident in Paris, in the direct employ of the court – some of whom were directly related to the developing literature on art. René Descartes, one of an important group of French intellectuals in Sweden at midcentury, was the most famous of these. It is however difficult to see how his ideas were significant for the development of the arts in Sweden, as they would later be for the arts in France. The key to the relation of developing intellectual attitudes and the arts in Sweden lies not in Descartes, who died after only a few months in Stockholm, but in Isaac Vossius. Vossius was an 1

The curriculum of the Stralsund academy is published in Ernst Heinrich Zober, “Zur Geschichte des Stralsunder Gymnasiums – Dritter Beitrag. Die Zeit von 1617 bis 1679” Urkundliche Geschichte des Stralsunder Gymnasiums von seiner Stiftung 1560 bis 1860 (Stralsund, 1848), 14–16.

2 See, e.g., Bo Lindberg, “Die gelehrte Kultur in Schweden im 17. Jahrhundert. Das Problem der Rezeption” Europa in Scandinavia. Kulturelle und soziale Dialoge in der frühen Neuzeit, ed Robert Bohn (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 9–18.

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outstanding scholar in his own right, but he has been overshadowed by his more famous father, Gerhard Johannes Vossius, a Leiden polymath. Christina was very much aware of both father and son. After the elder Vossius’s death, she purchased his library from Isaac, and, remarkably, the books and Descartes came to Stockholm on the same ship.3 Both Isaac and the legacy of his father were thus present in Sweden from 1649. (Isaac arrived in March of that year, Descartes and the elder Vossius’s library in September.) At first he taught the queen Greek and took charge of her library, but after the death of Descartes in February, 1650, he became her tutor in ancient philosophy as well. Although he was very much subject to the whims and intrigues of court life, he was very close to her for much of his stay in Sweden. He wrote that he saw her daily, often for several hours. And when she went out of Stockholm for one reason or another, he often rode in the carriage with her so that she could pass the time in stimulating conversation.4 Among the works in Gerhard Johannes Vossius’s library in Stockholm may have been the manuscript of his book on the philosophical schools, left unfinished at his death. Isaac would publish this in 1657 as De philosophorum sectis liber, and although he seems not to have undertaken the edition in Stockholm, he may very well have discussed the ideas in it with the queen and perhaps with others in the court and university.5 As we shall see, Gerhard Johannes Vossius’s ideas, particularly as they relate to the arts, left a remarkable impression on the literature of art produced in Sweden in a manner quite unlike many of the other ideas present in Christina’s circle. Vossius’s book on the philosophical sects, or schools, also had a strong impact on European intellectual life generally, particularly in the north. Indeed, it represents a turning point in the early-modern recovery of an obscure group of late-antique Alexandrine thinkers.6 In Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, written in the late third century AD, we learn of a certain Potamo of Alexandria who refused to submit to the exclusive authority of the traditional philosophical schools, such as the Stoics, Platonists, Epicurians, and so on. Rather, Potamo chose the best aspects from the various philosophical sects to derive a new, composite, philosophy.7 In this way he emancipated himself from the dogmatic teachings of a series of masters and made use of the most valid concepts of other schools. But because this was a recent development, Diogenes Laertius devoted only a passing mention to the Alexandrine group, devoting more attention to the philosophical sects with a longer history. 3

F.F. Blok, Contributions to the History of Isaac Vossius’s Library (Amsterdam, 1974), 20. 4 For Isaac Vossius’s career in Sweden, see F.F. Blok, Isaac Vossius and his Circle: His Life until his Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden 1618–1655 (Groningen, 2000). 5 Gerhard Johannes Vossius, De philosophorum sectis liber (The Hague, 1657). This work was reprinted the following year as De Philosophia et philosophorum sectis libri II (The Hague, 1658). The work was reprinted periodically until 1705. For the publication history of this book, see C.S.M. Rademaker, Life and Works of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649) (Assen, 1981), 374. The manuscripts from Vossius’s library were not included in the catalog made by Isaac Vossius, and it is in any case unclear whether the unfinished text would have been included. See Christian Callmer, Königin Christina, ihre Bibliothekare und ihre Handschriften (Stockholm, 1977), 47, 151. 6 This recovery is thoroughly documented in Michael Albrecht, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschafts-

geschichte (Stuttgart, 1994). See also Pierluigi Donini, “The History of the Concept of Eclecticism” The Question of “Eclecticism.” Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, ed John M. Dillon and A.A. Long (Berkeley, 1988), 15–33; Ulrich Johannes Schneider, “Eclecticism and the History of Philosophy” History and the Disciplines. The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed Donald R Kelley (Rochester, 1997), 83–101; Donald R Kelley, “Eclecticism and the History of Ideas” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 577–592. 7 Diogenes Laertius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in Ten Books, I.21. “One word more: not long ago an Eclectic school was introduced by Potamo of Alexandria, who made a selection from the tenets of all the existing sects. As he himself states in his Elements of Philosophy, he takes as criteria of truth (1) that by which the judgment is formed, namely, the ruling principle of the soul; (2) the instrument used, for instance the most accurate perception. His universal principles are matter and the efficient cause, quality and place; for that out of which and that by which a thing is

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY II: SYNTHESIS | CHAPTER VIII Potamo of Alexandria was obscure even in antiquity, and was never a major philosopher. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, we can trace a concerted effort to resurrect his method of thought. The Netherlandish intellectual Justus Lipsius appears to have been the first to pick up on his ideas. He argued in his influential Manuductionis ad stoicam philosophiam of 1604 that Potamo of Alexandria appeared too late in the development of classical thought. Had his ideas of selection guided thinkers already in the earlier period of Greek philosophy, much dogmatic fallacy and sectarian squabble might have been avoided.8 Lipsius’s idea was picked up and amplified by Gerhard Johannes Vossius, who wrote in 1631 of his successive studies under Aristotelians, Platonists, Stoics and Epicurians, and then added “clearly, I have become an eclectic.”9 He proselytized for the idea later in his life in the unfinished text published by Isaac Vossius, where he argued that an elective philosophy – intellectual eclecticism, now with selection as the basis of its method – was a means to surpass sectarian dogma and achieve a more pure and ideal form of thought.10 By the middle of the seventeenth century, the idea of eclecticism as a progressive method of thought – it was never a true philosophy, as has often been pointed out – was quite familiar in intellectual circles. The unshakeable logic of bringing together the best aspects of the various schools of thought to create a single, greater truth was profoundly appealing, and by the 1670s–1680s it had became a broadly-based intellectual fashion within the academic community of the Germanic lands, extending north to Uppsala.11 By the 1730s the Augsburg cleric Johann Jakob Brucker wrote in his reference work on philosophy – the most important publication of its kind in the eighteenth century – of “a species of philosophy … more pure and excellent than that of any former period, which we shall distinguish by the name of Modern Eclectic Philosophy.”12 A century after Gerhard Johannes Vossius first encountered Potamo’s method, it had become a convention of thought in much of northern Europe. made, as well as the quality with which and the place in which it is made, are principles. The end to which he refers all actions is life made perfect in all virtue, natural advantages of body and environment being indispensable to its attainment.” The Christian thinker Clement of Alexandria claimed a method similar to that of Potamo. He wrote that each philosophical sect has some elements of truth, and explained further: “When I speak of philosophy, I do not mean Stoic, Platonic, Epicurian or Aristotelian. I apply the term philosophy to all that is rightly said in each of these schools, all that teaches righteousness combined with a scientific knowledge of religion, the complete eclectic unity.” Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, I.37.6. Potamo and Clement of Alexandria are both discussed at some length in Michael Albrecht Eklektik (Stuttgart, 1994). See pp 69–78 for Potamo; pp 79–90 for Clement. 8 Justus Lipsius, Manuductionis ad stoicam philosophiam libri tres (Paris, 1604). 9 “Nempe eclecticus factus sum.” Cited in C.S.M. Rademaker, Life and Works of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577–1649) (Assen, 1981), 30. See also Donald R Kelley, “Eclecticism and the History of Ideas” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 582. 10 See generally Donald R Kelley, “Eclecticism and the History of Ideas” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 577–592. See also Wilhelm SchmidtBiggemann, Topica universalis (Hamburg, 1983), 255–264, who characterizes the whole of Vossius’s

thinking as eclectic; more skeptically, see Ulrich Johannes Schneider, “Eclecticism and the History of Philosophy” History and the Disciplines. The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed Donald R Kelley (Rochester, 1997), 83–101. 11 This is surveyed most fully in Michael Albrecht, Eklektik (Stuttgart, 1994). Ulrich Johannes Schneider, “Eclecticism and the History of Philosophy” History and the Disciplines. The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed Donald R Kelley (Rochester, 1997), 83–101 notes the prevalence of this concept in the German lands. For eclectic thought in Uppsala, see Bo Lindberg, “Den eklektiska filosofien och ‘libertas philosophandi.’ Svensk universitetsfilosofi under 1700talets första decennier” Lychnos (1972–1973): 215–234. 12 Johann Jakob Brucker, Kurtze Fragen aus der philosophischen Historie, 8 vols (Ulm, 1731–1737). It was reprinted in Latin as Historia critica philosophiae (Leipzig, 1742–1744), and posthumously in English as The History of Philosophy, from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century (London, 1791). Brucker’s survey would be outmoded around this time, but it was nonetheless reissued in 1819 and 1837. For more on Brucker, see Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Theo Stammen, eds, Jacob Brucker (1696–1770). Philosoph und Historiker der europäischen Aufklärung (Berlin, 1998); and Leo Catana, The Historiographical Concept “System of Philosophy.” Its Origin, Nature, Influence and Legitimacy (Leiden, 2008).

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Eclecticism and the Arts Vossius’s ideas on the possibilities of philosophical or intellectual eclecticism derived directly from ancient texts, but they were easy to relate to the arts on a number of levels. This was particularly evident because he discussed them in the very same work. Chapter sixteen of the second book on the philosophical sects veers from the philosophical schools to treat painting and sculpture.13 Although it is little more than a collection of excerpts on the arts from ancient texts – a reduced version of Franciscus Junius’s De pictura veterum (1637) – it made the fundamental relation between philosophy and the arts evident. The visual arts were certainly more than a passing interest for Vossius, however, for he had also written a short tract more expressly on this subject called De graphice, sive arte pingendi.14 All of these texts were very well known in the intellectual circles of the Swedish court. And unlike so much of Christina’s circle, which evaporated with her abdication, Vossius’s ideas remained vital within the kingdom. In particular, they were picked up by Johannes Schefferus, professor of rhetoric at Uppsala, and used as the basis of his Graphice, id est de arte pingendi (1669), which, through its title, refers directly to Vossius’s work, as well as a broad range of Latin literature.15 In structure, too, Schefferus’s work reflects Vossius’s. Vossius had been concerned to a limited degree with the practice of art, since he had discussed the mixing of colors and similar aspects of painting that may be construed as practical. Schefferus went well beyond this, however, and attempted to bring the conceptual framework into closer alignment with pedagogy and the practice of painting. Although it remained a Latin tract written by a professor, he laid out a program for developing various skills in a young painter. In chapter sixty-seven he discusses the choice of suitable models for each of these skills, proposing Raphael, Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Sebald Beham, Lucas van Leiden, Lucas Cranach, and others as worthy of study and emulation in various aspects of painting. Raphael is the paragon of grace and invention, Dürer a master of the human figure, Antonio Tempesta of horses, Maarten van Heemskerck of buildings, and so on.16 This is never proposed as an end in itself, but rather as a means of study. It is nearly impossible to separate this kind of academic discussion from longstanding traditions within painters’ workshops, even for the most highly regarded painters. Long before the excavation of Potamo of Alexandria’s discussion of eclectic philosophy, and before Justus Lipsius’s and Gerhard Johannes Vossius’s positive evaluations of it, these methods – at least in rhetorical commonplaces – had been established. Raphael is recommended by Schefferus as the master of grace and invention, but according to Giorgio Vasari (himself trained as a painter in the sixteenth century), he developed these qualities through the same process in which he now became a model: Raphael, then … having recognized that Fra Bartolommeo of San Marco had a passing good method of painting, well-grounded draftsmanship, and a pleasing manner of coloring, took from him what appeared to him to suit his need and

13 Gerhard Johannes Vossius, De philosophorum sectis liber secundus (The Hague, 1657), 125–141. 14 Gerhard Johannes Vossius, De graphice, sive arte pingendi, which comprises the greatest portion of De quatuor artibus popularibus, grammatistice, gymnastice, musice, & graphice, liber (Amsterdam, 1650). This, too, was unfinished at Vossius’s death, and was published by Franciscus Junius. 15 Johannes Schefferus, Graphice, id est de arte pingendi (Nuremberg, 1669). See the excellent study by

Allan Ellenius, De arte pingendi. Latin Art Literature in Seventeenth-Century Sweden and its International Background (Uppsala, 1960). Schefferus visited G.J. Vossius in Amsterdam in 1648 on his way from Strassburg to Uppsala. 16 Johannes Schefferus, Graphice, id est de arte pingendi (Nuremberg, 1669), 201–205.

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY II: SYNTHESIS | CHAPTER VIII his fancy – namely, a middle course, both in drawing and in coloring; and mingling with that method certain others selected from the best work of other masters, out of many manners he made one, which was looked upon ever afterwards as his own, and which was and always will be vastly esteemed by all craftsmen.17 Schefferus does not relate his recommendation of this method of study to Vossius’s more conceptual notion of eclecticism, and it may well be based more simply on longstanding artistic conventions. These in turn were directly related to ancient rhetorical models. Cicero, the great master of rhetoric, brought these strands together in De inventione, in which the painter Zeuxis, challenged to represent the beautiful Helen, chose five young Croton women and combined their finest features.18 Cicero compares the story of Zeuxis and the five young women to his own use of previous models. He could not look only to nature for rhetorical sources, as Zeuxis could turn to the Croton women for ideal human forms, but he culled the best aspects of the work of his forerunners. “In a similar fashion [to Zeuxis’s selection] … I did not set before myself some one model which I thought necessary to reproduce in all details, of whatever sort they might be, but after collecting all the works on the subject I excerpted what seemed the most suitable precepts from each, and so culled the flower of many minds.”19 His relation of rhetoric to painting was overt, and was complemented elsewhere in classical literature by Horace’s famous dictum “ut pictura poesis” (“as is painting so is poetry”).20 For the early modern reader – including Tessin, who read both Cicero and Horace in the Stralsund academy – these encouraged a basically imitative approach to the arts. These ancient authors were widely read everywhere, however, and therefore these texts alone cannot explain the more overtly synthetic approach adopted by so many painters, sculptors, and architects in the Germanic lands, who internalized the progressive optimism of the eclectic thinkers. In this region, selective imitation became more than a basis of developing various qualities; it became a method in itself. The Studio and the University It has been suggested that Vossius’s and Schefferus’s writings had little effect on the production of art in Sweden.21 Schefferus’s tract would instead have been read by the children of noblemen studying at the university, where drawing was considered an appropriate part of the training of aristocrats. There was indeed a drawing master at Uppsala for just this purpose from the 1680s. David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, the court painter who, among practicing artists, would have been most immediately concerned with the art of painting (the arte pingendi of Schefferus’s title), seems not to have written or read Latin, and the one theoretical text previously attributed to him was in fact by a Dresden court painter.22

17

Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects [1568], vol 1, trans Gaston du C de Vere (New York, 1996), 743. 18 Cicero, De inventione II.1.1–3. 19 Cicero, De inventione II.2.4. 20 Horace, Ars poetica 361–365. See inter alia, the classic study by Rensselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanist Theory of Painting (New York, 1967). 21 Allan Ellenius, De arte pingendi. Latin Art Literature in Seventeenth-Century Sweden and its International Background (Uppsala, 1960), 211–222. 22 Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe, ed, David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Kurzer Unterricht Observationes und

Regulen von der Mahlereÿ (Stockholm, 1918). Ragnar Josephson, Ehrenstrahls målarlära (Stockholm, 1959), showed that the text was in fact by the Dresden painter Samuel Bottschild, and the text did not reach Sweden until the very end of Ehrenstrahl’s life. It is not certain that Ehrenstrahl did not read Latin. We would make the same assumption about both Tessins if we did not know the curriculum of the Stralsund academy, and if the rector of the Latin school in Stockholm had not published Nicodemus the Younger’s school essays cited below.

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It has however recently been shown that Ehrenstrahl was close with one Blasio Ludovico Teppati from Turin, who taught French and Italian at Uppsala from 1671 until his early death in 1676. Teppati wrote the “elogio madrigalesco” that accompanies Ehrenstrahl’s biography in the Teutsche Academie, which Sandrart, presumably repeating Ehrenstrahl himself, noted was written “by a good friend.”23 As an academic, Teppati published in Latin, and he could easily have served as an intermediary between Ehrenstrahl and Schefferus, either by facilitating a meeting of the two men or by explaining the text of the Graphice and similar writings. This is a particularly appealing possibility since his best-known works were translations from Latin into the vernacular. In contrast to Ehrenstrahl, a tailor’s son, Tessin came from a patrician family. He received thorough training in Latin, and would have had no such trouble with the language; indeed, many of the classical sources on which Vossius’s and Schefferus’s texts build were already familiar, and may well have stood on his bookshelf. He ensured that Nicodemus the Younger was well versed in French, Italian, and Latin, as well as the German that the family spoke at home.24 Moreover, Tessin sent Nicodemus the Younger to Uppsala in 1670–1671, just after Schefferus’s tract appeared, and just as Teppati arrived at the university. Schefferus’s Graphice was no doubt intended above all for the children of the aristocracy, not practicing painters. But with Ehrenstrahl and Tessin striving to bridge that chasm, the distance between the studio and the intellectual life of the court and the university was less than it may have appeared. Because the new interest among intellectuals in eclecticism was so consonant with traditional training methods, its application did not require deep study of obscure Latin texts or close contact with academics. It required little more than a passing interest in current thought, which is evident in the libraries of many of the architects working in Sweden in the later seventeenth century. We have no inventory for Tessin, though we have seen that he had an ongoing interest in classical literature and contemporary theory. His occasional associate, Matthias Spihler, owned various Latin editions of Justus Lipsius, Hugo Grotius, and other contemporary writers, as well as Horace, Julius Caesar, Suetonius, and other ancient authors. Jean de la Vallée had copies of Aristotle’s Politics, Euclid’s Elements, Julius Caesar, Josephus, and Pliny, as well as Descartes on geometry and Les principes de la philosophie by some unnamed author.25 Clearly the architectural community was capable of reading and understanding the new literature by Vossius, Schefferus and others. It remained only to apply these ideas. Idea and Practice Diogenes Laertius’s text was well known in the Renaissance. Ambrogio Traversari translated it into Latin in 1433. His translation was published in 1472, and various vernacular

23

Doris Gerstl, “Joachim von Sandrarts Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste – zur Genese” Künste und Natur in Diskursen der Frühen Neuzeit, vol 2, ed Hartmut Laufhütte (Wiesbaden, 2000), 886–888. 24 See Merit Laine and Börje Magnusson, eds, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Travel Notes 1673–77 and 1687–88 (Stockholm, 2002), 441 for Tessin the Younger’s later comment that “… my parents had given my upbringing all necessary and useful care, both in bookish

arts and in useful practices and skills [wettenskaper], and especially in regard to what is to be learned in the French and Italian languages.…” For the younger Tessin’s school essays in Latin, see Ordo garterius: id est, Actus narrationis solennis (Stockholm, 1669); and Styli exercitationes de naturae mirandis, publice habitae in schola teutonica holmiensi (Stockholm, 1670). 25 Spihler’s inventory is SSA Bouppteckningar, 1694, fol 1204r–1213v; de la Vallée’s is transcribed in Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 247–248.

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY II: SYNTHESIS | CHAPTER VIII editions appeared over the following centuries.26 It became intertwined with the literature of art already in the writings of Vasari, who seems to have adopted its description of master and disciple relationships in his Lives, first published in 1550.27 The resurrection and positive evaluation of the ideas of Potamo of Alexandria and the so-called eclectic philosophers by Justus Lipsius and Gerhard Johannes Vossius (published by Isaac Vossius) was recognized in courtly and academic circles in Sweden and elsewhere. Indeed, one of Christina’s intellectuals, Marcus Meibom, made emendations to Traversari’s translation of Diogenes Laertius that served as the basis for another edition of the text.28 Some of the court artists – particularly Ehrenstrahl and Tessin from the 1660s on, when both were resident in Stockholm and creating places for themselves at court – were probably also familiar with these ideas at least at a basic level. But how did these ideas impact what Tessin and the others produced? Tessin was a mature man of thirty-three when Isaac Vossius came to Stockholm in March of 1649. He had been involved in building in one form or another for thirteen years – more if we assume some experience in Pomerania – but he had had very little opportunity to apply his classical education to architecture before the 1650s. He was to this point concerned almost exclusively with military architecture and city planning. This work was heavily theoretical in a technical way and not as unconcerned with aesthetic considerations as is often assumed. Though they shared a mathematical basis, fortifications work was nonetheless relatively removed from the classically-based principles that guided civil architecture.29 It was not until the time of his study travels in 1651–1653 that Tessin’s evident personal interest in humanistic texts really intersected with his professional responsibility for civil architecture. He was by this time well established at court, if at a lower level than he would have liked and would eventually attain, and so he was somewhat peripherally connected to the circles in which Vossius and the others worked. The most important point of contact between these intellectuals and Tessin was Christina herself. Although Oxenstierna was the driving force behind Tessin’s early career, and may well have arranged for the study travels, Christina paid for them. She was evidently personally engaged in his travels, for his description of the Medici collections must have been for her benefit, and only she could have arranged for his access. More importantly, she wrote the travel pass for him, requesting passage for the architect through Germany, Italy, France and Holland. Tessin’s itinerary was unusual.30 Although it was not uncommon for architects to travel, it was rare for them to visit so many places. Beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s famous trips to Venice around 1500, southern German artists regularly visited northern Italy. Heinrich Schickhardt and Elias Holl continued this informal tradition around 1600, but went neither to the Low Countries nor to France. The Low Countries were naturally closely linked to northern and western Germany. Some German builders, such as Georg Ridinger, who built the magnificent palace at Aschaffenburg early in the seventeenth century, visited both France and Italy before the middle of the seventeenth century (perhaps as a result of his proximity in southwest Germany to 26

Marcello Gigante, “Ambrogio Traversari interprete di Diogene Laerzio” Ambrogio Traversari nel VI centenario della nascita, ed Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence, 1988), 367–459. For a census of the editions produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Ilario Tolomio, “The ‘Historia Philosophica’ in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” Models of the History of Philosophy, vol 1, ed Giovanni Santinello (Dordrecht, 1993), 154–160. 27 Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari. Art and History (New Haven, 1995), 5. 28 Ilario Tolomio, “The ‘Historia Philosophica’ in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” Models of the

History of Philosophy, vol 1, ed Giovanni Santinello (Dordrecht, 1993), 158. 29 For the aesthetic aspect of fortifications, see J.R. Hale, Renaissance Fortification: Art or Engineering? (London, 1977). 30 Jean de la Vallée also went to Paris and to Rome in 1646–50, but one has the sense that he went to Paris in large part because his grandfather and other family contacts were still active there. Rome must have been an expected destination, given Christina’s unwavering regard for the city. See Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 25–26.

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both places).31 But in all of these cases the expectation seems to have been that the architect or painter would see outstanding models in the good, modern taste, from which he would profit in his own work. Any of the leading centers could provide this, and although it was recognized early on that there were differences in local traditions of production, the notion in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth century seems to have been that modern, Vitruvian architecture was a coherent body with regional variations, rather than a series of fundamentally distinct traditions or schools. This attitude made it unnecessary and needlessly expensive to send a young architect to all of the leading centers of Europe, since the nearest would serve, and would moreover likely be more relevant to the geographical and perhaps social circumstances at home. This approach to “modern” architecture is neatly summed up in Architectura moderna, a collection of architectural designs by Hendrik de Keyser, which was published by Cornelis Danckerts in Amsterdam in 1631 with a tract by Salomon de Bray.32 De Bray presents Vitruvian architecture as a single body appropriate for the modern age. Distinction is made only between the old (Gothic) and the new, modern (Vitruvian) architecture, rather than between Netherlandish and Italian or other traditions. This need not imply that there was no discussion of the subtleties or modifications necessary to make Vitruvian architecture functional in the decidedly nonItalianate climate and circumstances of the Low Countries. Peter Paul Rubens and Constantine Huygens, secretary to the stadholder, engaged in precisely such a debate in the very same decade in which Architectura moderna appeared. Huygens argued for a freer interpretation of Vitruvius to account for local needs, implicitly accepting differentiation within the Vitruvian tradition.33 But the differentiation they spoke of reflected regional variations in what was considered (in the north, at least) a basically coherent tradition revived from the ancient world. The process through which the regional variations in “modern” architecture, to use de Bray’s term, came to be distinct is an extremely complex subject, and cannot be treated in any depth here. Certainly, this sort of conceptual shift could not take root quickly. It can be traced in various forms from the sixteenth century, when Philibert de l’Orme began to develop architectural motifs that he considered suitable for use in France. And earlier in the seventeenth century, Louis Savot published L’Architecture françoise des bastimens particuliers, which discusses the French and Italian manners of approaching various architectural components.34 31

Another important exception is Wolf Casper von Klengel, who worked for an important and cosmopolitan court in Dresden. His travels coincided nearly exactly with Tessin’s, and the two architects are quite precisely comparable on a number of points. For the travels of German architects in northern Italy in the early seventeenth century, see Dirk Jonkanski, “Oberdeutsche Baumeiseter in Venedig. Reiserouten und Besichtigungsprogramme” Venedig und Oberdeutschland in der Renaissance. Beziehungen zwischen Kunst und Wirtschaft, ed Bernd Roeck et al (Sigmaringen, 1993), 31–40. 32 Salomon de Bray, Architectura moderna, ofte Bouwinge van onsen tyt (Amsterdam, 1631; facsimile Soest, 1971). See now Koen Ottenheym, Paul Rosenberg, and Niek Smit, Hendrick de Keyser, Architectura Moderna. Moderna bouwkunst in Amsterdam 1600–1625 (Amsterdam, 2008) for a facsimile with commentary. The text, which cannot be related to de Keyser’s work aside from its publication with prints of his buildings, should not be taken to reflect his thinking. See Ed Taverne, “Salomon de Bray’s Architectura Moderna. Biography and Manifesto” Architectura Moderna, ed Gary Schwartz (Soest, 1971); Konrad Ottenheym, “Architectura Moderna.

The Systemization of Architectural Ornament around 1600” Unity and Discontinuity. Architectural Relationships between the Southern and Northern Low Countries (1530–1700), ed Krista De Jonge and Konrad Ottenheym (Turnhout, 2007), 111–113; Konrad Ottenheym, Paul Rosenberg, Niek Smit, Hendrick de Keyser Architectura Moderna. Moderne bouwkunst in Amsterdam 1600–1625 (Amsterdam, 2008), 29–31. 33 Konrad Ottenheym, “De correspondentie tussen Rubens en Huygens over architectuur (1635–40)” Bulletin KNOB 96 (1998): 69–76. 34 Louis Savot, L’Architecture françoise des bastimens particuliers (Paris, 1624). See generally Hilary Ballon, “Constructions of the Bourbon State. Classical Architecture in Seventeenth-Century France” Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, ed Susan J Barnes (Hanover, 1989): 135–148. Here, too, the coherence with Italian architecture is emphasized, and the preponderance of the emergence is placed in the ideological sphere of Louis XIV’s building programs, rather than in the earlier work of Philibert de l’Orme and others.

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY II: SYNTHESIS | CHAPTER VIII It may suffice to say that the shift in attitude away from an Italianate standard (although there had always been significant regional variations even within Italy35) had developed far enough by the middle of the seventeenth century that architects and observers in France and also elsewhere in Europe could speak in general terms about “French,” “Roman,” and other building manners. In the 1660s the Parisian engraver and occasional architect Jean Marot prepared the compilation of printed architectural views called L’Architecture françoise.36 He did not include commentary to explain precisely what he meant with his title, but since it contained designs for export, as it were (including a project for Gustaf Bonde in Stockholm) it seems that the ordering principle was stylistic rather than geographical – that is, form, rather than location in France, made them French.37 A century earlier, his predecessor Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau had done the opposite, describing buildings that could be seen in France without describing them as inherently French.38 We find the beginnings of a similar shift in the language of architecture in Sweden at just about the same time. Axel Oxenstierna spoke of a “Palatium Italicum,” and Carl Gustaf Wrangel spoke at various times of his desire for palaces both in the “Italienische Manier” (for his city residence) and in the German “Manier” (for Skokloster).39 Here the terminology is intensely problematic, and it is very difficult to know what, precisely, he meant with this. He spoke of the “Italian manner” in regard to his residence in Stockholm, though it seems to us much more in line with the Parisian hôtel, with its projecting wings enclosing a forecourt (figure 74). It is possible that “Italian” came to be a synonym for “modern,” though one would then wonder why he would want a building in a non-modern manner, as we would have to understand his use of “German manner.” Nonetheless, the vocabulary was very much in play by the 1650s, and by the end of the century Tessin the Younger would use it in a very precise and self-conscious way to describe his own work. Although Tessin the Elder seems not to have used the terminology explicitly – at least in writing – it is everywhere in his architectural vocabulary. The general plan of the Wrangel palace, for instance, is reflected in other residential projects, such as the city palaces for Carl Sparre, Seved Bååt, and others in Stockholm (figure 67). This conception in turn reflects the hôtels or palaces built by Louis Le Vaux and François Mansart in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century (figure 28).40 In some cases Tessin built in what we can consider fairly

35

James S Ackerman, “The Regions of Italian Renaissance Architecture” The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, ed Henry A Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (Milan, 1994), 319–347. 36 Jean Marot, L’Architecture françoise (Paris, ca 1665– 1670, though the date is very uncertain). The book is more commonly known as the Grand Marot. 37 It seems that there were at least four editions of the Grand Marot, though only two are generally known. The first edition contained only images of buildings in and around Paris. Later editions – especially that published by Pierre-Jean Mariette in 1727 – included a still wider range of buildings, putting strict limits on this interpretation. For Marot’s published work, see André Mauban, Jean Marot, architecte et graveur parisien (Paris, 1944); and idem, L’Architecture française de Jean Mariette (Paris, 1945). 38 Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau, Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France, 2 vols (Paris, 1576–1579). This work, with its refined engravings, is not so much a collection of models in the manner of Serlio as a

demonstration of the excellent architecture of the region, and so may be interpreted as closer in spirit to the later publications of Marot, Erik Dahlbergh, Colen Campbell, and others. 39 Wrangel specified at least twice that he wanted the palace in an Italian “Manier.” “… på italianisch manier ogh uthförr åt siön medh affsatser ogh altaner” (1650), and “so dass uff Italianische Manier faconiert würde” (1651). See Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 72, 121–123. For Oxenstierna’s comment, see Allan Ellenius, “Die repräsentative Funktion der adligen Bauten und ihrer Ausstattung im schwedischen 17. Jahrhundert” Arte et Marte. Studien zur Adelskultur des Barockzeitalters in Schweden, Dänemark und Schleswig-Holstein, ed Dieter Lohmeier (Neumünster, 1978), 129. 40 Allan Braham and Peter Smith, François Mansart, 2 vols (London, 1973); Jean-Pierre Babelon and Claude Mignot, François Mansart. Le génie de l’architecture (Paris, 1998); Cyril Bordier, Louis Le Vau, architecte (Paris, 1998).

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pure examples of other regional traditions. The cathedral in Kalmar has long been associated with Roman or central Italian ecclesiastical architecture.41 It has a long, barrel-vaulted interior space supported visually by muscular pilasters, and on the exterior the sandstone pilasters even approximate Roman travertine (figures 39, 40). Various other unbuilt projects also point to Roman origins.42 These examples would seem to support the common assumption that Tessin looked first to France for the conception of city residences, and to Rome or central Italy for his churches. There is some validity to this broad generalization, but the exceptions are numerous enough that its descriptive usefulness is strictly limited. A number of his projects for smaller city residences, including his own, looked instead to Venetian models, perhaps because these were made for much more compact sites that would not allow projecting wings, as in the Sparre and Bååt palaces. There are also instances – admittedly rare – where he seems to have looked to Rome for domestic architecture. The Fleming Palace is the prime example, drawing loosely on a type that can be traced back to Donato Bramante at the beginning of the sixteenth century (Tessin’s involvement in the design is very unclear, however; figure 127).43 The Stenbock palace on Riddarholmen may also be said to be loosely Roman, with a broad façade, corner quoins, and a rusticated portal (figure 128). This project was really a renovation of a standing building, which limited Tessin’s freedom significantly. In purely architectural terms, this refurbishment is not up to the standard established in his other works. The state bank also showed his mastery of the Roman palace facade, but applied it to an institution rather than a residence. The cathedral in Kalmar is Tessin’s main ecclesiastical work, and although various other drawings seem to support an Italianate bias in church design, it was hardly hegemonic. The Kalmar design may itself have been derived most specifically from Jacques Lemercier’s church for the Sorbonne in Paris, though this church, too, looks back to Rome. Moreover, a drawing for an unidentified church project (Järlåsa?) may be described more precisely as a synthesis of the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague (or one of several similar structures with a steep roofline), with a cut stone façade like that of the Mare Kerk in Leiden, built by Arent van ’s-Gravesande (figures 129, 130, 131). These buildings are relatively observant of foreign models and traditions. They are also relatively rare in Tessin’s work. More common are syntheses of various aspects of these traditions, which we find repeatedly in various forms. An early and rather immature project, made very soon after Tessin returned from his study trip, shows a compiling, synthetic method very clearly (figures 132, 133). This is unusually evident in part because he has not yet shown particular skill in bringing together the elements at his disposal, all still fresh impressions from his recent travels. It was to be a garden pavilion for Hedwig Eleonora’s estates at Gripsholm, and it may be because Tessin was working within the drawing conventions that held at Borgholm, under construction for her husband Carl X Gustaf, that he sent her a plan and a view. The plan is taken almost directly from the Dutch architect Pieter Post’s design for the Huis ten Bosch near The Hague, published in 1654, though Tessin must have known very 41 See Sten Karling, Kalmar domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984); and the extended review by Torbjörn Fulton, “Domkyrkan i Kalmar. Några synpunkter i anslutning till en nyare skrift” Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift (1987): 121–138. 42 Gerhard Eimer, “Romerska centraliseringsidéer i Sveriges barocka kyrkobyggnadskonst” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forssman et al. (Stockholm, 1966), 131–188.

43

Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 171–173; Martin Olsson, Stormaktstidens privatpalats i Stockholm (Stockholm, 1951), 51; Claes Ellehag, Palatsen i Stockholm under stormaktstiden (Lund, 1998), 36–38. No documents survive for this commission. Sirén attributed it to Tessin solely on formal grounds, and suggested that it may have been a reworking of an earlier building on the site.

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127. Tessin (?), Fleming Palace, Stockholm, 1660s.

128. Tessin, Stenbock Palace, Stockholm, 1666–1671.

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129. Tessin, Elevation for a Church (Järlåsa church?).

130. Bartholomeus van Bassen and Pieter Noorwits, Nieuwe Kerk, The Hague, 1649–1656.

131. Arent van ‘s-Gravesande, Mare Kerk, Leiden, 1639–1649.

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132. Tessin, Pavilion at Gripsholm, ca 1655–1660.

133. Tessin, Pavilion at Gripsholm, ca 1655–1660.

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134. Pieter Post, Plan of Huis ten Bosch, The Hague, Begun 1645. From Post, De Saal van Orange, 1654.

well that Post had derived his plan from Palladio’s Villa Rotonda (figure 134).44 The façade is entirely Tessin’s own creation, however. To the Palladian plan he has added a Mansard roof and tall windows more often found in France, but retained Italianate loggias on three sides. If the plan of the Huis ten Bosch served as the basis for the unbuilt villa at Gripsholm, the façade of Pieter Post’s structure was reworked by Tessin for another unbuilt project (figure 110; cf. figure 112). The plan, however, is closer to the city residence for Carl Sparre, with a domed oval space in the back and an axial division on each side (cf. figure 70). Drottningholm is a vast assemblage of linked pavilions in the manner frequently associated with French architecture, and the swooping roof even has a row of dormer windows very similar to those on the lateral sides of the central block of François Mansart’s early work at Balleroy and other buildings. The grouped composition was even more striking before the 1740s, when additions to the flanking wings gave the peripheral expanses a more or less flat 44 Pieter Post, De Saal van Orange, ghebouwt by haere Hoocht. Amalie, Princesse dovariere van Orange … (s.l., 1654); Sten Karling, “Villa Rotonda och Huis ten Bosch vid Mälaren. Kring några lustslottsprojekt för

Kungsör och Gripsholm” Vision och gestalt. Studier tillägnade Ragnar Josephson, ed Mårten Liljegren and Sven Sandström (Stockholm, 1957): 59–80.

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY II: SYNTHESIS | CHAPTER VIII profile. Before this alteration, clustered pavilions at the extremities broke up the profile even more starkly (figure 58). Inside, however, it is a different matter entirely. It has recently been argued that the proportions of the rooms and the suites correspond very closely with the ideals laid out in Palladio’s Four Books.45 But if the composition of the apartments reflects Palladio, the enormous staircase rising in the center of the structure is derived from Baldassare Longhena’s staircase in the monastery at S Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, elaborated and extended to encompass three stories rather than two. Rather than a Roman basis for churches and a Parisian basis for palaces, the most consistent quality in Tessin’s work is an inclination to survey the full range of European architecture and draw on it accordingly. This was something that he, among all contemporary architects, was almost uniquely qualified to do by virtue of his extensive travels. His knowledge of the plan of the Huis ten Bosch, for instance, or of the various projects for the Amsterdam Town Hall shows that his pool of references was very current. But he was not interested only in the most recent developments, as he looked for instance to the Bramante circle in the Fleming Palace, and the later sixteenth century in the various burial chapels produced by his workshop. The expanding field of viable traditions provided a vastly broader set of models to work with, and the intellectual and artistic climate of the court and at large – particularly in Northern Europe – gave him every justification to work in this way.46 Tessin did not leave us the kinds of written clarification of this aspect of his method that we might wish. His tract on the geometric construction of fortifications is too focused on a technical course of instruction to discuss the use of sources in civil architecture, and he was otherwise generally disinclined, or perhaps too busy, to elaborate in writing on his designs. The only clearly formulated reflections on his work come through the early letter to Oxenstierna and the memo on the proper work of the architect, which was both to the point and very likely requested by the court.47 Otherwise, we have only some hints of what he might have thought, indicated by his education, the intellectual and artistic milieu at court, and, of course, by his buildings. We also have the writings of Nicodemus the Younger. This is a problematic resource, since the two men were of different generations, and the general shape of the court and artistic production shifted greatly in these years with the coming of the reduction and the consolidation of major patronage under the crown. Yet, we shall see that the court thought of the two Tessins as a continuity, rather than discontinuity, and when one looks beyond Nicodemus the Younger’s royal palace and related projects from the 1690s on for a crown with resources greater than those available to the elder Tessin, their work is fundamentally intertwined. The younger Tessin was formed first in his father’s shop. His experiences in Bernini’s circle and at Versailles gave him a set of reference points that had been unavailable to Nicodemus the Elder, whose study travels came before Bernini’s emergence as an architect and before the expansion of the older hunting lodge at Versailles began. Tessin the Younger never succumbed entirely to one or the other, however, and it is in this that he may reflect his father most. And it is here, where a clear articulation of method by Nicodemus the Elder is

45

Fredric Bedoire, “Drottningholm under Hedvig Eleonora” Drottningholms slott. Från Hedvig Eleonora till Lovisa Ulrika, ed Rebecka Millhagen and Göran Alm (Stockholm, 2004), 40–131. 46 It could also be argued that this is the product of the confluence of the older attitude represented

by Salomon de Bray in Architectura moderna, stressing the coherence of all modern, Vitruvian architecture, and the expanding group of variants within that category in the middle of the seventeenth century. 47 See Appendices Three and Four.

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lacking, that Nicodemus the Younger made his principles very plain. Speaking of the French and Italian manners, he wrote that, “combining the two properly, without giving precedence to one or the other, can only be carried out with the exercising of careful judgment, effort and work; but that is how one learns, and one can expect a much greater level of perfection as a result.”48 Tessin’s statement seems to be a quite precise articulation of his father’s work, especially in the state bank and at Drottningholm, both works continued by Tessin the Younger. Eclectic Theory 1670–1750 Interest in the progressive view of eclectic thought revived by Lipsius and Gerhard Johannes Vossius exploded in the German lands in the last three decades of the seventeenth century and remained vital through much of the eighteenth. From about 1670 through the third quarter of the eighteenth century many of the chairs in various disciplines at the major German universities were held by self-professed eclectics. Christian Thomasius, professor at Halle, was recognized as a figurehead for the movement. In 1688 he wrote: “I call eclectic philosophy not what depends on the teaching of an individual or on the acceptance of the words of a master, but whatever can be known from the teaching and writing of any person on the basis not of authority but of convincing arguments.”49 Notably, his description has little to do with philosophy per se, and rather describes an attitude or method of thought. At the same time, the courts within the same region saw a more self-consciously eclectic approach to the arts develop in a manner similar to that we have already seen adopted by the Tessins. In Dresden, Johann Georg Starcke built a garden palace in the Grosser Garten in 1678–1683 (figure 135). It was largely derived from Pierre Lescot’s wing of the Louvre in Paris, built 1548–1578, which provided the segmental pediments, roof structure, and other details. The staircases descending towards the center of the façade have a precedent in Fontainebleau, another French royal palace. A decade earlier, Starcke had built another small palace, or “Lusthaus,” for the Saxon elector in the Italienischer Garten. This was destroyed in the 18th century, and is thus difficult to discuss in detail, but it seems to have been an equally self-conscious look back to the Italian villa tradition.50 Starcke’s set pieces in Dresden were intended as showpieces, as the foremost examples of current architecture in the empire. A generation later they were already surpassed in scale and complexity by the buildings raised in Vienna around the turn of the eighteenth century. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, an exact contemporary and acquaintance of Tessin the Younger, designed the imperial library with a tripartite, pavilion-like structure with a high roof and an understated portal that has long been associated with Parisian architecture (figure 136).51 Inside, however, the structure seems rather to reflect closely the gallery of the Colonna palace in Rome, expanded to an imperial scale. Elsewhere in Vienna, Fischer took on an even more complex process of synthesis in the Karlskirche (figure 137). This went well beyond baroque Rome and Paris, and incorporated his significant antiquarian interests as well. The basic prototype that he seems to have had in mind is the temple of Jerusalem, 48

Quoted in Birgitta Haslingen, 300 Years of the Tessin Palace: A House in Accordance with all the Orders of Architecture (Stockholm, 2003), 56. On another occasion, he recommended Palladio as the authority on the composition of apartments. See Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, Observationer Angående så wähl Publique som Priuate huus bÿggnaders Starkheet, beqwämligheet och skiönheet, in rättade, effter wår Swänska Climat och oeconomie [ca 1714] (Stockholm, 2002), 45.

49

Christian Thomasius, Introductio ad philosophicam aulicam (Leipzig, 1688), introduction. Quoted from Donald R Kelley, “Eclecticism and the History of Ideas” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 584. 50 Kathrin Reeckmann, Anfänge der Barockarchitektur in Sachsen: Johann Georg Starcke und seine Zeit (Cologne, 2000). 51 Hans Sedlmayr, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (Stuttgart, 1997), 318–320.

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135. Johann Georg Starcke, Palais im Grossen Garten, Dresden, 1678–1683.

136. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Imperial Library, Vienna, Begun 1721.

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137. Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Karlskirche, Vienna, Begun 1715.

described in II Kings as a domed building flanked by two enormous columns. These borrow the format of the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, but the spiraling reliefs recount episodes from the life of S Carlo Borrommeo, to whom the church is dedicated. This Roman aspect is equally evident in the pedimented portico, which recalls the pantheon in Rome and other classical sources. The organization of all of these elements seems to be derived from Parisian churches, however; François Mansart’s church of the Minimes is usually mentioned.52 In the Karlskirche, the synthesis was as significant for its content as for the design itself, for the columns referred not only to the temple of Jerusalem, but also to the Pillars of Hercules at the Strait of Gibraltar, alluding to the traditional boundaries of the known world and also of Habsburg dominion. Though the church is named for S Carlo Borromeo, the name resonates equally with Charlemagne (Charles or Carl the Great), the first Holy Roman Emperor and the source of the notion of the translation of the Roman Empire to the north, as well as Charles (Carl) V, under whom the Habsburg dynasty achieved its greatest reach, and who took two paired columns as his emblem, and Charles (Carl) VI, his heir and the builder of the church.53 The complex conceptual scheme is entirely coherent, but achieved through the same kind of synthetic process that we have seen in the work of the Tessins and others. 52

Hans Aurenhammer, J.B. Fischer von Erlach (London, 1973), 132–143; Hans Sedlmayr, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (Stuttgart, 1997), 290–294. 53 For the iconographic scheme of the Karlskirche, see most accessibly Frances D Ferguson, “St Charles’ Church, Vienna: The Iconography of its Architecture”

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 29 (1970): 318–326; Irving Lavin, “Fischer von Erlach, Tiepolo, and the Unity of the Visual Arts” An Architectural Progress in the Renaissance and Baroque. Sojourns In and Out of Italy, vol 2, ed Henry A Millon and Susan Scott Munshower (University Park, PA, 1993), 499–525.

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ARCHITECTURAL THEORY II: SYNTHESIS | CHAPTER VIII Eclectic Architectural Theory A firm tie between this way of working, formal architectural theory, and the eclectic thinking of the heirs of Vossius is first found in the writings of Leonhard Christoph Sturm, the foremost German architectural theorist of the early eighteenth century. His father, Johann Christoph Sturm, was one of the most prominent of the self-proclaimed eclectics. His Physica electiva sive hypothetica (1697) became a model work in applying eclectic thought to the natural sciences, and demonstrates how broadly the eclectic method could be applied.54 Indeed, it was Johann Christoph Sturm who was most influential in the intellectual formation of Christian Thomasius.55 Leonhard Christoph was brought up in this intellectual environment, and around the same time that his father applied it to physics, he began to explore its relation to architectural theory. This is most overt in his Hypothetical-Eclectic Military Architecture, or an Ernest Instruction on how one may use the different German, French, Dutch and Italian Fortifications Manners.56 This is not a practical handbook, as one might assume from the title, but comprises a set of twelve debates between an engineer and a young student, and is thus a tract on engineering presented in the form of a philosophical discussion. It was architectural theory in the guise of an intellectual exercise, very consciously bridging the distance between architecture and the more conceptual world of the academic eclectics. Such a work had limited purchase, however, since it offered little concrete guidance to architects. Much more influential was his edition of Nicolaus Goldmann’s writings. Goldmann was a Silesian Lutheran mathematician and architectural theorist who settled in Leiden during the uncertainty of the mid-seventeenth century. He was not formally associated with the university there, but ran a sort of salon, in which students received private tuition in architecture. These teachings coalesced into a written tract on architecture by about 1660. Although various students took manuscript copies of the text home with them, affording the work a limited circulation, it remained unpublished until the end of the century. The publication and elaboration of this work became an ongoing project of Leonhard Christoph Sturm.57 The edition of Goldmann’s text was highly inflected by Sturm’s own interests and those of his generation. (This became more pronounced in later editions, as Sturm’s interventions encroached on Goldmann’s own work.) Sturm’s intellectual orientation is immediately evident in the introduction, where he praises Goldmann’s “accurate mathematics and judicious eclecticism.” He continues to argue that Goldmann sought to help architects bring together without bias the legacy of antiquity and Vitruvius and the inventions of modern architects “to produce a new work more perfect than its sources.” Rephrasing the principle, Sturm proposes that the architect should marry the lightness of Vignola with the appearance of Palladio and the organization and proportions of Scamozzi producing “a 54

Johann Christoph Sturm, Physica electiva sive hypothetica (Nuremberg, 1697). For J.C. Sturm, see Hans Gaab et al, eds, Johann Christoph Sturm (1635–1703) (Frankfurt am Main, 2004). 55 Michael Albrecht, Eklektik. Eine Begriffsgeschichte mit Hinweisen auf die Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1994), 399. 56 Leonhard Christoph Sturm, Architectura militaris hypothetico-eclectica, Das ist: Eine getreue Anweisung/ wie man sich der gar verschiedenen Teutschen/ Französischen/ Holländischen und Italiänischen

Befestigungs-Manieren mit guten Nutzen so wohl in der regular - als irregular - Fortification bedienen könne (Nuremberg, 1702). 57 Leonhard Christoph Sturm, Vollständige Anweisung zu der Civil Bau-Kunst (Wolfenbüttel, 1696), with many later editions. For Goldmann and his work, see Jeroen Goudeau, “Nicolaus Goldmann (1611–1665) en de praktijk van de studeerkamer” Bulletin KNOB 94 (1995): 185–203; idem, Nicolaus Goldmann (1611– 1665) en de wiskundige architectuur-wetenschap (Groningen, 2005).

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new work of much greater perfection.” 58 All of this is very precisely consonant with Tessin the Younger’s summation of his own method: “Combining the French and Roman traditions properly … one can expect a much greater level of perfection as a result,” while also recommending, in a different context, Palladio as an authority for interior design.59 Both moreover echo the progressive optimism of Johann Jakob Brucker’s slightly later description of eclectic thought as “more pure and excellent than that of any former period.” Sturm cites a group of well-known Renaissance architects, all of whom produced treatises, as models. He mentions very few contemporary architects, but twice discusses Tessin the Elder at some length. Both of these passages take up “the famous staircase built under the leadership of the excellent Mr Tessin in the royal Swedish pleasure palace at Drottningholm.”60 He probably knew the work through the 1694 print in Suecia antiqua, since his comment that it “may easily be regarded as one of the most beautiful in the world” paraphrases the inscription on the print itself. He did not discuss Tessin’s work in terms of an eclectic method, as he was in this instance reverting to an older tradition of providing models for various design elements (though the use of models is by definition part of any eclectic approach), among which monumental staircases were one of the greater challenges facing the architect. But this function as a model could of course very easily play a role within a more overtly eclectic scheme, and it is precisely in this way that Sturm approached it. He included in his text a print of the plan of the staircase at Drottningholm, juxtaposed with the plan of the staircase of Salzdahlum palace near Wolfenbüttel, where he worked. A third staircase plan of Sturm’s own invention completes the set, combining elements of the first two – the more spacious, winding character of Tessin’s with the more axial character of the Salzdahlum staircase.61 Sturm undoubtedly believed he was combining the most excellent aspects of the two standing staircases to create a new, more perfect, form (figure 138). 58

Leonhard Christoph Sturm, Vollständige Anweisung zu der Civil Bau-Kunst (Wolfenbüttel, 1696), unpaginated introduction. “Dann von gründlich gelehrten Baumeistern hat sich dieses Werck am wenigsten zu befürchten. Erstlich können wir insgemein rühmen/ daß unser Goldmann in seiner gantzen Architectur einen accuraten Mathematicum, und einen judicieusen Eclecticum vorstellet; jenes/ wann er alle seine Reguln ordentlich/ eine auß der andern/ und endlich die Ersten auß ungezweiffelten und männlich bekandten Warheiten herleitet/ und sich dabey der denen Geometris sonst gewöhnlichen Methode sehr wohl bedienet; dieses/ indeme er die Antiquität sampt dem Vintruvio, dann auch die Erfindungen der heutigen Baumeister ohn alle Partheilichkeit/ nach der Richtschnur seiner ungezweiffelten und von jedermann zugelassenen Gründe erweget/ gegen einander hält/ und aus einem jeden das Beste erkiesend/ zuletzt ein neues Werck in viel grösserer Vollkommenheit endlich daraus zusammen bringet. Also befleissiger er sich die Leichtigkeit des Vignola, das Ansehen des Palladio, und die genaue Außmessung sampt der schönen Eintheilung des Scamozzi gleichsam mit einander zuvermählen. Wer nun aus der Weltweißheit gelernet/ wie viel an diesen beeden Tugenden/ als an der Geschicklichkeit unsers Auctoris erkennen. Allein ich halte vor dienlich etwas weitläufftiger hievon/ sonderlich nach Anleitung der 5. Ordnungen

zu handeln/ wie solche von demsleben außgearbeitet worden; dann diese sind der Grund der gantzen Baukunst/ und ist jederzeit aller verständigen Baumeister Meinung dahing gangen/ daß aus ihrem aussehen unstreitig zu schliessen sey/ wie weit deren Verfertiger in der Baukunst kommen sey.” 59 Quoted in Birgitta Haslingen, 300 Years of the Tessin Palace: A House in Accordance with all the Orders of Architecture (Stockholm, 2003), 56; Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, Observationer Angående så wähl Publique som Priuate huus bÿggnaders Starkheet, beqwämligheet och skiönheet, in rättade, effter wår Swänska Climat och oeconomie [ca 1714] (Stockholm, 2002), 45. 60 Leonhard Christoph Sturm, Erste Ausübung der Vortrefflichen und Vollständigen Anweisung zu der Civil-Bau-Kunst (Braunschweig, 1699), 116, 130–131. The discussion of Tessin does not appear in the first edition of 1696, but is found in the many subsequent editions. Suecia antiqua was not formally issued until 1715, but many of the images from it were well-known and circulated widely from the 1690s at latest. 61 Hans Reuther, “Das Treppenhaus im Lustschloß Salzdahlum. Ein Beitrag zur Genese barocker Stiegenanlage” Niederdeutsche Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte 16 (1977): 53–68, rather problematically sees the Drottningholm staircase as the source for a group of formal staircases in Germany, with Salzdahlum as the point of introduction.

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138. Leonhard Christoph Sturm, Model Staircases. From Sturm, Vollständige Anweisung …, 1699.

Tessin the Elder died before Sturm began his career as an architectural theorist, but his methods were so consonant with Sturm’s more abstract writings that they in effect illustrated each other. Neither really needed the other, however. The ideas that laid the foundation for Tessin’s methods and Sturm’s later writings were all readily available by the middle of the seventeenth century. It required only joining the knowledge gained through traditional training and a thorough study tour of Europe with intellectual modes that were fast becoming prevalent in northern Europe. Because of the intellectual ferment in Stockholm around 1650, Tessin may have absorbed these ideas about a generation earlier than most of his peers. Indeed, the very presence of Descartes and a larger group of French intellectuals juxtaposed with Isaac Vossius, Hugo Grotius (retained by the court though never resident in Stockholm), and the largely German professoriate at Uppsala, as a group representing a variety of intellectual traditions, guaranteed a certain kind of intellectual eclecticism. It is hardly surprising that this milieu soon fostered a more theorized eclecticism, the basis of which was explicitly present in the writings of the Vossius family. This way of thinking was well established through the greater part of the eighteenth century, as was its association with the arts. In a 1763 essay on the nature of taste and beauty, Johann Joachim Winckelmann describes the Carracci as eclectics. This is often cited as the first use of the term “eclectic” in reference to the arts,62 though, as we have seen, Sturm anticipated him by more than six decades. Nearly paraphrasing Sturm and Brucker, Winckelmann wrote that “the latter [Agostino and Annibale Carracci] were eclectics, and sought to unite the purity of the ancients and of Raphael, and the knowledge of Michelangelo, with the richness and excess of the Venetian school, especially of Paolo [Veronese], and with the cheerfulness of the Lombard brush in Correggio.”63 In his History of Ancient Art (1764), Winckelmann explicitly compared the Carracci to Potamo of Alexandria and the Greek eclectic philosophers; that is, the Carracci were to Raphael and the High Renaissance as Potamo was to

62

See, e.g., Rudolf Wittkower, “Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius” Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, ed Earl R Wasserman (Baltimore, 1965), 151–152. 63 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Essay on the Capacity for the Sentiment for the Beautiful in Art, and on its

Instruction in it” Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, vol 1, ed Curtis Bowman (Bristol, 2001), xli.

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Plato and Aristotle.64 Here the interpretation is bound up with the historical system posited by Winckelmann, in which a period of tremendous achievement is followed by decline and a weaker resurgence, represented in different contexts by Potamo and by the Carracci.65 The system is quite different from that assumed by Sturm and others earlier in the century, in which achievements would build upon one another in a continuous process of improvement and perfection. Nonetheless, Winckelmann hardly saw eclecticism in purely negative terms; the Carracci, after all, represented a substantial improvement over the preceding generations. Rather, he seems to draw here on his academic background at Halle, where the professed eclectic Christian Thomasius held a chair during his studies there in 1738–1740. Like so many others, Winckelmann immediately associated the thought of Potamo and his modern descendents with the arts. Eclecticism was still a viable and promising concept for Winckelmann. It would hardly last another generation, however. This way of thinking about the arts could not survive the Romantic generation around 1800, and as an intellectual or philosophical method it could not survive the critiques leveled by Kant and then Hegel around the same time.66 But for over a century it was a legitimate, theoretically-grounded, and very progressive approach to the arts.

64

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “The History of Ancient Art” Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, vol 3, ed Curtis Bowman (Bristol, 2001), 143–155. 65 For Winckelmann’s system, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal. Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, 1994). 66 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol 2, ed Frederick C Beiser (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1995), 400–401. Hegel ignored the modern eclectics entirely in his lectures on the history of philosophy, but wrote of Potamo of Alexandra: “Eclecticism is something to be utterly condemned, if it is understood in the sense of one thing being taken out of this philosophy, and another thing out of that philosophy, altogether regardless of their consistency

or connection, as when a garment is patched together of pieces of different colours or stuffs. Such an eclecticism gives nothing but an aggregate which lacks all inward consistency. Eclectics of this kind are sometimes ordinary uncultured men, in whose heads the most contradictory ideas find a place side by side, without their ever bringing these thoughts together and becoming conscious of the contradictions involved; sometimes they are men of intelligence who act thus with their eyes open, thinking that they attain the best when, as they say, they take the good from every system, and so provide themselves with a vade mecum of reflections, in which they have everything good except consecutiveness of thought, and consequently thought itself. An eclectic philosophy is something that is altogether meaningless and inconsequent.”

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CONCLUSION A FAMILY ENTERPRISE

In 1708 an “historical- political- geographical description of the kingdom of Sweden” described Nicodemus Tessin in this way: Tessin (Nicodemus) was previously the king’s chamberlain, and is now the royal building director. He is however no Swede, but born in Stralsund, though he went to Sweden in his youth. Because of his excellent knowledge of mathematics, his royal majesty Carl XI made him a gentleman. He has traveled widely and studied a great deal, as he has held learned orations, and especially as he has made excellent works in civil architecture. He is now 87 years old, if he is still alive.1 This short biography touches on many of the essential points of the architect’s life. The knowledge of mathematics follows logically from his background in fortifications, discussed by Sandrart. The same author discussed his travels, though the younger Tessin was even more famously well traveled. The curious comment that he “held learned orations” does not particularly describe either Tessin, however. Both were thoroughly educated and seem to have been familiar on some level with current intellectual trends, but neither could be considered an academic at heart, nor inclined to discourse on esoteric themes. The most likely source for this remark are Nicodemus the Younger’s Latin orations, given as a schoolboy and published by the schoolmaster.2 But with publication dates in 1669 and 1670, at the height of Nicodemus the Elder’s career, and no distinction between father and son made in any of the texts, the author, Johann Georg Goelgel, a jurist and councilman in Regensburg, could be forgiven for his imprecision. The overemphasis on academic achievement was mistaken, but it is Goelgel’s errors that are most telling. He conflated the careers of Tessin the Elder and the Younger into one, and then, because he could hardly believe that an 87-year-old architect could still be active, wondered if he were still alive. Certainly most of the information comes from the biography of Nicodemus the Elder, however. The origins in Stralsund, work in fortifications, and elevation to the peerage are all specific to him. In 1708, when the book appeared, Nicodemus the Younger was near the height of his career. It was just before the disastrous loss at Poltava that would show the frailty of Swedish power, and make continued building difficult. And yet, after diligent research that turned up Tessin’s ennoblement (not mentioned in Sandrart) and the obscure school orations, Goelgel saw the careers of both men as an unbroken continuity.

1

Johann Georg Goelgel, Historisch- politisch und geographischen Beschreibung des Königreichs Schweden (Frankfurt, 1708), 508–509. “Thessin/ (Nicodemus) war vorhero des Königs Cämmerling/ jetzo aber Königl. Bau=Director, ist zwar kein Schwed/ sondern von Stralsund gebürtig/ aber von Jugend auf in Schweden erzogen worden. Jhro Königl. Majestät Carolus der XI. haben ihn wegen seiner trefflichen Wissenschafften in Mathematicis zum Freyherrn

gemacht/ er hat wohl gereiset und nett studiret/ wie er dann etliche gelehrte Orationes gehalten/ absonderlich aber in Architectura Civili treffliche Sachen angegeben/ und gebauet/ und ist jetzo schon bey 87. Jahren/ wann er anderst noch beym Leben.” 2 Tessin’s orations are published in Ordo garterius: id est, Actus narrationis solennis (Stockholm, 1669); and Styli exercitiones de naturae mirandis (Stockholm, 1670).

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This could be dismissed as the quirky work of an insignificant writer, except that it seems to reflect the opinion of the court at least until the end of the 17th century, nearly twenty years after the death of Nicodemus the Elder, and perhaps up to Tessin the Younger’s nomination to the privy council in 1712. It also reflects much of the early historiography of the family, which is rather surprising given the overwhelming imbalance of attention accorded the younger Tessin since the 1920s. Since the 1930s, Tessin the Younger has been by far the most famous architect active in Sweden, and has eclipsed his father to the point that the latter has almost been forgotten.3 His reputation was very strong in his own lifetime, but it is not certain that he was regarded as a single outstanding figure in the context of the Swedish court; in fact, it is not even certain that he was as famous as his father. Sandrart praised Nicodemus the Elder’s works, particularly Drottningholm, Strömsholm, and the Caroline burial chapel, all royal projects.4 He does not mention an international reputation, but he was in fact helping to create one. He also mentioned that these could be seen in prints, in the project for Suecia antiqua et hodierna, which was underway in these years, and would finally be presented to the public in the second decade of the eighteenth century, inviting future readers to compare his text with the images.5 A generation later, Leonhard Christoph Sturm discussed the “well-known and meretricious architect Mr. Tessin” (“bekannte wohl-meritirte Baumeister Mr. Tessin”) in his edition of Nicolaus Goldmann’s principles of civil architecture. He clearly referred to Drottningholm, which, as he certainly knew from Sandrart, was the work of the elder Tessin.6 (It is unlikely that Sturm, a much keener architectural observer than Goelgel, conflated the two architects.) These comments first appeared in the expanded 1699 edition, when work was well under way on the royal palace and the younger Tessin, at forty-five years old, was approaching the height of his career. In 1711, just after Goelgel’s description of the kingdom appeared, Paul Jakob Marperger published a German edition of André Félibien’s Lives of the Artists, revised to include biographies of Germans who did not appear in the original French edition. Although he admired the new royal palace by the younger Tessin, he, too discussed the elder architect in more depth, even though he had been dead for thirty years.7 Marperger gave more emphasis to the older architect in part because he plagiarized much of Sandrart’s text, and therefore had more information on the father with which to work. But it is significant that he added material on the Tessin the Elder that is not taken from Sandrart. He discusses in some detail the gardens at Drottningholm, which he apparently did not know were designed by the younger Tessin. He also discusses other architectural details, such as the copper roofs and, in a very general way, the interior. Although the new royal palace was well known at this point through prints, Marperger seems in general to have been both more familiar with and more impressed by Drottningholm. And as late as 1750, Tessin the Younger’s protégé,

3 The literature on Tessin the Younger is surveyed in Anders Bergström, “Bilden av Tessin” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 77 (2008): 72–76. 4 Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, vol 1 (Nuremberg, 1675), 347. See Appendix Two. 5 Erik Dahlbergh, Suecia antiqua et hodierna (Stockholm, 1715). For the background of this work, see Samuel Bring, “Sueciaverket och dess text” Lychnos (1937): 1–67; Börje Magnusson, Att illustrera fäderneslandet – en studie i Erik Dahlbergs verksamhet som tecknare (Uppsala, 1986); idem,

“Sweden Illustrated: Erik Dahlberg’s ‘Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna’ as a Manifestation of Imperial Ambition” Baroque Dreams. Art and Vision in Sweden in the Era of Greatness, ed Allan Ellenius (Uppsala, 2003), 32–59. 6 Leonhard Christoph Sturm, Erste Ausübung der Vortreflichen und Vollständigen Anweisung zu der Civil-Bau-Kunst (Braunschweig, 1699), 116. The first edition was published at Wolfenbüttel in 1696. 7 Paul Jakob Marperger, Historie und Leben der berühmtesten europäischen Baumeister (Hamburg, 1711), 503–506. See Appendix Two.

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CONCLUSION Carl Hårleman, called the elder Tessin “the Swedish Vitruvius.”8 Hårleman’s comments and the survival of eighteenth-century copies after plans by the older architect suggest that he was still widely recognized and respected generations after his death.9 Relatively little new information on the Tessin family appeared during the following century and a half, though interest in them remained high. Nicodemus the Younger was the subject of a lecture to the academy in 1796, one of a series of presentations on noteworthy Swedes.10 A biography of Carl Gustaf Tessin, the son of Nicodemus the Younger, was published together with his notes in 1819, and a generation later a sort of dramatic reading of the documentary sources appeared.11 The latter was a “romanticized portrait,” as the author put it. It fully lived up to its promise, describing the elder Tessin strutting about his large salon, his hands glittering with gold rings and other very exaggerated signs of success. Neither of these offered viable new opinions on the architectural legacy of the family, however, and in the few lexicon entries that appeared in the later eighteenth century, the elder Tessin retained the primacy accorded him in earlier sources.12 When the first surveys of architecture in this region appeared in 1871 (by Christoffer Eichhorn) and 1901 (by Gustaf Upmark), father and son were treated as approximate equals, with the younger a somewhat better-groomed version of the elder.13 8 Carl Hårleman, Dagbok öfwer en ifrån Stockholm gjord resa 1750 (Stockholm, 1751), 50. “Den med skäl så mycket berömda Stads-kyrkan [i.e., Kalmar Cathedral], hwaruti wår Swenske Vitruvius, den äldre Tessin, så mycken konst och snille nedlagt, och hwars ritningar däröfwer tryckte, pryda Gref Dahlbergs werk.” (“That with reason so famous town church [Kalmar Cathedral], in which our Swedish Vitruvius, the elder Tessin, laid down so much art and genius, and whose printed drawings for it adorn Count Dahlberg’s work [Suecia antiqua].”) 9 See for example the drawing by Hårleman for Adolf Fredrik church in Stockholm (NM THC 4482) that is inconceivable without Tessin’s drawing for Sant’Agnese in Piazza Navona (NM CC 149). There are also several anonymous eighteenth-century copies after Tessin’s drawings in the Nationalmuseum for the unexecuted church for the Finnish congregation in Stockholm. These may be the work of J.E. Carlberg’s architecture school or academy, which opened around 1727. Carlberg was the third to hold the post of Stockholm city architect, after father and son Tessin, and he doubtless had access to his predecessors’ drawings. Tessin the Younger took on very few projects in his capacity as city architect, and so most of the material would have been from Tessin the Elder’s tenure. See Ragnar Josephson, Stadsbyggnadskonst i Stockholm intill år 1800 (Stockholm, 1918), 41–45. For Carlberg’s work as city architect, see Henrik Ahnlund, Johan Eberhard Carlberg. Stockholms stads arkitekt 1727–1773 (Stockholm, 1984). 10 Carl Gustaf Nordin, “Minne af riksrådet och öfverste marskalken, Grefve Nicodemus Tessin” Svenska akademiens handlingar ifrån år 1796, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1802), 61–82. Ehrenstrahl was also taken up as the subject of a lecture in this series, though Tessin the Elder was not.

11

Fredrik Wilhelm von Ehrenheim, ed, Tessin och Tessiniana (Stockholm, 1819); Magnus Jakob von Crusenstolpe, Huset Tessin under enväldet och frihetstiden (Stockholm, 1847); translated immediately into German as Das Haus Tessin zur Zeit der Alleinherrschaft und der Freiheit (Berlin, 1847), and reissued in 1883. 12 See, for example, Johann Rudolf Füssli, Allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon (Zürich, 1763), 544. The information comes from Sandrart, although it is compressed and takes a somewhat different form. Tessin the Younger does not appear at all. In the second edition of 1779, in which Füssli added a great deal of information to many of the biographies, Tessin the Younger is given a single sentence at the end of his father’s biography, emphasizing the perceived continuity between the generations. “S. le Clerc hat nach seines Sohns Zeichnungen 1694. die große Vorderseite des königlichen Pallastes zu Stockholm und 1696. das Leichenbegängniß König Carl des Eilften radirt” (p 646). An exception is G.K. Nagler, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon, vol 18 (Munich, 1848), 260–262, which is however so confused that it cannot be taken as representative. Here, spurious works are attributed to Tessin (who is said to have died in 1648), and many of the major works are attributed to Tessin the Younger. Carl Gustaf Tessin is given the majority of the credit in building the new royal palace in Stockholm. 13 See Christoffer Eichhorn’s addendum to Wilhelm Lübke, Arkitekturens historia från äldsta till närvarande tid (Stockholm, 1871), 696–704; and Gustaf Upmark, Die Architektur der Renaissance in Schweden, 1530–1760 (Dresden, 1901), translated as Svensk byggnadskonst 1530–1760 (Stockholm, 1904), 130–131.

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In both cases emphasis was placed on the continuity of form and professional position from one generation to the next. Following this trend, the first monographic literature – a study of the buildings in Stockholm by Osvald Sirén and a heavily documentary book on Drottningholm by John Böttiger – treated the father rather than the son.14 It was in the 1920s that the focus moved to Nicodemus the Younger. This is evident in an important essay by the Wölfflin student Hans Rose in 1924, but even he found the two architects similar enough to characterize their work as a single oeuvre, and declined in several cases to distinguish their individual projects.15 Even at the end of the decade, in 1928, the anniversary year of Tessin the Younger’s death was celebrated at the academy as a memorial festival for both Tessins. Andreas Lindblom from the Nordic Museum in Stockholm gave a lecture on the “the art of the Tessins,” in which the father and son were presented as essentially similar, though Nicodemus the Elder was characterized as a much more inventive architect whose work was well suited to its natural context, while Nicodemus the Younger was castigated for his Romanitas and more overtly eclectic nature – a criticism, remarkably, not directed at the elder Tessin.16 Lindblom cited the work of Ragnar Josephson, whom he called the foremost expert on Tessin the Younger, based on a series of books and articles that had already appeared. The culmination of these publications was a monograph, published in two parts in 1930 and 1931, that became the standard work, and established the younger Tessin in a dominant position in the historiography to the exclusion of his father and others around him.17 The emphasis that Josephson gave to the younger Tessin was buttressed by Björn R Kommer’s 1974 study of the royal palace in Stockholm and a number of more recent books and essays.18 Publications related to a major symposium in 2002 dedicated to Nicodemus the Younger have recently

14 John Böttiger, Hedvig Eleonoras Drottningholm (Stockholm, 1897); and Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, 2 vols (Stockholm, 1912–1913). Sirén also published Nicodemus Tessin D.Y:S Studieresor i Danmark, Tyskland, Holland, Frankrike och Italien: anteckningar, bref och ritningar (Stockholm, 1914) on the younger Tessin’s study travels in this period. 15 Hans Rose, “Nikodemus Tessin der Jüngere und der Neubau des Schlosses von Stockholm” Festschrift Heinrich Wölfflin (Munich, 1924), 245–272. 16 Andreas Lindblom, “Tessinarnas konst” Ord och bild 37 (1928): 401–416. Much of the criticism is derived from a notion that Tessin the Younger abandoned or even betrayed the Swedish artistic tradition and imported a foreign one that was fundamentally out of place. This is repeated in Lindblom’s survey of Swedish art, Sveriges konsthistoria från forntid till nutid, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1944), 437. Henrik Cornell, in a survey of the same subject published in the same year, sees a greater continuity between the two Tessins. Henrik Cornell, Den svenska konstens historia från hedenhös till omkring 1800 (Stockholm, 1944), 249–264. 17 Ragnar Josephson, Tessin i Danmark (Stockholm, 1924); idem, Tessins slottsomgivning (Stockholm, 1925); idem, L’architecte de Charles XII, Nicodème

Tessin, à la cour de Louis XIV (Paris, 1930); idem, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – mannen – verket, 2 vols (Stockholm, 1930–1931). 18 Björn R Kommer, Nicodemus Tessin der Jüngere und das Stockholmer Schloss. Untersuchnungen zum Hauptwerk des schwedischen Architekten (Heidelberg, 1974). See also inter alia Börje Magnusson, “Tessin Jr and Sylvius at Drottningholm. The Impact of their Studies in Rome” Nationalmuseum Bulletin 3 (1979): 50–66; idem, “Some Notes on the Development of Drawing Practices in Nicodemus Tessin’s Workshop” European Drawings from Six Centuries (Copenhagen, 1990), 119–140; idem, “Drawing on Rome. Nicodemus Tessin, Christina, and the Creation of a Royal Ambience” Cristina di Svezia e Roma, ed Börje Magnusson (Stockholm, 1999), 47–63; idem, “Nicodemus Tessin il giovane (1654–1728)” L’esperienza romana e laziale di architetti stranieri e le sue conseguenze, ed Jörg Garms (Rome, 1999), 37–50; Mårten Snickare, Enväldets riter. Kungliga fester och ceremonier i gestaltning av Nicodemus Tessin d.y. (Stockholm, 1999); idem, “The Construction of Autocracy. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger and the Architecture of Stockholm” Ca 1700. Architecture in Europe and the Americas, ed Henry A Millon (New Haven, 2005), 65–77.

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CONCLUSION solidified this state of affairs, as only a handful of essays and book sections on various aspect of Tessin the Elder’s work were published in the same period.19 In his 1930–1931 biography of Tessin the Younger, Josephson devoted the first chapter to Nicodemus the Elder as a sort of introduction to the life and career of his son. It seems appropriate, then, to close with an examination of the continuities between the two architects, and the ways in which Tessin the Younger extended and completed the work of his father. The Tessins at Court The extension and completion of Tessin the Elder’s work was certainly what the court had in mind in granting posts and study support to Nicodemus the Younger early in his career. The initial grant in 1671 to the younger Tessin of three years of study abroad was based at least as much on the father’s service to the crown as the son’s promise. We have considered faithful men and regarded not only the faithful services that the Councilman and Architect Nicodemus Tessin [the Elder] has shown and done us and our most honored father [Carl X Gustaf], and also the capacity and good knowledge that his son Nicodemus Tessin the Younger has acquired in civil architecture, and for that reason have resolved to give Nicodemus Tessin the Younger for three years time a stipendium of 400 dalers in specie or its worth, to be able to travel and thus perfect himself in the same Architecture that he has already begun to learn with praise.20 Even after Tessin the Younger’s first years of study abroad in the 1670s (he would return to Italy and France in 1687–88), when he had the most thorough and up-to-date knowledge of any architect in the kingdom, Carl XI’s nomination to succeed his father as palace architect likewise stressed the continuation of work and position from one generation to the next. As we have, faithful servant and architect, more than five years ago found it graciously good to accept and appoint you as our court architect, and furthermore

19

The proceedings of the 2002 symposium were published in Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72:1–2 (2003). Many primary sources documenting Tessin the Younger and his collections were published nearly simultaneously in the series Nicodemus Tessin the Younger: Sources – Works – Collections, as was a collection of essays edited by Mårten Snickare, Tessin. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Royal Architect and Visionary (Stockholm, 2002). Two of Tessins’s shorter theoretical tracts were also published in this spurt of interest: Bo Vahlne, ed, Observationer Angående så wähl Publique som Priuate huus bÿggnaders Starkheet, beqwämligheet och skiönheet, in rättade, effter wår Swänska Climat och oeconomie (Stockholm, 2002); and Bo Vahlne, ed, Reflexioner över de fem kolonnordningarna när en ordning skall ställas ovanpå en annan = Reflexions sur les cinq ordres de l’architecture, lors qu’il faut poser l’un ordre sur l’autre (Stockholm, 2005) (the latter was previously published in Björn R Kommer, Nicodemus Tessin der

Jüngere und das Stockholmer Schloss. Untersuchnungen zum Hauptwerk des schwedischen Architekten (Heidelberg, 1974)). Appearing at the same time was Birgitta von Haslingen, Tessinska palatset under 300 år. Privatbostad, överståthållareboställe, landshövdingeresidens (Stockholm, 2002), published in English the following year. 20 RA Riksregistraturet, December 14, 1671. “Wy hafve troo Männ considererat och betrachtadt icke allenast the trogne tienster som Rådemannen och Architecten Nicodemus Thessin Oß och wår hogst sahl: H: fader giordt och bewijst hafver uthan och den capacitet och gode wetenskap som hans son Nicodemus Thessin den Yngre uthi Architectura Civili förwerfwat hafwer och för den orsaken resolverat och godt funnit till att gifva Nicodemo Thessin d: Yngre uthi 3 Åhrs tydh ett Stipendium af 400 Dr in specie eller deß verde, till att få giöra een reesa dermed och perfectionera sigh uthi sam:a Architectur som han allareda att lära med beröm: begynt hafver.”

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since your father, who likewise has supervised our palace works, has been carried off by death, we could enlist none other than you for this post.21 Tessin the Younger himself described the transition from his father’s work at the court to his own in remarkably similar terms in a memorandum probably written at the height of his career around the turn of the eighteenth century. Shortly thereafter, namely in the year 1681, because my dear father departed with death, I received his royal majesty’s most gracious letter of appointment of the 28 of June to be both palace and court architect at 1200 dalers silver yearly salary, together with his majesty’s orders to the noble magistrate here in the city, in my dear father’s place to oversee the city’s public buildings for the same salary that my dear departed father had enjoyed.22 Both Tessin the Younger and the court thus saw his career, at least in its earlier phases, as a continuation of his father’s. In these circumstances, we may presume that the elder Tessin would have continued to rise through the court hierarchy had he lived longer. Ehrenstrahl, whose career mirrors Tessin’s in many respects, and who was initially raised to the peerage just after him, was made court steward in 1690, nine years after the architect’s death. Likewise, Tessin the Younger’s array of titles began with his father’s 1674 ennoblement, which extended to all heirs, and all of his subsequent elevations built on this foundation. Tessin the Elder and Younger: Architectural Continuities The overwhelming emphasis given to Tessin the Younger’s project for the Stockholm royal palace and the grander plan to rework the center of Stockholm, admittedly complex and rich, has had the unintended consequence of masking much of his actual day-to-day work. The first project for the north façade of the palace did not get underway until 1692, however, and it was not until 1697 that the old palace burned and he became fully engrossed in his lifetime’s work. This leaves a great deal of time in the 1680s and 1690s unexplained. Certainly his second visit to France and Italy in 1687–1688 accounts for some of this, as do an unbuilt project from the mid-1690s for a royal palace in Copenhagen and a residence for himself in Stockholm.23 But what, precisely, did Nicodemus the Younger do in the 1680s and earlier 1690s?

21 RA Tessinskasamlingen E 5710, June 28, 1681. “Wår ÿnnest och nådige benägenheet medh Gudh Allzmächtigh, Såsom Wÿ hafwe, Tro Tienare och Architect, nådigst godt funnit för mehr ähn fem Åhr sedan att antaga och förordna Edher till Wår håff Architect och nu sedermehra Edher fadher som tillÿka öfwer Wårt Slåtzbÿggerÿ har hafft opsicht, ähr medh dödhen afgången; tÿ kunnom Wÿ ingen annan ähn Edher … den bestellningen opdraga. …” 22 Merit Laine and Börje Magnusson, eds, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Travel Notes 1673–77 and 1687–88 (Stockholm, 2002), 451. “Kort däruppå nembl: anno 1681, enär min Sahl. k. Fadher medh döden afgeck, undfeck jag Hans Kongl. Maij:ttz HögstSahl: Konungens wijdare nådigste fullmacht af den 28 junij, så wähl att wahra slottz som hoffarchitect, à 1200 dlr: smt åhrl: löhn,

jempte Hans Maij:ttz orders till den edle magistraten här i stadhen, att i min Sahl: k. Fadhers stelle förestå stadzens publiques bÿgningar för samma löhn som min Sahl: k. Fadher hadde åthniutit.” For clarity, some of the more baroque rhetorical flourishes honoring his dead father and king have been eliminated in the translation. 23 Ragnar Josephson, Tessin i Danmark (Stockholm, 1924); Harald Langberg, “Tessins Amalienborg” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 36 (1967): 136–142; Mårten Snickare, “Three Royal Palaces” Tessin. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Royal Architect and Visionary, ed Mårten Snickare (Stockholm, 2002): 103–125. For his own residence, see Birgitta Haslingen, 300 Years of the Tessin Palace: A House in Accordance with all the Orders of Architecture (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2003).

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CONCLUSION Much of his attention was directed to the completion of projects his father left unfinished. As his father’s successor to the works at Drottningholm, he was largely responsible for the completion of the chapel, aspects of the interior decoration, including the invention of many of the ceiling paintings, and the layout of the gardens.24 He was simultaneously involved in the ongoing work on the Caroline burial chapel (which would continue even into the next generation, and was finally completed by Carl Hårleman), at Hedwig Eleonora’s Strömsholm, in an extension of the depth of the state bank by a number of bays, and in the rebuilding of the Södermalm town hall after a fire in 1680. All of this, it need hardly be said, would have been the responsibility of his father had he lived longer. These and other projects were not conceived around the talents of Tessin the Younger, but rather given to him in his father’s absence: “… since your father, who likewise has supervised our palace works, has been carried off by death, we could enlist none other than you for this post,” as Carl XI put it. Even the central work of Tessin the Younger’s career, the royal palace that formed the foundation stone of his career, is predicated on plans from the middle of the century. The old palace, comprised of wings and towers from the sixteenth century and earlier, had long been an embarrassment, and Jean de la Vallée, as palace architect, had been commissioned to develop plans for a substantial renovation to the old fabric in the 1650s.25 Work began on the project in 1657, but did not progress far before Tessin the Elder inherited the project as palace architect in 1663. To economize, he was required to retain the basic parameters of de la Vallée’s plan, but he provided elevations that de la Vallée did not make, or made new drawings to complement or replace earlier ones that do not survive. The new project fundamentally reconceived the palace and the way that it interacted with the city. Most significantly, it shifted the orientation of the palace from the west, so that the main façade would face north and look out over the water. This had been a stipulation of the older project first developed by Jean de la Vallée, but he had never incorporated this in his plans.26 The north façade remained isolated against the water, with no connection the northern part of the city. It was Tessin the Elder who made the necessary revisions to the surrounding urban fabric to make this shift to the north feasible. He projected a bridge to connect the main entrance of the palace to the Norrmalm district across the water, and connected it to the palace through a series of ramps, which would allow carriages to drive up to the portal, which in turn would now be elevated enough to project a sense of monumentality. On a smaller island slightly to the west he planned stables for the palace, which were built after 1674. All of these elements were taken up by Tessin the Younger in his own palace project. He retained the northward focus, which, despite the various efforts, had never been incorporated in the old structure. He solved the connection of the bridge to the elevated portal in a manner nearly identical to that proposed by his father (figure 139; cf. figure 35). This solution retained his father’s layout of the royal stables, which he rebuilt in a grander manner after a fire in 1696.27 Significantly, Tessin the Younger began this project by returning to the drawings from midcentury for the rebuilding of the palace. He made notes and sketches directly on

24

Much of this can be gleaned from Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen, eds, Drottningholms slott. Från Hedvig Eleonora till Lovisa Ulrika (Stockholm, 2004). 25 Tord O:son Nordberg, “Stockholms gamla slott under 1600-talets senare hälft” Rig 7 (1924): 56–142; Tord O:son Nordberg, “Slottets historia under sextonhundratalet” Stockholms slotts historia, vol 1, ed Martin Olsson (Stockholm, 1940), 272–330. See chapter three.

26

Only one of the numerous plans generated by de la Vallée includes a bridge to the north. 27 Ludvig Magnus Bååth, Helgeandsholmen och Norrström från äldsta tid till våra dagar, vol 1 (Uppsala, 1916), 259–266; Martin Olin, “Tessin’s Project for Royal Stables on Helgeandsholmen” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 159–170.

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139. Tessin the Younger, Royal Palace, Stockholm, Begun 1697.

the sheets, working out changes and additions in graphite directly on his father’s earlier ink plans, which became the basis for his own design for a stable (figures 140, 141).28 Although part of this return to earlier plans can be attributed to a more general desire to economize by reusing older foundations where possible, this cannot explain, for instance, the return to an exedral form on a much larger scale than had been considered earlier. Tessin the Younger’s plans for the new urban core of Stockholm thus to some extent grew out of projects developed in the middle of the century. The centerpiece of this urban vision, the palace designed by Tessin in stages from 1692, bears little resemblance to his father’s more spare plan. He replaced a basically Palladian façade with a Roman one richly 28 Ragnar Josephson, “Jean de la Vallées slottsförslag” Samfundet St Eriks årsbok (1923): 110–138; Ragnar Josephson, Tessins slottsomgivning (Stockholm, 1925), especially 19–26. Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 84–87, review the project and the earlier literature, as well

as Tessin the Younger’s annotations on the older plan. In both of these publications, Josephson gave to Jean de la Vallée plans that are, with the benefit of subsequent research, clearly by Tessin the Elder, and which include, for instance, the Finnish church projected by him in the mid-1660s, after he had become palace architect and taken over responsibility for the renovation of the palace.

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140. Tessin and Tessin the Younger, Projects for Stables on Helgeandsholmen.

articulated on all sides. This building is fundamentally related to broader streams in European architecture on many levels, most fundamentally in Bernini’s project for the completion of the Louvre in Paris, and this dimension of its design must not be underestimated. Nonetheless, in this case, too, Tessin the Younger worked back through the old drawings from midcentury. Just as his early sketches for the stables were literally drawn over his father’s ideas for the same project, he returned to his father’s drawings from the 1660s for aspects of the palace itself. An early project for the new palace after the fire of 1697 shows the new wings and

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141. Tessin the Younger, Project for Stables on Helgeandsholmen.

hemispherical courtyard accommodated to the old palace (figure 142). This of course had practical advantages both large – the foundations could be reused to some extent – and small – he had a ready site plan with the surrounding buildings blocked in, saving him time at the drafting table. This practice nonetheless underscores the continuity of the two architects’ projects, for not only is the new palace contained within the general framework of the projected rebuilding of the 1650s and 1660s, it fits almost effortlessly within the larger urban framework first developed by Tessin the Elder. Even after his studies abroad, therefore, Tessin the Younger’s architectural practice was steeped in his father’s legacy. This extended well beyond the many works inherited from Nicodemus the Elder, and is easily visible in many of the projects that Tessin the Younger took on independently. Steninge manor near Stockholm, built between 1694 and 1698 for Carl Gyllenstierna, the custodian of Hedwig Eleonora’s trust, looks back to Sjöö, Salsta, and other country residences designed by Tessin or emanating from his workshop (figure 143; cf. figure 116). Salsta in particular seems to be an instructive comparison. In both cases there is a rather compact block with smaller peripheral pavilions placed well to the front of the main residence. Each façade has a projecting central grouping of three bays with an elevated portal, and projecting end bays (significantly larger at Salsta). There are of course significant points of departure as well. The rusticated central portion of the façade at Steninge has niches for sculptures, rarely used by Tessin the Elder outside of major projects. It also features a central staircase much grander than those in the elder Tessin’s country residences, which looks back to the winding three-armed stair at Drottningholm. The staircase at Steninge leads directly to an oval salon projecting at the rear of the structure. While Tessin the

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CONCLUSION Younger may have had Louis Le Vau’s Vaux-leVicomte in mind, his father had already used something similar in the Carl Sparre residence in Stockholm, as had the Dutch architect Adrian Dortsman in his designs for Louis de Geer’s Finspong. Steninge is almost unique in Tessin the Younger’s work.29 It is really the culmination of a phenomenon of the 1660s and earlier 1670s, to which Tessin the Elder had contributed so much. With the coming of the reduction of lands to the crown in this period, the aristocracy had a declining ability to commission this kind of project, and by the 1690s it was essentially an obsolete building type in the kingdom. This tendency to think through his father’s projects is likewise evident in one of his few major ecclesiastical projects, Fredrik Church in Karlskrona, at the southern extreme of the kingdom, which in many ways looks back to Kalmar Cathedral (figures 144, 145). Carl XII authorized work to begin on the church at the end of 1697. This year represented the beginning of the inferno of his reign, as well as the rebuilding of the royal palace, which demanded enormous resources. The foundation stone of the church was not laid until 1720, after the era of great power had demonstrably passed with the loss of most of the Baltic territories. Still 142. Tessin and Tessin the Younger, Projects for the Royal Palace, Stockholm. incomplete, it was consecrated in 1744 in the reign of Fredrik I, for whom it is named.30 The plan of the church is quite different from Tessin the Elder’s synthesis of the central and cruciform at Kalmar (cf. figures 39–41). Tessin the Younger seems rather to have derived his plan from Vignola’s Gesù in Rome. This required a more traditional façade on the narrow (west) front of the church, where Tessin the Elder put his on the broad (south) side. In Karlskrona the short transept no longer bisects the nave, but is set near the apse in a more traditional format. There are three shallow chapels on each side of the nave where in Kalmar there were none. These open to the nave without the small connecting doorways included in Vignola’s innovative design, which were unnecessary in a church without true side chapels. The façade is very close to Giacomo della Porta’s S Atanasio dei Greci in Rome. 29

Tessin the Younger made drawings for various renovations and modernizations for country residences, for instance at Rosersberg, and designed a grander version of Steninge for count d’Avaux, the French resident in Stockholm, which was long thought to have been built at Roissy and destroyed in the French revolution, but which has recently been shown to have been an unexecuted project. See Jean Yves Dufour, “Tessin and Roissy: An Error Corrected” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 147–158.

30

Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – mannen – verket, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1931), 124–131. For a more recent general discussion of Tessin the Younger’s churches, see Martin Olin, “Churches and Church Decorations” Tessin. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Royal Architect and Visionary, ed Mårten Snickare (Stockholm, 2002), 167–181. Olin argues that Tessin the Younger’s project for a Caroline dynastic church in Stockholm also looks back to the church in Kalmar.

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143. Tessin the Younger, Steninge Manor, 1694–1698.

It is in the details that the relation of the two churches is quite clear. On both facades, the sandstone articulation is set against a neutral stucco ground. The two stories of the façades are separated by a heavy entablature, with a spare Doric order below and an Ionic above. The lower levels each encompass both a main and a mezzanine storey, while the upper levels are crowned with pediments. The niches, which the elder Tessin placed on either side of a central window on the second storey, have been moved to the lower level, and replaced with blind windows above. Likewise, the sandstone band that Tessin used to separate the lower and mezzanine levels was moved down by his son to support the niches and blind windows of the lower storey. The towers, which in Kalmar took a peculiar position in the cruxes of the transept and nave, are here recessed slightly and give a similar impression when viewed head-on. The drawings for the Fredrik Church even show small copper cupolas set on octagonal drums with oval windows, precisely like the ones at Kalmar. Even quite subtle details are retained, such as the slight differentiation in the planes of the stucco, so that there is in effect a raised frame around each bay. Inside, the differences in the plan make the overall impressions of the two spaces different, but there are significant similarities nonetheless. The stark purity of the white interiors, articulated by Ionic pilasters and crowned by a barrel vault, certainly have a similar effect. The apses are likewise treated similarly, and each has a gallery in the transept, though Nicodemus the Younger moved the transept from the middle point of the church towards the choir. It is little wonder that Ragnar Josephson wondered aloud if Tessin the Younger’s project was not based completely on a project by his father, though there is no evidence that this was the case.31 31

Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – mannen – verket, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1931), 130. In this he was following a suggestion of Martin Olsson.

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144. Tessin the Younger, Fredrik Church, Karlskrona, Begun 1720.

*

*

145. Tessin the Younger, Fredrik Church, Karlskrona, Begun 1720.

*

Johann Georg Goelgel, the Regensburg jurist and amateur travel writer, was confused about the Tessins, but he was not wrong to think of their work as a single oeuvre. His understanding was consistent with that of the court, and was shared by many other observers elsewhere who were unsure if there was one architect named Tessin or two. It was in fact entirely natural, given the sources he had at his disposal. This included his visual sources. Sandrart, his primary resource, mentioned that a number of Tessin’s buildings were to appear in print.32 Although he didn’t give the name of the publication project, he referred to Suecia antiqua et hodierna, first commissioned by the crown in 1661 and finally available in 1715.33 So far, we have encountered this book primarily as a valuable documentary record of almost every significant building in the kingdom around 1700, many of which were of course by the Tessins. The work, which comprised 353 large engravings, was intended as a compendium of all the significant buildings in the kingdom, as well as views of many smaller towns. Suecia antiqua was intended to present the kingdom’s achievements in the seventeenth century to foreign observers, specifically through the modern architecture, which, its producers felt, was now comparable to that of any other land in Europe. The buildings were identified by patron 32

Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, vol 2 (Nuremberg, 1675), 347.

33

Erik Dahlbergh, Suecia antiqua et hodierna (Stockholm, 1715).

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146. Tessin, Drottningholm, after Suecia antiqua. From Goelgel, Historisch- …Beschreibung des Königreichs Schweden, 1708.

rather than architect. The accompanying text would have attributed some of the buildings to one architect or another, but it was never completed.34 Nonetheless, for those with more than a passing interest, it was easy enough to match Tessin to some of his major projects simply by matching the prints to the works listed in Sandrart’s biography of the architect. This is in fact precisely what Goelgel did, for the second edition of his book, published in 1708, included a number of copies after the prints in Suecia antiqua (figure 146). Although the authorized prints were not released until 1715, individual sheets circulated well before then, and were available in reduced format copies from about 1700. It is one of these that provided the model for Goelgel’s images.35 Tessin is the only architect active in Sweden discussed by Sandrart. Jean de la Vallée and Matthäus Holl are completely absent. It was thus easy for Goelgel and others to assume that a far greater proportion of the buildings included in Suecia antiqua and its derivatives were by Tessin than was actually the case. It also tended to conflate Tessin the Elder, present 34 KB M 17, Johannes Loccenius, Brevis description Svetiae. Although some buildings are attributed to individual architects, and later marginal notations to Loccenius’s text would have added more, the vast majority are not associated with a builder.

35

The prints in Goelgel’s book are derived from Pieter Schenck, Paradisus oculorum (Amsterdam, 1702) or one of several derivative works published soon thereafter.

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CONCLUSION in the printed works, and Tessin the Younger, who was active at the court and keeping the name alive. Indeed, Nicodemus the Younger published his own works fairly aggressively and specifically for a foreign audience.36 This was to publicize his own achievements in the project for the new royal palace and its environs, but he may also have felt compelled to match his father’s reputation. We may wonder to what degree this caused further confusion on the part of foreign observers, and enhanced the image of Nicodemus the Elder. Yet the impression that one gets from all of this – that Tessin the Elder’s role was significantly larger than it was, strictly speaking – was also in a way accurate. He set the tone for Johann Tobias Albinus and, with Jean de la Vallée, for Matthias Spihler. Salsta, for instance, may be the handiwork of Spihler, but it is unthinkable without the figure of Tessin in the background. But more than is generally recognized, he also established the parameters within which Tessin the Younger worked. To a surprising degree, then, he stands behind much of the architectural achievement of the next generation. This generational continuity is much more evident in the Tessin family than in other artistic families active in Sweden in this period, and also more encompassing. David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl’s nephew, David von Krafft, took over the post of court painter after his uncle’s death in 1698, but he represents a continuation of Ehrenstrahl’s work only in very limited respects, most notably the large workshop that produced numerous painters for the next generation.37 Even Hedwig Eleonora’s long reign, so crucial for the sustained artistic production at the court, began after Christina’s abdication, and so does not encompass the full scope of the court’s development. The Tessins jointly represent and reflect the transformation in the architecture of the Swedish kingdom from the somewhat severe years of the 1630s, after the death of Gustaf II Adolf and before the riches that came with the Peace of Westphalia, through the tremendous architectural growth in aristocratic building in the third quarter of the century, to the royal projects of the absolute state around 1700. The character of the works changed with the composition and ambitions of the court, as did the character and ambitions of the architects themselves. The trajectory from Tessin the Elder’s first appointment as court architect and building master in 1646 to his ennoblement in 1674 has as its conclusion Tessin the Younger’s elevation to count and Lord High Chamberlain, and a political career that became inseparable from his architectural work.

36

See, among other publications, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger and Claude Haton, Arx regia holmiensis (Stockholm, ca 1714), in which the comprehensive plan to remake the center of Stockholm around the royal palace was published in a large format.

37

Krafft was, moreover, the third choice for the post, after Michael Dahl declined to return to Stockholm from London to take the post and Daniel Cronström could not secure someone in France. See Martin Olin, Det karolinska porträttet. Ideologi, ikonografi, identitet (Stockholm, 2000), 201–202.

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APPENDIX 1 CHECKLIST OF BUILDINGS AND HIS WORKSHOP

AND

PROJECTS ASSOCIATED

WITH

NICODEMUS TESSIN

The core of Tessin’s work is fairly well documented, but many projects lie at the fringes of this corpus. Some of these bear traditional attributions to Tessin that are untenable; others are the work of people active within the context of the workshop, or former assistants working independently but with knowledge and ideas gleaned from their experiences in Tessin’s studio. Some of these problems can be resolved with the help of documents, as independent archives survive for many of the aristocratic families. There are monographic studies of a number of the more significant buildings that deal very thoroughly with these records. These records frequently cannot account fully for a workshop system, however, as they document the figures most closely engaged in a project, rather than the authority under whose oversight it was developed. All of these problems make a catalogue of Tessin’s work a tricky prospect. This appendix is not intended as a definitive and critical corpus, but rather as an overview of Tessin’s work as it appears today. This group of buildings will surely be modified, even in the near future. Some works may be added to it; more likely, others will be removed from it as the work of lesserknown architects, such as Johann Tobias Albinus and Matthias Spihler, is clarified. Even with this more modest goal, I have made a number of decisions, some of which may seem arbitrary. I have rejected a number of buildings bearing traditional or occasional attributions that do not seem to fit with what we know of Tessin’s work (Görväln, Hesselbyholm, Löfstad, Skällnora, Näsby, and others). In other cases I have accepted as workshop projects a number of buildings where other architects – notably Matthias Spihler – are documented (Ållonö, Salsta, Sjöö, Ericsberg). The justification for this is that one of Tessin’s strengths was the organization of his practice, which involved significant workshop assistance. I have therefore accepted the buildings that are likely to have been produced under his oversight, even if he was not much involved in the actual design or drafting. Many of these buildings have no real bibliography. I have not attempted to cite every passing mention, but have rather given sources that provide basic information and, where available, a more detailed discussion. For each building, I have included a patron. Most of these had numerous titles accumulated over the course of their careers, and it is impossible to account for this here. A large majority of Tessin’s private clients were members of the Council of the Realm (Riksråd). Nearly all held prominent positions of one kind or another within the state, either within the bureaucracy or the military. For more detailed information, see Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (Stockholm, 1918–). Buildings Planned and Built by Nicodemus Tessin the Elder Palaces and Other Domestic Architecture Ållonö Manor, 1671–1675 (cover illustrations). Patron: Gustaf Kurck. Bibliography: Axel R Unnerbäck, Ållonö. Studier kring ett östgötskt 1600-talsslott (Stockholm, 1970). Notes: Ållonö was burned by Russian troops in 1719, and not rebuilt until 1905, which makes analysis difficult. There is no documented architect, but visual records place it close to Tessin.

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Unnerbäck groups this building with Salsta and Sjöö manors, all of questionable relationship to Tessin, and all projects for which Matthias Spihler seems to have had a great deal of the actual responsibility both for the design and execution. For at least some of these, however, Spihler seems to have acted as a representative of Tessin’s workshop and used a set of Tessin’s drawings for many aspects of the work. Bååt Palace (now Freemasons’ lodge, Stockholm), 1662–1669 (figures 67, 68). Patron: Seved Bååt. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 154–170; Bo Runmark, Det okända palatset på Blasieholmen (Stockholm, 1989). Notes: In 1876–1877 a significant extension and interior rebuilding project was undertaken by F.W. Scholander and J.E. Söderlund to make the building suitable for use as the Freemasons’ lodge. Bonde Palace, Stockholm, 1662–1673 (figures 63, 64). Patron: Gustaf Bonde. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 115–153; Claes Ellehag, Bondeska palatset. En skrift till minnet av Högsta domstolens 200-årsjubileum 1789–1989 (Stockholm, 1989); idem, Fem svenska stormanshem under 1600-talet (Stockholm, 1994). Notes: Tessin and Jean de la Vallée independently (?) prepared very similar plans for the project, suggesting that Bonde gave them very precise directions. These may have been significant alterations to a project by Jean Marot (see chapter four). Ellehag considers the design a collaborative work of Tessin and de la Vallée, but executed primarily or totally by the latter, who was also largely responsible for the interior. The wings and attic story were altered in 1731 by J.E. Carlberg after a fire. The wings projecting towards the city, though part of the original plan, were not completed until 1758–1759. Further changes were made in 1949 by Ivar Tengbom when the building became the home of the supreme court. Borgholm Castle, 1653–1660 (figures 32–34). Patron: Carl [X] Gustaf/Crown. Bibliography: Ernst Aréen, Borgholms slott under de sista trehundra åren (Ölands kulturminnesförenings årsskrift, 1927); Zygmunt Łakociński, Borgholms slott Öland III (Lund, 1949), 307–337; Ingrid Rosell, “Borgholms slott och Tessin d.ä.” Fornvännen 93 (1998): 181–189. Notes: The palace was never finished, and most of what was built was destroyed by fire in 1806. Brenner House, Stockholm, 1668–1670. Patron: Mårten Brenner. Bibliography: Ragnar Josephson, Stadsbyggnadskonst i Stockholm intill år 1800 (Stockholm, 1918), 22. Notes: The house was to be built by mason Mathias Berendtsson “aldeles effter den dessein som rådman och architecteuren Mons. Nicodemus Tessin afrijtat och proiecterat” (“completely after the design that the councilman and architect Mons. Nicodemus Tessin drew and projected”). Berendtsson was incompetent and a legal imbroglio followed. Douglas House, Stockholm, ca 1655. Patron: Robert Douglas. Bibliography: See Claes Ellehag, Palatsen i Stockholm under stormaktstiden (Lund, 1998), 167–170, with further references.

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APPENDIX 1 Notes: It appears from a dispute with the building master Andreas Fischer that Tessin designed the house as it was built. This residence has been heavily rebuilt, rendering it difficult to make a stylistic judgment. In 1805 the Arsenalgatan wing was added, and in 1874 the building was completely renovated. In 1985–1986 the interior was redone. All that remains of the original design is the five-story structure and vaulted ground floor. Drottningholm, 1662- (figures 50–59, 61–62, 146). Patron: Hedwig Eleonora. Bibliography: John Böttiger, Hedvig Eleonoras Drottningholm (Stockholm, 1897); Nils Wollin, Drottningholms lustträdgård och park (Stockholm, 1927); Stig Vänje, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Drottningholm” Konsthistorisk tidsskrift 29 (1960): 1–19; Göran Alm and Rebecka Millhagen, eds, Drottningholms slott från Hedvig Eleonora till Lovisa Ulrika (Stockholm, 2004). Ekolsund, 1667- (figure 4). Patron: Åke Tott and Claes Tott. Bibliography: Claes Ellehag, Fem svenska stormanshem under 1600-talet (Stockholm, 1994), 86–114. Notes: Responsibility for this project passed from Simon de la Vallée in the 1630s to Tessin in the 1660s to Carl Hårleman in the eighteenth century. Ericsberg, ca 1680. Patron: Christoffer Gyllenstierna. Bibliography: Slott och herresäten i Sverige, vol 4:1 (Malmö, 1968), 110–134. Notes: As with other later aristocratic residences – and especially country residences – credit for Ericsberg has shifted between Tessin and Matthias Spihler. Many of the features are difficult to reconcile with Tessin’s work, and, especially at this late date, it seems reasonable to suppose that Spihler was responsible for virtually all of the particulars, and perhaps for the general scheme as well. This manor house thus lies at the very periphery of what can justifiably be considered Tessin’s work, if not beyond. The estate was originally called Pintorp. Fleming Palace, Stockholm, 1660s (figure 127). Patron: Erik Flemming. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 171–173; Martin Olsson, Stormaktstidens privatpalats i Stockholm (Stockholm, 1951), 51; Claes Ellehag, Palatsen i Stockholm under stormaktstiden (Lund, 1998), 36–38. Notes: It has been proposed that this building was designed by Johann Tobias Albinus, as some details compare closely with other projects by him. Albinus was however an assistant in Tessin’s workshop until 1668, when he moved to Livonia. Although it is possible that he had some or most of the responsibility for the project, it would likely have been under the umbrella of Tessin’s studio. Krusenberg Palace, 1648 (figure 22). Patron: Axel Oxenstierna for his daughter, Karin Kruus. Bibliography: Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 173–191. Notes: I have relied on Karling for this attribution, which stands virtually alone as a completed independent project by Tessin before his study travels. Oxenstierna was however a strong supporter of Tessin, and was likely to give him the commission. Tessin added an auxiliary

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wing to the estate after it had passed to Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. The building was destroyed in 1716. Mälsåker Palace, 1672–1680. Patron: Gustaf Soop. Bibliography: Erik Andrén, Mälsåker: ett tessinslott vid Mälaren (Stockholm, 1945); Slott och herresäten i Sverige, vol 4:2 (Malmö, 1968), 21–30. Notes: This project was really an extensive rebuilding and extension of an extant stone house, parts of which survive. The palace was severely damaged by fire in 1945, when the roof fell in and the stucco ceilings were lost. The building was restored in 1993–1997. Morianen House, Stockholm, 1676. Patron: Christian Heraeus. Bibliography: Gösta Selling, Stockholms stads brandförsäkringskonstors hus i kvarteret Aglaurus vid Mynttorget (Stockholm, 1946), 21; Anders Hammarlund, Ett äventyr i staten (Stockholm, 2003), 19. Rosenhane Palace, Stockholm, ca 1653–1656 (figure 78). Patron: Schering Rosenhane. Bibliography: Tord O:son Nordberg, “Rosenhanska palatset på Riddarholmen” Rig 14 (1931): 1–27; Claes Ellehag, Palatsen i Stockholm under stormaktstiden (Lund, 1998), 111–115, with further references. Notes: Much of the early literature attributes the building to Jean de la Vallée. Andreas Fischer did the masonry for this and Rosenhane’s Säby residence after Tessin’s drawings (“efter arkitekten herr Nicodemi däröver gjorda avritning och dessein och densamma i alla måtto efterölja”), which would seem to confirm the attribution to Tessin. A projecting wing was added to the east side of the façade in 1801, and to the west side in 1855. Rosenhane Estate at Säby, Uppland, early 1650s. Patron: Schering Rosenhane. Bibliography: Sten Karling, Trädgårdskonstens historia i Sverige intill Le Nôtrestilens genombrott (Stockholm, 1931), 250–254. Notes: The building master Andreas Fischer was contracted for this project at the same time as the Stockholm palace, though precisely what this entailed is uncertain. Salsta, 1670s (figure 116). Patron: Nils Bielke. Bibliography: Erik Andrén, “Salsta” Fataburen 1952; Slott och herresäten i Sverige, vol 2:2 (Malmö, 1963), 84–100; Gunnar Redelius, Salsta slott – Lena socken, Uppland. En documentation gjord 1994–1995 (Stockholm, 1997); Claes Ellehag, “Matthias Spihler – adelns arkitekt, och kronans” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 75 (2006): 244–268; Karin Wahlberg Liljeström, Att följa decorum. Rumsdispositionen i det stormaktstida högreståndsbostaden på landet (Stockholm, 2008). Notes: This building has long been associated with Matthias Spihler, though he may have been acting either as an independent architect or a semi-independent representative of Tessin’s workshop. Sjöö, 1670–1679 (figure 115). Patron: Johan Gabriel Stenbock. Bibliography: Johan Eriksson and Peter Liljenstolpe, Sjöö slott. Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och Johan Gabriel Stenbock som aktörer vid ett stormaktstida slottsbygge (Uppsala, 2001); Karl Johan Eklund, Hans Norman, Göran Ulväng, eds, Sjöö slott – tradition och manifestation (Uppsala, 2008).

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APPENDIX 1 Notes: An early manuscript text for Suecia antiqua gives the palace to Matthias Spihler, as do Badeloch Noldus, Trade in Good Taste (Turnhout, 2004), 152, and Torbjörn Fulton in the Grove Dictionary of Art, who considers Sjöö a simplified version of Mälsåker. Spihler was probably working out of Tessin’s workshop, however, which would seem to be confirmed by a document in which Spihler promises to execute a “dessein” for a staircase, but that the “stairs are after Tessin’s desseign” (cited in Eriksson and Liljenstolpe, 71). The rigid and unflattering roof was added in the nineteenth century. Skokloster, 1653- (figure 77). Patron: Carl Gustaf Wrangel. Bibliography: Erik Andrén, Skokloster. Ett slottsbygge under stormaktstiden (Stockholm, 1948); Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 138–150; Hans-Bernd Spies, Schloß Johannisburg in Aschaffenburg und Schloß Skokloster am Mälarsee in Schweden (Aschaffenburg, 1986); Arne Losman, “Carl Gustaf Wrangel, Skokloster and Europe: A Display of Power and Glory in the Days of Sweden’s Dominance” 1648. War and Peace in Europe, vol 2, ed Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (Münster, 1998), 639–648. Notes: The level of Tessin’s involvement is unclear. Eimer argues that he only tidied up what had already been built by Wrangel and Caspar Vogel (from Gotha), and this would help explain why the project bears virtually no relation to anything else Tessin designed. Sparre Palace, Stockholm, 1671–1672. Patron: Axel Sparre. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 176–198. Notes: A plaque, apparently original, reads “Hanc domum extrui curavit Illust: dn: Axelius Sparre Regni Sue:ae senator arcis Holmensis Casstellanus et civitatis gubernator Annis 1671 & 1672 quam delineavit Nicodemus Tessin Architectus Regius & Civitatis Consiliarus,” confirming the attribution of the design to Tessin. The building still exists in a radically altered form as the academy of art. It was rebuilt in 1751 after a fire, donated to the academy in 1775, and rebuilt and enlarged in 1841–1847. It was rebuilt and extended again in 1893–1896 by E. Lallerstedt. Sparre Palace, Stockholm, begun 1669 (figures 69, 70). Patron: Carl Sparre. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmhus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 176–188; Ragnar Josephson, “Sparreska palatset” St Eriks årsbok (1925): 121–133. Notes: The building is similar in plan to the Bååt palace, but more elegant (to the point that Josephson thought it was by Tessin the Younger, who may have prepared the known drawings). The building suffered repeated disasters, and was destroyed in 1915 to make room for a department store. Stenbock Palace, Stockholm, rebuilt by Tessin ca 1666–1671 (figure 128). Patron: Gabriel Stenbock. Bibliography: Lars Sjöberg and Lennar Uhlin, Stenbockska palatset på Riddarholmen: historien, restaurering (Stockholm, 1972); Claes Ellehag, Palatsen i Stockholm under stormaktstiden (Lund, 1998), 95–99. Notes: The palace was built in the 1640s, and modernized in 1666–1671 by Tessin. He evidently retained most of the structural aspects of the building. Carl Hårleman undertook interior renovations in the 1730s and 1740s. Stiernmarck House, Skeppsbron 36, Stockholm, 1670s (?). Patron: Magnus Stiernmark.

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Bibliography: Henrik Andersson and Fredric Bedoire, Stockholm Architecture and Townscape (Stockholm, 1988), 47; mentioned by Johan Eriksson and Peter Liljenstolpe, Sjöö slott. Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och Johan Gabriel Stenbock som aktörer vid ett stormaktstida slottsbygge (Uppsala, 2001), 30. Notes: Eriksson and Liljenstolpe say Tessin was “probably involved” and date it very late in Tessin’s life. Although it bears similarities to some of Tessin’s drawings, and to his own house, this modest project is more likely a workshop product of the design of a follower. The attic story was added and the interiors redone in the 1790s. Strömsholm, 1668/9–1680 (figure 49). Patron: Hedwig Eleonora. Bibliography: Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe, “Ett karolinskt slott. Hedvig Eleonoras Strömsholm” Svenska kulturbilder IV (Stockholm, 1932), 201–220; Slott och herresäten i Sverige – De kungliga slotten, vol 16:2 (Malmö, 1971), 219–242; Eva Lena Karlsson and Rebecka Millhagen, eds, Strömsholms slott (Stockholm, 2005). Tessin House, Skeppsbron 20, Stockholm, 1668/70-ca 1675 (figure 123). Patron: Nicodemus Tessin the Elder. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 213–240; Claes Ellehag, Palatsen i Stockholm under stormaktstiden (Lund, 1998), 52–53. Wrangel Palace, Stockholm, 1653- (figures 73–76). Patron: Carl Gustaf Wrangel. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912) 43–114; Tord O:son Nordberg, “Wrangelska palatset” Samfundet St Eriks årsbok (1947): 49–56; Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustaf Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 119–138. Notes: The palace was really a complete rebuilding and massive expansion of an extant structure. The building history is a tangle, but as with Wrangel’s Skokloster, Tessin seems to have become involved in the project fairly late, after various architects and Wrangel himself had made competing contributions. His contribution may have been primarily to make sense of what had already been done. Fires in 1693 and 1802 have left the building a shell. Religious Buildings – Churches and Private Burial Chapels Bonde Burial Chapel, Spånga Church, ca 1667–1673 (figures 82, 89–90). Patron: Gustaf Bonde. Bibliography: Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 166–168. Notes: Liljegren attributes this to Tessin on stylistic grounds, but it is certainly correct. The dome burned in 1740 and was replaced. Caroline Burial Chapel, Riddarholm Church, 1671–1743 (figures 96–97). Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Martin Olsson, Riddarholmskyrka i Stockholm [Sveriges kyrkor] (Stockholm, 1928), 202–244; Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947); Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources, Works, Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 141–148. Notes: The ongoing project was continued by Tessin the Younger and Carl Hårleman well into the eighteenth century.

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APPENDIX 1 De la Gardie Burial Chapel, Veckholm Church, begun 1654; constructed largely 1674–1675 (figures 87–88). Patron: De la Gardie family. Bibliography: Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 157–166; Ingrid Rosell, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardies kyrkobyggnadsverksamhet i Sverige (Stockholm, 1972), 34–45; idem, Veckholms kyrka [Sveriges kyrkor] (Stockholm, 1974), 37–54; Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, eds, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources – Works – Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 126. Notes: Tessin made plans for two different chapels for the de la Gardie family, only one of which was built in a fragmentary fashion. The chapel bears little resemblance to the impressive drawings, although some details from the original design can still be seen. Kalmar Cathedral, 1660–1702 (figures 39–41). Patron: Crown and parish. Bibliography: Sten Karling, Kalmar domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, Sweden, 1984); Torbjörn Fulton, “Domkyrkan i Kalmar: några synpunkter i ansluting till en nyare skrift” Kyrkohistorisk årsskrift (1987): 121–138; Ingrid Rosell and Robert Bennett, Kalmar domkyrka [Sveriges kyrkor] (Stockholm, 1989). Von der Linde Burial Chapel, 1670–1671. Patron: Lorentz von der Linde. Bibliography: Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 174; mentioned by Johan Eriksson and Peter Liljenstolpe, Sjöö slott. Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och Johan Gabriel Stenbock som aktörer vid ett stormaktstida slottsbygge (Uppsala, 2001), 30. Notes: Liljegren considers this rather “in the style” of Tessin. As I have argued (in chapter five) that many of these chapels were workshop projects with varying degrees of input from Tessin himself, this assessment seems concordant. Rosenhane Burial Chapel, Flens Church, 1660s. Patron: Brita Ribbing, widow of Johan Rosenhane. Bibliography: Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 174; Ingrid Rosell, “Rosenhanska gravkoret vid Husby-Oppunda kyrka” Fornvännen 53 (1958): 135–138. Notes: Liljegren is very reluctant to tie Tessin to the building, preferring to see it as “style of.” Rosell is more eager to give the chapel to Tessin. As with others, it may be by someone more or less closely associated with Tessin’s workshop. Johan Rosenhane was the brother of Schering Rosenhane. Rosenhane Burial Chapel, Husby-Oppunda Church, ca 1663. Patron: Possibly Schering Rosenhane, and built around the time of his death in 1663. Bibliography: Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 170–171. Public Buildings Particularly in his capacity as municipal architect in Stockholm, Tessin was responsible for a large number of public buildings, most of which are unknown, few of which have survived, and relatively few of which are particularly noteworthy. Mint, Stockholm, Begun 1678. Patron: Crown (Carl XI).

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Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 247–251. Notes: The building was destroyed in the eighteenth century. Packhouse, Stockholm, 1668. Patron: City, presumably. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 241. Notes: This building was destroyed in the 1690s. State Bank, Stockholm, 1675–1682 (figures 45–46). Patron: City of Stockholm. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 73–196; Sven Brisman, Den palmstruchska banken och riksens ständers bank under den karolinska tiden (Stockholm, 1918); Lars Olof Larsson, “The Bank and its Buildings” Sveriges Riksbank. Its Buildings, 1668–1976 (Stockholm, 1976), 27–99. Royal Stables, Stockholm, ca 1674–1682 (figure 140). Patron: Crown (Carl XI). Bibliography: Ludvig Magnus Bååth, Helgeandsholmen och Norrström från äldsta tid till våra dagar, vol 1 (Uppsala, 1916), 259–266; Martin Olin, “Tessin’s Project for Royal Stables on Helgeandsholmen” Konsthistorisk tidskrift 72 (2003): 159–170. Notes: The stables were built somewhat differently from the preserved drawings for the island, which vary widely. In February, 1696, a fire mostly destroyed the building. What survived was incorporated by Tessin the Younger in the new stables, which were destroyed in 1894. The complex included a riding house. School, Stockholm, 1668. Patron: City of Stockholm (?). Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 239–240. Notes: This was only partially built, at least by Tessin. It was very plain and functional building. Södermalm (Stockholm) Town Hall; ground broken 1664. Patron: City of Stockholm and private interests (the city took over the project entirely in 1667). Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 197–236; Tord O:son Nordberg, Södra Stadshuset (Stockholm, 1963); Åke Abrahamsson, Stockholm. En utopisk historia (Stockholm, 2004), 57–59. Notes: The building was rebuilt by Tessin the Younger after a fire in 1680. It was reworked again in 1939–1942 for use as a museum. The courtyard originally had open arcades. The original concept – comprising two fully-enclosed courtyards – was rather grander than what was built. Town Hall, Gothenburg, 1672. Patron: City of Gothenburg (?). Bibliography: Most information on Tessin’s project is incorporated in the literature on Erik Gunnar Asplund, who rebuilt the structure completely early in the twentieth century. See e.g., Stuart Wrede, The Architecture of Erik Gunnar Asplund (Cambridge, 1980); Peter Blundel Jones, “The Gothenburg Law Courts” in Dan Cruikshank, “Erik Gunnar Asplund” The Architect’s Journal 1988: 57–96. Notes: The building was damaged in a fire in 1732 and partially rebuilt. It was modified more heavily by B.W. Carlberg in 1814–1817, and again by Erik Gunnar Asplund in 1912–1937 for use as the Gothenburg courts.

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APPENDIX 1 Projects Planned by Tessin but not Built (or not Completed) Arensburg (Kuressaare), Estonia, ca 1652 (figure 27). Patron: Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. Bibliography: Sten Karling, Jakob och Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie som byggherrar i Estland [Svio-Estonica V] (Tartu, 1938); Gerhard Eimer, “Romerska centraliseringsidéer i Sverges barocka kyrkobyggnadskonst” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forsmann (Stockholm, 1966), 131–188. Arsenal, Stockholm, 1663. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Attributed to Tessin by Sten Karling, Trädgårdskonstens historia i Sverige (Stockholm, 1931), 405; mentioned by Claes Ellehag, Jean de la Vallée, kunglig arkitekt (Lund, 2003), 31. Notes: To the degree that Tessin was involved in this project at all (which is uncertain), he inherited it from Jean de la Vallée’s project for Carl X Gustaf. The proposal was rejected in 1663, in the same year in which he became palace architect. Bourse, Stockholm, 1661. Patron: City of Stockholm. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 74–75. Notes: This project was commissioned in May, 1661, and was to be on Järntorget, the square where the state bank now stands. The building was mentioned as well along by Erik Dahlbergh ca 1662. Work stopped in 1664 when the institution collapsed. (For Dahlbergh’s comments, see Gunnar Bolin and Erik Vennberg, “En stockholmsbeskrivning av Erik Dahlbergh från omkring år 1662” Samfundet St Eriks årsbok (1925): 24.) Church and Hospital, Malmö, ca 1673. Patron: Crown (?). Bibliography: Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, eds, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources – Works – Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 80–81. Notes: This little-known project was noted by Carl Gustaf Tessin to be the work of his grandfather, Nicodemus the Elder. Tessin evidently relied on site plans by local draftsmen in developing this project, one of which is dated September 27, 1673. Olin and Henriksson suggest that it was planned in part to help assimilate the new territories in the south. It may also have had a planned function as a home for injured soldiers, much like the Invalides in Paris, begun almost precisely at this time. Court of Appeals, Jönköping, 1664. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Ingrid Rosell, Kalmar domkyrka (Stockholm, 1987), 79. Notes: Tessin had drawings for this project ready in 1667. The Riksregistraturet for November 23, 1664, reads: “Till Architecten Nicodem. Thessin, att fatta en dessein af HoffRättshusets bygning i Jönkiöping . . . att I tagen under händerne Plantan aff Hoffrättshuset uthi Jönkiöping och däröffver fattar en sådan dessein som Hoffrätten till alla dess Commoditeter kan vara tienligt. . . . ” Finnish Church, Stockholm, ca 1663/5–1668 (figures 36–37). Patron: Crown and parish. Bibliography: Martin Olsson, “Nikodemus Tessins Finska kyrka” Rig 9 (1926): 34–54; Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich (Stockholm, 1961), 348–358; idem,

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“Romerska centraliseringsidéer i Sveriges barocka kyrkobyggnadskonst” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forssman (Stockholm, 1966), 131–188. Notes: Work began on this project in 1668 on land donated by the regency on behalf of the crown, but by 1672 the crown’s interests were elsewhere, and in 1674 the plot was retracted. De la Gardie Palace, Stockholm, 1660 (figure 79). Patron: Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. Bibliography: Göran Axel-Nilsson, Makalös (Stockholm, 1984), 162–165. Notes: Tessin was supposed to expand the central structure into a complete palace complex with an extension to the south, which would have doubled the length. The project never went beyond the drawings stage. Gripsholm Pavilion, 1655–1657 (figures 132–133). Patron: Hedwig Eleonora. Bibliography: Sten Karling, “Villa Rotonda och Huis ten Bosch vid Mälaren. Kring några lustslottsprojekt för Kungsör och Gripsholm” Vision och gestalt. Studier tillägnade Ragnar Josephson, ed Mårten Liljegren and Sven Sandström (Stockholm, 1957), 59–80. Notes: Tessin wrote a four-page written description or explanation of this project, now in the graphic collection of the Nationalmuseum. The plan of the project was derived from Pieter Post’s Huis ten Bosch, near The Hague, which was published in 1654. Järlåsa church, work begun 1672, consecrated 1688 (figures 118–121). Patron: Gustaf Rosenhane. Bibliography: Ingrid Rosell, Järlåsa kyrka. Ett kyrkobygge på Gustaf Rosenhanes initiativ (Lund, 1962). Notes: A connection between this church and Tessin has never been established. The traditional association dates only to the nineteenth century. The church as built bears no perceptible relation to Tessin’s work, and it is only through a drawing in the church’s records that any roots in his workshop can be adduced. Oxenstierna Villa (“Lusthaus”), Bergshammar, ca 1651–1652. Patron: Axel Oxenstierna. Bibliography: Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – mannen – verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 19. Notes: Tessin mentioned drawings he had completed for this project in his letter to Oxenstierna from Rome in February, 1652. Royal Palace, Stockholm, 1660s (figure 35). Patron: Crown (Carl XI). Bibliography: Tord O:son Nordberg, “Stockholms gamla slott under 1600-talets senare hälft” Rig 7 (1924): 56–142; idem, “Slottets historia under sextonhundratalet” Stockholms slotts historia, vol 1, ed Martin Olsson, (Stockholm, 1940), 272–299. See also Ragnar Josephson, “Jean de la Vallées slottsförslag” Samfundet St Eriks årsbok (1923): 110–138, in which he attributes the whole project to Jean de la Vallée. The drawings are now generally attributed to Tessin. Notes: Although the project itself was not built, various aspects of it were, including an alcove bedroom similar to that at Drottningholm, stables, and so on. Stockholm Town Hall, mid 1660s (figures 98–102, 105–108). Patron: City of Stockholm with assistance from the crown.

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APPENDIX 1 Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 2 (Stockholm, 1913), 251–257; Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 361–366. Notes: Osvald Sirén considers this Tessin’s most important project for Stockholm. There are a number of drawings, which vary widely. The project was apparently abandoned in 1667. Uppsala University Library, 1648. Patron: Bibliography: Ernst Aréen, Uppsala universitetsbiblioteks byggnadshistoria (Uppsala, 1925), 9–15; Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 173–191; idem, Kalmar Domkyrka och Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. (Växjö, 1984), 21. Notes: The design was closely dependent on Simon de la Vallée’s project for the House of the Nobility in Stockholm. Vadstena Palace (Garden Pavilion), ca 1657? Patron: Hedwig Eleonora. Bibliography: Sten Karling, “A Project by Nicodemus Tessin Sr for a Summer Palace at Vadstena” Opus Musivum, ed H.W.M. van der Wijck (Assen, 1964), 215–229. Notes: Although there are points of comparison to some of Tessin’s early projects (particularly the pavilion for Hedwig Eleonora at Gripsholm), the drawings for this project are in other respects rather difficult to relate to his other sheets. They may be copies, or Karling’s attribution may be spurious. Wrangel Burial Chapel, Probably for Skokloster Church, ca 1676–1680 (figures 94–95). Patron: Carl Gustaf Wrangel’s heirs. Bibliography: Mårten Liljegren, Stormaktstidens gravkor (Stockholm, 1947), 168; Gerhard Eimer, Carl Gustav Wrangel som byggherre i Pommern och Sverige (Stockholm, 1961), 169–171; Martin Olin and Linda Henriksson, eds, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger – Sources – Works – Collections. Architectural Drawings I: Ecclesiastical and Garden Architecture (Stockholm, 2004), 127–129, 133. Projects Associated with Tessin, but not Principally his Work (Including Restoration Projects) Bååt Residence on Myrö Estate, before 1660. Patron: Seved Bååt. Bibliography: Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 157, 168. Notes: Tessin mentioned in a letter to Bååt in 1654 (published in Sirén) that he would soon travel to the estate to explore the possibilities for restorations to the standing house. It is unclear what became of this. From the context of the letter, however, it seems that Tessin wished to do a favor for Bååt, who was a member of the reduction committee, in hopes that Bååt would protect Tessin’s estate on Rügen from reduction to the crown. It is possible that the project was never seriously considered by either party. Drottningholm – Restoration to the Sixteenth-Century Palace. Patron: Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. Bibliography: Slott och herresäten i Sverige, vol 16:1 (Malmö, 1971), 135–138. Notes: Tessin took over this project in the mid 1650s. Fiholm Manor, 1640–1642 (figures 15, 17). Patron: Axel Oxenstierna.

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Bibliography: Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 173–191. Notes: Tessin was involved primarily as an executor of plans probably by Simon de la Vallée. Only a small part of the project was finished. Maria Magdalena Church, Stockholm, 1675–1683. Patron: Parish. Bibliography: Efraim Lundmark, S:ta Maria Magdalena kyrka (Stockholm, 1934), 79–83. Notes: Tessin planned transepts as extensions to a standing church. In 1760–1763 the vaults and interior were restored by C.J. Cronstedt after a 1759 fire, making it difficult to determine the extent of Tessin’s intervention. He also evidently provided drawings for a new tower for the church. House of the Nobility, ca 1646–1647. Patron: Nobility, under leadership of Axel Oxenstierna. Bibliography: Carl Hallendorff, ed, Sveriges Riddarhus (Stockholm, 1926); Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 173–191; Claes Ellehag, Riddarhuset (Stockholm, 1999). Notes: Tessin presented a paper model for the project on March 5, 1647. This project was rejected, evidently because its rich cut-stone decoration was considered too expensive. Tessin was however commissioned on March 28, 1647 to work as a building master on the site. Oxenstierna Burial Chapel, Jäder Church, 1641–1643 (figure 16). Patron: Axel Oxenstierna. Bibliography: Barbro Flodin, Jäders kyrka [Sveriges kyrkor] (Stockholm, 1989), 71–73, 92–93. Notes: As with other work for Oxenstierna in the early 1640s, Tessin was a building leader with no particular creative responsibilities. Tidö Manor, Begun mid 1620s, mostly 1638–1640 (figure 18). Patron: Axel Oxenstierna. Bibliography: Sten Karling, “Nikodemus Tessin d.ä. och Simon de la Vallée” Rig 13 (1930): 173–191. Notes: Tessin’s input in this project was minimal. The project was already largely in the decorative phase, and Tessin’s job was evidently to oversee the craftsmen. Tott Residence, Stockholm, 1661–ca 1667. Patron: Claes Tott. Bibliography: Claes Ellehag, Fem svenska stormanshem under 1600-talet (Stockholm, 1994), 140–151. Notes: On his return from Borgholm, Tessin seems to have made drawings for the interior reconfiguration of an older residence owned by Tott. No drawings survive, and no exterior changes were made, making it difficult to judge the extent of Tessin’s intervention. Ulriksdal/Jakobsdal, after 1669. Patron: Hedwig Eleonora. Bibliography: Slott och herresäten i Sverige, vol 16:1 (Malmö, 1971), 261–322; Uno Björkhem, ed, Ulriksdal efter 350 år (Stockholm, 1997). Notes: Hedwig Eleonora acquired the palace from Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie in 1669, and set Tessin to work making changes soon after. Almost none of this work is visible today,

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APPENDIX 1 following a full reworking in the eighteenth century and various interior renovations in the nineteenth century. The estate, originally called Jakobsdal, was renamed Ulriksdal by Hedwig Eleonora in honor of a son of Carl XI who died young. City Planning Projects Associated with Tessin and his Workshop Arensburg (Kuressaare), Estonia, ca 1652 (figure 27). Patron: Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie. Bibliography: Sten Karling, Jakob och Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie som byggherrar i Estland (Tartu, 1938), 24–29; Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 340–344; idem, “Romerska centraliseringsidéer i Sveriges barocka kyrkobyggnadskonst” Konsthistoriska studier tillägnade Sten Karling, ed Erik Forssman (Stockholm, 1966), 131–188; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 664–666. Carlsburg an der Weser, Lower Saxony, 1674. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 445–465; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 671–678. Gävle, 1646 (figure 19). Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 329–332; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 408–410. Härnösand, 1646. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 328; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 433–436. Hudiksvall, 1646. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 328; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 429–433. Kalmar, 1647–1648. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 334–340; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 443–453. Karlskrona, 1680–1681. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 483–509; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 457–465.

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Landskrona, 1659, 1680–1681. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 344–348; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 476–487. Stockholm, 1663–1679 (various projects spread over this period). Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 348–366; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 527–544. Sundsvall, 1646. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 332; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 550–552. Umeå, 1646. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Die Stadtplanung im schwedischen Ostseereich, 1600–1715 (Stockholm, 1961), 332; Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala, 2005), 566–569. Ephemeral Works and Other Projects Decorations for an Allegorical Masque, 1664. Patron: Hedwig Eleonora. Bibliography: Kurt Johannesson, I polstjärnans tecken (Stockholm, 1968), 140. Notes: The decorations represented the four seasons, with flowers, cereals, fruits and icicles showing the seasonal progression of the year. Decorations for the Coronation of Carl XI, 1672. Patron: City of Stockholm (at least the part for which Tessin was responsible). Bibliography: David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, Certamen equestre (Stockholm, 1672); Lena Rangström, “Karl XI:s karusell 1672” Livrustkammaren 1994: 13; Jonas Nordin, Certamen equestre. Karl XI:s karusell inför samtid och eftervärld (Stockholm, 2005), 149. Notes: Tessin was responsible for “felicities by the town hall,” on the main square in Stockholm. He submitted a bill in 1673 that mentions a number of other known figures, including Nicolaes Millich, who made “een groodt sittende beldt Abondantia,” (some sources call it Felicitas Publica), probably of gilded plaster. Flanking it were masks of lions, from which wine poured for public consumption on several nights of the festivities. Decorations for the Entry of Ulrica Eleonora the Elder into Stockholm, 1680. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Mårten Snickare, Enväldets riter (Stockholm, 2001), 46–58, 187–188. Notes: It seems that the preparations for this event were begun by Tessin the Elder, but that Tessin the Younger took over primary responsibility for them on his return to Stockholm in the summer of 1680.

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APPENDIX 1 Funeral of Carl X Gustaf, 1660. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Ragnar Josephson, Nicodemus Tessin d.y. Tiden – mannen – verket, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1930), 27. “Royal Loggia” in St Gertrude (German Church), Stockholm, 1671–1673. Patron: Church or crown? Bibliography: Gerhard Eimer, Deutsche St Gertruds Kirche (Stockholm, 1956), 10; Emil Schieche, 400 Jahre Deutsche St. Gertruds Gemeinde in Stockholm, 1571–1971 (Stockholm, 1971), 20. Notes: Bertil Waldén (Nicolaes Millich och hans krets, 1942) doubted the attribution, but it may be correct nonetheless. Eimer and Schieche both give the design to Tessin and the putti to Millich. The ceiling painting on the interior is by Ehrenstrahl’s workshop. These three men were all members of the congregation, and collaborated on numerous other projects. Triumphal Arch for Carl XI on Coronation in Uppsala and Entry into Stockholm, 1672. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Bengt Holmquist, “Till Sveriges ära. Det götiska arvet” Stormaktstid. Erik Dahlbergh och bilden av Sverige, ed Leif Jonsson (Läckö, 1992), 125. Notes: Placed at the western portal of the Stockholm palace. Triumphal Arch for Carl XI After Victory over the Danes, 1679–1680. Patron: Crown. Bibliography: Bertil Waldén, Nicolaes Millich och hans krets (Stockholm, 1942), 168.

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APPENDIX 2 EARLY BIOGRAPHIES

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Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste, vol 2 (Nuremberg, 1675), 347. Nicodemus Tessin ist im Jahr 1619. in Teutschland/ in der Stadt Stralsund von fürnehmen Eltern gebohren/ welche ihn in seiner Jugend zum Studieren gehalten/ nachdem ihm aber selbige frühzeitig abgestorben/ und man sonderliche Lust bey ihme zum Zeichnen gemerkt/ haben ihn seine Freunde/ bey einem Königl. Schwedischen Ingenieur recommendiret/ bey welchem er in der Fortification unterwiesen worden/ worinn er dann dergestalt zugenommen/ daß er im 19. Jahr seines Alters/ in Königl. Schwedische Dienste gelanget/ um sich bey der Armee gebrauchen zu laßen; Demnach er aber verspüret/ daß die Leibes-Kräfte bey ihme nicht gar zu stark gewesen/ hat er sich auf die Architecturam civilem geleget/ worinn er dann dergestalt zugenommen/ daß die damals Regierende Königin Christina Ihn Anno 1645. als Architect in Bestallung angenommen/ und um in der guten Italienischen Architectura sich so viel bäßer zu üben ihn nach Italien geschicket/ woselbsten er dann so wol in Rom als andern Oertern Italiens und Frankreich seinen äußersten Fleiß/ durch einrahten verständiger Architecten/ so wol in fleißiger Betrachtung als Abzeichnung der principalsten Antichen und Modernen-Werken angewendet; nach seiner Zuruckkunft/ in Schweden ist er allezeit in Königl. Diensten von Königen zu Königen geblieben/ und mit sonderlichen Königl. Gnaden/ auch von allen Großendes Reichs geehret und beliebet worden. Unter andern von den principalsten Werken/ welche nach seinem Angeben gebauet/ seynd die Königl. Land-Häuser Dronningholm und Strömsholm von der Königl. Frau Wittwe Hedewig Eleonora ausgeführet/ ingleichem in Stockholm das Königliche Begräbnus für den Glorwürdigsten König Carl Gustav, welches noch im Werk ist. Wie herrlich sonsten die Stadt Stockholm und viele Oerter des Königreichs mit schönen Pallästen und gebäuden/ worvon ein Theil in Kupfer ausgehen/ durch seine gute Vorschläge sind in Aufnehmen gebracht und versehrt worden/ wird jederman/ deres gesehen/ mit Verwunderung bezeugen; wordurch ihme dann/ in diesem Königreich/ ein unsterb-rühmlicher Nahme verbleiben wird/ sintemaln er der guten und bästen Italiänischen Architectur gesuchet nach zu folgen/ und sie allhier in solchen Gang und Belieben gebracht/ daß auch gemeine Privat-Leute schier nichts mehr bauen/ es sey klein oder groß/ es komme dann nach dieser guten Manier/ wordurch also die Architectur allhier so zu floriren beginnet/ als in einem Ort von Europa. Sonsten ist er eines stillen/ nüchtern/ Gottfürchtigen/ aufrichtigen Lebens/ jederzeit fleißig/ diensthaftig und freundlich in Conversationen. Paul Jakob Marperger, Historie und Leben der berühmtesten europäischen Baumeister (Hamburg, 1711), 503–506. In Schweden machte sich gegen das Ende des vorigen XVII. Seculi seiner BauErfahrenheit halber berühmt Herr Baron TESSIN, welcher das königliche Schloss so wie es vor den Brand gestanden aufgeführet/ von welchem jederman der es gesehen sagen müssen/ daß es ein Muster eines nach allen Regeln der Architectur vollkommen wohl angelegten Gebäudes gewesen/ indem dessen festes Fundament, wie auch innerliche und äusserlich wohl ersonnene Zierde/ eine Admiration bey allen Anschauenden erwecket/ und würde es viel Raum und Zeit erfordern/ wann man en detail beschreiben wolte die köstliche Treppe nebenst ihrer Cascade

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an der Norder Malmer Seite/ worauf man mit Kutschen nach dem Schloß fahren kan/ die schöne Kirche und in solcher die vortrefflichste Gemählde/ unter andern das Jüngste Gericht von dem Herrn Klöcker von Ehrenstral und das Gewölb so al Fresco gemahlt von Sylvio, &c. inwendig in dem Schloß würde man gnug zu remarquiren haben an der guten Ordonnance und Eintheilung/ an der Zierde der Kammern/ und insonderheit des Königlichen Cabinets, es war aber dieser Kunst-Erfahrne Mann aus Stralsund in Pommern gebürtig/ woselbst er Anno 1619. gebohren worden/ gleich von seiner Jugend an haten ihn seine Eltern dem studiren gewidment/ weil aber nach deren Todt sich ein grosses Belieben zur Zeichen-Kunst bey ihm gefunden/ als bedungen ihn seine Vormündere bey einen Schwedischen Ingenieur oder Kriegs-Baumeister in die Information, in welcher er auch so trefflich zugenommen dass er in 13. Jahr schon in Königliche Schwedische Kriegs-Dienste tretten/ und einem Feldzug beywohnen können/ wie er aber zu solchen Kriegs-Fatiguen seine Kräfte zu schwach zu seyn vermerckte/ legte er sich auf Architecturam Civilem und machte in solcher so gute progressus, daß ihn die Königin Christina Anno 1645. zu ihren Ober-Baumeister ernennte/ und ihn (damit er was zu einem so wichtigen Ampt gehörete/ desto besser erlernen möchte) auf ihre Unkosten nach Italien sandte/ woselbst er sich an unterschiedlichen Orten/ sonderlich zu Rom/ und nach diesen in Franckreich so unverdrossen aufgeführet/ die vornehmsten Baumeisters besuchet/ sich bey ihnen Raths erholet/ und die besten Sachen abgezeichnet/ daß er bey seiner Wiederzurückkunft in Schweden/ allezeit in der Könige Gunst geblieben/ und von denen Grossen des Reichs in hohen Ehren gehalten worden/ dabey er dann ausser dem Königlichen Schloß/ noch vor ihre Majestät die verwittibte Königin Hedwig Eleonora unterschiedliche ihrer Lust-Schlösser/ als Droningsholm und Strömsholm erbauet/ in Stockholm selbst aber des Königs Caroli Gustavi glorwürdigster Gedächtniß/ sein prächtiges Grabmahl/ wie auch unterschiedlicher grosser Herrn Palatia, deren etzliche nach diesem in Kupfer gestochen worden/ daher dann die Italienische Bau-Art/ als welche er allezeit beybehalten/ so gemein in diesen Nordischen Ländern geworden/ daß weil ein jeder/ der Mittel zu bauen hatte/ dieselbe sich zum modell vorsetzte/ in Stockholm fast eben so schöne Palatia als in Italien zu finden seyn/ obbesagtes Dronigholm wird uns in der Ao. 1707 herausgekommen Beschreibung des Königreich Schwedens folgender Gestalt beschrieben/ dass es ohnfern der Residentz Stadt auf einer Insul des Meeler Sees liege/ und vor ein Muster und Idee des Frantzösischen Versailles dienen könne/ das Gebäude an sich selbst schreibet unser Autor hat einen trefflich magnifiquen Eingang rings herumb mit Galerien und schönen Statuen versehen/ die Zimmer sind schön meubliret/ und mit trefflichen Schildereyen gezieret/ die Dächer von Küpfer überzogen/ über welche in der Mitte ein schöner gleichfalls mit Kupfer bedeckter Thurm/ auf dessen Spitze die Schwedische Cron stehet/ hervor raget/ der Garten welcher 1000. Ruthen in die Länge hat/ is mit den trefflichsten Fontainen, Cascaden und raren Statuen angeleget/ die an den Lustgarten stossende Alleen, item der Irrgarten seynd sonderbahr sehenswürdig/ nicht ferne davon stehet auch ein durch Kunst angeordneter Lust-Wald/ und in demselben eine Menagerie.

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APPENDIX 3

Nicodemus Tessin the Elder to Axel Oxenstierna, 5 February, 1652. RA E 739 - Axel Oxenstiernas brevväxel. Published in Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. och några samtida byggnader, vol 1 (Stockholm, 1912), 235. Hochwollgeborner Graff, Gnädiger Herr Ewer Hochgrefl: Excellentz mit diesem meinem vnterthänigstem schreiben anzugelangen habe ich nicht vnterlaßen können, daß nach dem ich meine reise durch Teutschlandt vndt weiter biß hir in Rom verbracht woselbst ich mich bey dritte halb monat aufgehalten auch selbe Stadt, neben andern auf dieser reise, so viel möglich besehen, auch noch hinfüro meinen fleiß thuen werde. Ob nuhn woll ich vnterschiedene feine gebeuw gesehen, scheinet es doch daß von manchem offt ein mehres gemacht wirdt alß es an Ihme selber ist, den man nuhr hie vndt da etwan ein wolgemacht Stück in irgendt einem Pallatzio findet, von dem daß gantze gebeuw den ruhm bekompt, Sonsten seindt die Pallazzia alhier meistentheils sehr groß vndt Kostbahr erbauwet, gezieret mit vielen Statuen vndt gemälten, dergegen aber die geringeren oder burger heüser, auch so schlecht, alß ich die an keinem orthe gefunden. Daß beste so ich in diesem lande finde, Seindt die gebeuwde der Alten, so viel noch von denselben verhanden, vndt dan die Kirchen, woran man dan viel schöne werck siht, wie auch ist die materia vndt des landes Ahrt alhier treflich gudt vndt bequem, also daß es vnmöglich, an andern örtern, so weiter gegen Norden, also zu bauwen, den ich diesen gantzen winter in Rohm keinen Schne gesehen, darzu laufen die Fontanen beÿdes winter vndt Sommer, deren dan alhir trefflich viel verhanden, wie dan eine neuwlich gemacht, welche auf dem Platz Navona, genandt, stehet, so gleich einem felsen mit vier gewaltigh großen Statuen von weisen marbell neben einem alten vndt zimlich hohen Obelisco oben dar auf, welche zu sehen würdigh. Jn Jhren garten aber ist daß vornemste die Grotten, fontainen, Statuen vndt alleen von Zypreß beümen, welches alles sich an anderen örthern so nicht thuen laßet. Jnneligenden abriß auf daß lusthauß zu Bergshammer habe ich alhier verfertiget, Ewer hochgrefl: Excell:tz vnterthänigh bittendt, diese meine geringe arbeit sich gnädigh gefallen zu laßen. Vndt wie woll ich zwar zuvor auf bemeltes hauß etwaß verfertiget, deücht mir doch dieses bequemer vndt von ohngefehr gleichem kosten zu sein, die wohnungen seindt mehrentheil mit dem vorigen gleich, allein ist das dach etwaß beßer proportioniret, damit es nicht gar zu hoch seÿ, vndt seindt deßwegen auf den seÿten in der öberen wohnungh zwene kleine Altanen gemacht. Die größe der wohnungen ist neben dem maß auch darbeÿ geschrieben, wie den auch die Fazziata solches mit mehrem außweiset, vndt von es Ewer hochgrefl: Excell:tz gnädich belieben möchte den bauw so lange zu verschieben, biß mir Gott wiedervmb zurück helfen würde, wolte ich den selben so viel möglich mit fleiß befordern helfen, damit alles recht vndt woll gemacht würde, welches dan, wan alles beÿ der handt, desto geschwinder könte verfertiget werden. Vnterdeßen ist an Ewere Hochgrefliche Excell:tz nochmahlen mein untherthänigstes bitten, nach dem ich vernommen, daß auf die, Ewer Excell:tz gnädich bewuste anweisungh, wegen sehl: Abraham Wÿnandtz verlohrenen gütter im Sundt, noch nichtes würckliches erfolget, dieselbe gnädich belieben möchten, noch mahlen in der Königl: Cammer, dero gnädigstem versprechen nach, so viel zu vermögen, daß die so lang verhoffte zahlungh erfolgen möchte, vndt ich in meinem abwesen nicht hülfloß gelaßen würde. Vndt wie woll Ewer hochgrefl: hohe gnade, gegen mich alß dero vnwürdige diener, vielveltigh vndt gnädighst erwiesen, ich ohne daß nicht gnuchsam zu rühmen, viel weiniger zu verdienen weiß,

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gelebe ich doch der vnterthänigsten zu versicht, Ewer hochgrefl: Excell:tz werden in meinem abwesen auch hinferner dero gnade vndt hülfe geniesen laßen, alß dero, negst Gott, ich vor mein wolfardt vnterthänigst zu dancken schüldigh, Ewer Excell:tz nochmahlen vnterthänig bittent dieselbe gnädigh geruhen dieses mein geringes schreiben in gnaden zu vermercken, wie auch mein vndt der meinig: gnädiger herr zu sein vndt verbleiben, Ewer hochgrefl: Excell:tz sampt dero hochgrefl: familien hiemit in gottes gnädige obacht zu langhem leben vndt bestendiger gesundtheit, mich aber in dero hohe gnade vnterthänigst empfehlendt, Ewer Hochgrefl: Excellentz Datum Romæ den 5 februarij Ao 1652 Vnterthänigster vndt schüldigstgehorsamster treuwer diener, Nicodemus Tessin

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APPENDIX 4

Nicodemus Tessin the Elder, Kort och oförgrijpeligh opsatz. RA Stockholms stads acta, 8, ca 1672–1674. Kort och oförgrijpeligh opsatz och wnderrättelse Till Wälb:ne H: Secreteraren, opå hwadh sätt Kongl: Maÿtt:, denne stadhe sampt hela Rÿket wthi Bÿgningz wäsendet her effter aller wnderdånigst kundhe blifwa betient 1) Kongl: Maÿtt kan wara wäll betient Om Architecten holles wedh deth werk han lert hafwer och hans Profession angår och består dettsamma förnembl: wthi Speculationer at opfinna deth som länder till/nödig, nÿttig och Zierligh Bÿgnat. Hwar förre när Kongl: Maÿtt Resolverar at någon Bÿgningh [loss] skall blifwa förretagen, Architecten då förresteller een wthförligh dessein och förshlag der öfwer; Om då Kongl: Maÿtt samme dessein allernådigst approberar, giör han densamma i gönnom sina wnderhafwande werkstellig, wnderwisandes dem som dermedh hafwa at bestella huru dhe deres veerk derwedh förrätta skolle, och måste dhe allesammans wara förbundne at afhempt ordres af honnom, så frampt werket [loss] elliest eftter behör skall hafwa sin rätta gong och komma till godh Endtskap: 2) Dhe Bÿgningar som skee wedh Stadhe der öfwer kundhe hans Excell: herr Öfwer Ståtthollaren och samptl: Borgmästare och Rådh resolvera, kundhe och Architecten då wara tillstades om fredagen opå Rådshuset, som är den dagen der sådahne saker förre komma, eller der han deßemellan behöfdes, kundhe han opkallas, och elliest hollas derwedh den ordning som korteligen ofwan förmelt är, derwthinnan och Stadzens Bÿgningz betienste kunna wara honnom till handa, och för den skuldh för Stadzens Bÿgninger åtminstone b____niuta [loss] så mÿcket som een Rådmans löhn, emedhan hanß tienst wedh een Stadh annorstades fuller så nÿttig funnetz som een Borgmästares, och bordhe han derförre icke belastas medh een hoop sÿßlor som hans Embete Inthet angå, wthan fast mehra hans werk hindra, och des wthan Embetz Borgmästare medh sina Colleganter nogsampt kan hinna medh, emedhan deth beswäret om Bÿgningz wäsendet Architecten allena Åligger, kan och således Embetes Collegium hafwa bättre tidh och tillfällen medh Större nÿttigheet in Rätta Embeten och Skråen som Eentligen hörer till ett sådant Collegium; 3) Emedhan Architectz werk förnambl: består der wthinnan at medh sine godhe Speculationer och desseiner komma anderes händer till at arbeta, hwilket är den rätta och besta wnderwÿsning för handtwerketz männerne; män der emoot om Een och annan blifwer tillåthen som icke rätt lärt eller nogsam förfarenheet hafwer, wthan fast mehra igonnom egen inbillning låther sigh tÿkia wara kunnig nogh wthi een så nödig och nÿttig konst som dock mehra än/Een manniskas older erfordrar, blifwa derigönnom framförde een hoop desseiner som mehra lända till förderf än något gott, och föra handtwerks folket på een orätt wegh at giöra odogeligh arbete; Män På deth sådant mißbruk kundhe wara fortagen och den som hadhe hågh och willia at öfwa sigh wthi Architecturen icke matte blifwa afskreckt eller hindrat at giöra sigh widhare förfahren och kunnigh der wthinnan, så och den som wille låtha Bÿggia icke heller måtte twifla om hans Bÿgning blefwer föört effter een godh dessein, sÿnes dertill wara den bästa wägen denne, at Ingen måtte fördrista sigh at anordna eller stella i werket någon bÿgning för än desseinen deröfwer af Kongl: Maÿttz Architect wore öfverseet, der öfwer hans omdömmer in hämptat, och eftter hans gått finnande Approberat

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och wnderskrifwin, hwar i gönnom den som desseinen giordt mÿcket kundhe lehra, så och den som Bÿggia will desto bättre blifwa betient, sampt och handtwerks folket blifwa rätt wnderwÿste och förbättradhe, Skedde altså derigönnom Kongl: Maÿtt: stadhen och landet förmodeligen een vnderdånig och nÿttig tienst som wäll kunde wara een godh belöning werdt, tÿ den som wngh är kan icke hafwe bÿwistat månge werk, och derförre omoÿeligh kan hafwa den förfahrenheten som den samme den altidh i från sin vngdom in till sin temmeligh ålder sigh wthi förfahrneheet bracht, hafwer och haftt den nådhen at tiena hennes Kongl. Maÿtt Drottning Christina i från Ao: 1636. wedh Krigz Staten först for Copio Conducteur och Ingenieur blifwit brukat och öfwat sigh så wäll wthi Architectura Militaris som Civilis, hwilken senare elliest mÿcket mehra förfahrenheet behöfwer, och för den skuldh höghst bemelte hennes Kongl. Maÿtt Ao: 646 nådigst hafwer förordnat honnom för Architect wthi Borgm. de la Vallèès fadhers stelle och alt sedermehra, bleef och strax antagen för Architect- [loss] hooß hans Kongl: Maÿtt Konung Carl Gustaff Glorwÿrdigst i åminnelse och alt sedhan opwachtat nu Regerande Kongl: Maÿtts Bÿgningar in till närwarande tidh förmodeligen till et Nådigt nöÿe, derom han icke mindare hereffter sigh ombeflitandes warder, och hafwer han således alt i från sin Yngdom icke wthan månge Swårigheet måst sigh frambhielpa, Emedhan och kriget hans föräldrar mÿcket ruinerat, Fadhern honnom mÿcket wngh ifrån fallit der elliest hans Förfäder wthj Pommern och Stadhen Strahlsundh wälbekante så igönnom des wapen opå Rådhuset och Kÿrkior, än tillfinnandes är. Om Nu Kongl: Maÿtt, allernådigst tächtes benådhe deß gamble tienare medh något mehra förbettring och framstegh, som fuller Architectj hooß andre höge Potentater wedherfahres, när dhe längre tienst och i gönnom dehres flÿt sigh i erfahrenheet beacht icke imindre wedh denne noble konsten som andre wedh Krigz Staten i från Ingenieur och till bättre wilkor framsteeg winna, hwilket al så wäll hans sönner som andra lehr animera at beflÿta sigh desto bettre wthj des lehrdom och sådant som kan lända Kongl: Maÿtt till widhare wnderdånig tienst; Och är detta så korteligen opsatt och stelles altsammans wthj wälb:ne H Secreterarens gåttfinnande och Correction, förblifandes wthi deth öfwrige wälb:be herr Secreterarens tienst beredhwilligst tienare[.] *

*

*

Short and unassailable essay and brief to the well-born Mr Secretary, on which way His Royal Majesty, this city, and the whole kingdom in building affairs hereafter may be most humbly served. 1) His Royal Majesty may be well served if the Architect is held to that work he has learned and which pertains to his Profession, and which consists primarily of devising Inventions that lead to necessary, useful, and Decorous Buildings. Therefore, when His Royal Majesty Resolves that some Building [loss] shall be undertaken, the Architect then presents a comprehensive design and proposal for it. If then his Royal Majesty most graciously approves the same design, he [the architect] realizes the same through his assistants, teaching those who are responsible [for construction] how they should perform their work. And they must all take orders from him, if the work [loss] shall develop as it should and come to a good conclusion. 2) His Excellence the Chief Governor and all the Magistrates and Council could take charge in regard to the Buildings that fall to the City. The architect could also be present in the Town Hall on Fridays, which is the day on which such things are discussed, and if he is needed otherwise he could be called, but otherwise held to the plan sketched out above. The City’s Building services could also be available to him, and for that reason at least [loss] so much as a Councilman’s salary, since his post is as important for a city as a Chief Magistrate’s.

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APPENDIX 4 And he should therefore not be saddled with an assortment of duties that do not fall within his office, but rather hinders his work, and furthermore, which the Municipal Magistrates with their Colleagues can manage well enough, while the responsibility for Building affairs lies solely with the Architect. And so the Municipal Offices may . . . with Greater utility establish Offices and Guilds that Actually belong to such an Office. 3) Since the Architect’s work consists primarily of his good Inventions and designs, they fall to others’ hands to work, which is the right and best instruction for the craftsmen. But to the contrary, if one or another [building master] be allowed [to work] who has not learned properly or does not have enough experience, but rather more through his own delusion believes himself to be capable enough in such an important and necessary art . . . a group of designs will be delivered that will instead lead to disaster rather than anything good, and [he will] lead the craftsmen in an incorrect manner that results in unacceptable work. But such abuses could be avoided, and those who have the inclination and desire to practice in Architecture must not be discouraged or hindered from making themselves more experienced and capable therein. And so that he who wishes to build [i.e., potential patrons] need not doubt whether his building will be raised according to a good design, it seems that the best way is that No-one should be bold enough to order or go forward with a building before the design for it has been looked over by His Royal Highness’s Architect [i.e., Tessin himself], his judgment sought, and his approval certified and signed. Through this he who made the design could learn much, he who wishes to Build [the patron] will be better served, and the craftsmen will be properly instructed and improved. Such a procedure would likely serve a humble and useful service in His Royal Majesty’s city and land that could well be worth rewarding, for he who is young cannot have taken part in [the erection of] many works, and thus cannot possibly have the experience of he who from his youth into maturity has developed his skill, and has also had the favor to serve her Royal Majesty Queen Christina from Ao: 1636, employed by the Military first as Copio Conductor [building leader] and Engineer and trained in Military and Civil Architecture, the latter of which otherwise requires much experience. And for that reason the aforementioned Royal Majesty [Christina] Ao: [1]646 most graciously has appointed him [Tessin] as Architect in place of Magistrate de la Vallée’s father [i.e., as successor to Simon de la Vallée], and furthermore, was also soon appointed Architect- [loss] by his Royal Highness Carl Gustaf, most glorious in memory, and ever since has overseen the now-Reigning Royal Majesty’s Buildings till the present time, presumably to [his Majesty’s] Gracious pleasure . . . And he has accordingly, ever since his Youth, not without many Difficulties, had to help himself forward, since the war ruined his parents, his father passed away very young, where otherwise his forefathers were well known in Pomerania and the City Stralsund, where their arms are still in the Town Hall and Churches. If now His Royal Majesty thought to grace his old servant with some more improvement and advancement, which certainly falls to the Architects in the service of other high Potentates, when they win notice through their longer service and their industry in that noble art, as others in the Military also are promoted from Engineer to better circumstances, all of which should encourage his sons and others to bring greater diligence to its study, so that it can be of further use in the most humble service of his Royal Majesty. Thus is this so briefly composed and brought together for the well-born Secretary’s approval and Correction, remaining a most ready servant in the Secretary’s service.

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APPENDIX 5 TIMELINE

Date

Projects

1615

Career Markers

Concurrent Events

Tessin born in Stralsund, December 7.

1628

Siege of Stralsund by imperial troops.

1636

Tessin enters Swedish service.

1640–1643

Work at Oxenstierna’s estates.

1646

Town planning, 1646–1648.

1648

Krusenberg house for Oxenstierna.

1651–1653

Named “royal architect and building master.” Peace of Westphalia ends Thirty Years’ War. Studies abroad.

1653–1660

Work at Borgholm; work for Rosenhane, Wrangel, and others.

Christina abdicates, June, 1654.

1660

Kalmar Cathedral begun. (Work soon stopped.)

Carl X Gustaf dies; regency instated.

1661

Named city architect of Stockholm.

1662

Drottningholm, Bonde, Bååt palaces begun.

1663

Takes over project to rebuild royal palace.

Named architect to the royal palace.

1667

Södermalm courts; project for Stockholm town hall.

Named city councilman in Stockholm.

1668

Work begun on Finnish church in Stockholm (never finished).

1669

Strömsholm, Carl Sparre palaces begun; work begun on Tessin’s own house (1669–1670). (continued )

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(continued )

Date

Projects

1670

Sjöö begun; Axel Sparre palace begun (1671); work resumes at Kalmar Cathedral.

1671

Caroline burial chapel begun.

1672

Gothenburg town hall; Mälsåker begun.

1673

Mint begun.

1674

Royal stables begun.

1675

State bank begun.

War with Denmark, 1675–1679.

1680

Work begun at Ericsberg manor, probably under Mathias Spihler.

Reduction of estates to crown culminates.

1681

Career Markers

Concurrent Events

Personal rule of Carl XI begins. Tessin ennobled.

Tessin dead, May 24.

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INDEX

A von Aachen, Hans 2 Adolf Friedrich I, Duke of MecklenburgSchwerin 29 Alberti, Leon Battista 54, 120–121, 180 Tempio Malatestiano 54 De re aedificatoria 120–121, 180 Albinus, Johann Tobias 12, 151–152, 155, 221 Albrecht, Duke of Sachsen–Gotha 116 Alexander VII, Pope 46 Algardi, Alessandro 6 Amsterdam 2, 6–8, 44, 51, 54, 57, 60, 62, 75–76, 101, 104, 110, 122, 135–136, 139–140, 170 Antwerp 2, 4, 29, 57–58 Arensburg (Kuresaare) 52–53, 61 Arfidson, Lars 163 Asplund, Erik Gunnar 143 Augsburg 8, 17–19, 27–28, 36, 45 August, Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel 8 Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland 103 B Bååt, Seved 96–97, 114, 170 Bamberg 45 Banér, Johan 103 Barberini 1 Barth (Pomerania) 41, 61 van Bassen, Bartholomeus 196 Nieuwe Kerk, The Hague 194, 196 Beck, David 4–5, 7–8, 63 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 173 von Bentheim, Lüder 147 Berlin 28, 103 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 8, 46, 67, 100, 121, 143–144, 199, Cornaro Chapel, Sta Maria della Vittoria 46 Four Rivers Fountain 46, 49 Louvre 215 Palazzo Ludovisi (Montecitorio) 46 de Besche, Gerard 12 de Besche, Gilles 12 de Besche, Hubert 12 de Bie, Cornelis 5 Bielke, Nils 155 van Bleyswijk, Dirk 4 Le Blon, Michel 4, 6 Blume, Heinrich 36 Böckler, Andreas 104 Bogislav XIV, Duke of Pomerania 23, 30 Bologna 45, 54 Bonde, Gustaf 93–96, 104, 109, 114, 116, 129–130, 170, 193 Borgholm 27, 105, 117–118

Borromini, Francesco 46–47, 52, 86, 100 Lateran Basilica 46–47 S Carlo alle Quattro Fontane 46 Sant’ Ivo 46 Bottschild, Samuel 189 Bourdon, Sébastien 3–4, 7–8, 63 Boy, Willem 11, 180 Boyle, Richard, Lord Burlington 85, 145 Bramante, Donato 53, 120, 194, 199 Brandin, Philipp 29–30 de Bray, Salomon 122, 192, 199 Breslau (Wrocław) 42 Bretzel, Andreas 19–20 de Brosse, Salomon 13, 56, 63, 123 Luxembourg Palace 13, 63, 123 St Gervais 63 Brucker, Johann Jakob 187, 204–205 Le Brun, Charles 3, 10 C Cambridge 110 Camerarius, Ludwig 63 Campbell, Colen 193 van Campen, Jacob 13, 58, 104, 111, 122–123, 145, 149–150 Amsterdam Town Hall 6, 58–59, 124, 135–136, 146, 199 Mauritshuis 58–59, 111, 123 Noordeinde Palace 58, 60, 111 Caratti, Francesco 105 Carl X Gustaf, King of Sweden 5, 9, 16–17, 57, 62–65, 67, 72–73, 77–80, 88, 90, 103, 109, 117, 131, 161, 194, 211 Carl XI, King of Sweden 10, 66, 79, 88, 91–92, 160, 164–165, 171–172, 207, 211 Carl XII, King of Sweden 131, 182, 217 Carlberg, Johan Eberhard 209 Carove, Carlo 97, 114, 163 Carove, Giovanni 163 Carracci, Agostino 205–206 Carracci, Annibale 205–206 du Cerceau, Jacques Androuet 104, 193 Chanut, Pierre 115 Charles I, King of England 4 Charles II, King of England 4 Chauveau, Evrard 88 Christian IV, King of Denmark 12, 23, 27 Christina, Queen of Sweden 1–9, 16, 31, 38, 43–44, 48–49, 53–54, 56, 58, 61, 63–64, 79, 90–92, 104–105, 108, 117–118, 162, 165, 185–186, 191, 221 Christler, Hans Jakob 12, 34 Le Clerc, Sébastien 209 Copenhagen 42, 104, 212

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Cordier, Nicolas 4, 6 Correggio, Antonio Allegri 1–2, 205 da Cortona, Pietro 9, 46, 100 Sta Maria della Pace 46 SS Martina e Luca 46 Cranach, Lucas the Elder 1, 10, 28, 188 Cranach, Lucas the Younger 28 Crell, Magnus Gabriel 155–156 Cronberg, Börje 170 Cronström, Daniel 221 Cronström, Isaac Kock 170 D de Cussy, Louis 88 Dahl, Michael 221 Dahlbergh, Erik 64–65, 82, 85–86, 91, 155, 193 Suecia antiqua et hodierna 64–65, 82, 85–86, 91, 96–97, 106, 204, 209, 219–220 Dankerts, Cornelis 122, 192 Danzig (Gdan´sk) 19, 30, 104 Delft 4–5 Demosthenes 25 Denmark 10, 12, 23–24, 62, 65–66, 88, 93, 170 Descartes, René 3, 185–186, 205 Dieussart, Charle Philippe 7 Dijon 56 Doberan 29 Dortsman, Adriaen 11, 101–102, 123 Finspong 11, 101–102, 217 Douglas, Robert 103, 119 Dresden 103, 200 Dürer, Albrecht 2, 48, 188, 191 Duytsche Mathematique 40, 146, 183 van Dyck, Anthony 4–5, 10 E Ehrenstrahl, David Klöcker VII, 6–10, 21, 25, 27, 33, 45, 82, 88, 91, 97, 108, 111, 114, 165, 189–191, 209, 211, 221 Eosander, Nils Israel 103, 152 Eosander Göthe, Johann Friedrich 103 Erasmus 25 Evelyn, John 54 F Falkenberg, Henrik 170 Faxell, Daniel 170 Félibien, André VII, 3–4, 208 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor 13 Ferrara 45, 54 Feuquière, Isaac de Pas, Marquis de 87 Fischer, Andreas 111, 161 Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard 60, 200 Imperial Library 200–201 Karlskirche 200, 202 Florence 44–46, 48, 51, 55–56 Palazzo Vecchio 44, 48 Floris, Cornelis 29

Fontana, Carlo 144 Bigazzini Palace 177 Fontana, Domenico 127, 132 Lateran Palace 177 Sistine Chapel, Sta Maria Maggiore 46, 127, 132 Forlì 54 France VII, 3, 5, 15–16, 33, 42, 44, 54, 55–58, 60, 62, 72, 86–87, 96–97, 101, 103, 105, 112, 118, 121, 124, 172, 176, 185, 191–194, 198, 211–212, 221 Frankfurt am Main 104 Frederik Hendrik, Stadholder in Northern Netherlands 13, 33, 62, 177 Fredrik I, King of Sweden 217 Freitag, Adam 177–179, 182–183, 185 Architectura militaris aucta et nova 177–179, 182–183, 185 Du Fresne, Raphaël Trichet 4 Friedrich III/I, Elector of Brandenburg, King in Prussia 103 Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg 123 Friedrich V, King of Bohemia 62–63 Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft 103 Furttenbach, Joseph 104 van Gameren, Tilman 145–150 Krasin´ski Palace 146 Lubomirski Country House 146 University Church, Krakow 149 de la Gardie, Jakob 19 de la Gardie, Magnus Gabriel 17, 19–21, 34, 44, 52–53, 80, 102, 110–116, 119, 129, 131, 170, 175 G Gävle 38–41, 43, 53–54, 61 de Geer, Louis 62, 101, 169 Genoa 55–56, 141 Giambologna 3 Gibbs, James 144 Giocondo, Fra Giovanni 120 Goelgel, Johann Georg 207–208, 219–220 Goldmann, Nicolaus 42–43, 146, 203 Goltzius, Hendrick 28 Gothenburg 70, 143, 149 Grammatica, Antiveduto 112 van ‘s–Gravesande, Arent 123, 194 Mare Kerk, Leiden 194, 196 Greifswald 104 Grotius, Hugo 63, 185, 205 Gyldenhoff, Balthasar 157, 163 Gundelach, Matthäus 19 Gustaf II Adolf, King of Sweden 8, 18–19, 24, 32, 35, 40, 62, 67, 89–90, 103, 131, 178, 221 Gustaf Vasa, King of Sweden 1 Güstrow 23, 29–30 Gyllenstierna, Carl 216 H The Hague 13, 58, 62, 104, 110 Hainhofer, Philipp 8, 19, 27–28

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INDEX Halle 200, 206 Hamburg 7–8, 10, 104 Hårleman, Carl 14, 82, 209, 213 von Haugwitz, Anna Margareta 8 Hedwig Eleonora, Queen of Sweden 7, 9–10, 62, 70, 78–82, 87–92, 109, 112, 114, 119, 131, 157–158, 160, 163–164, 172, 194, 221 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 206 Heinrich von Cölln 11 Heintz, Joseph 17 Henrietta Anna, Duchess of Orléans 9 ‘s–Hertogenbosch 177 von Hildebrandt, Johann Lucas 144 Hilliger, Wolfgang 29 Höfing, Hermann 30 Holbein, Hans the Younger 1, 17 Holl, Elias 17–21, 45, 147, 191 Town Hall, Augsburg 20–21, 45 Holl, Matthäus 12, 19–21, 61, 112, 117, 152, 220 Hapsal Palace 19–21 Läckö Palace 112–113 Homer 25 van Honthorst, Gerrit 10 Huygens, Constantine 122–123, 135, 192 I Italy VII, 5, 7, 15–16, 18, 27–28, 33, 42, 44–56, 60, 63, 75, 77–78, 105, 118–121, 124, 126, 144, 146, 175, 191–194, 211, 212, J Jacobsz, Juriaen 8–9 Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau–Siegen 40, 91 Jones, Inigo 110, 121–122, 145, 149–150 Banqueting House 110 Queen’s House 111 Jordaens, Jacob 4, 7, 63, 111 Jordis, Hendrik 91 Julius Caesar 183 Junius, Franciscus 188 Juvarra, Filippo 60, 144 K Kalmar 30, 70, 149 Castle 65 Town Hall 155–156 Kant, Immanuel 206 Karlskrona 149 de Keyser, Hendrick 75, 122, 192 Noorderkerk, Amsterdam 75 Khevenhüller, Anna Regina 6 Kirstenius, Johann Peter 128–129, 132, 151 von Klengel, Wolf Caspar 147, 165, 192 Königsberg 28 Königsmarck, Hans Christopher 1, 96–97, 103 Körver, Johann 28 von Krafft, David 221 Kraus, Hans Georg 19

L Leiden 40, 42–43, 110, 146, 177, 203 Leipzig 45 Lemke, Johann Philipp 88 Leo X, Pope 120 Leoni, Leone 1–2 Lescot, Pierre 200 von der Linde, Lorentz 10, 130 Lipsius, Justus 187–188, 191, 200 Lodron–Laterano, Franz 1 London 9, 104, 110, 144 Longhena, Baldassare 55–56, 68, 70, 85, 145–146, 168–170, 199 S Giorgio Maggiore (Staircase) 55, 85, 87, 199 Giustinian–Lollin Palace 169 Sta Maria Assunta 55–56 Sta Maria della Salute 55–56, 68, 70 Widman Palace 169 Louis XIV, King of France 79, 87, 91–92, 192 Low Countries VII, 4–7, 11–13, 15–16, 33, 40, 44, 54, 57–59, 62, 76, 102–103, 111, 122–124, 145–146, 149, 163, 170, 176–177, 191–192 Lubomirski, Jerzy 146 Lurago, Carlo 105 Lyon 55–56 M Maastricht 177 Maderno, Carlo 78, 100 Madrid 104 Magalotti, Lorenzo 2, 171 Malmö 70, 149 Mansart, François 13, 56, 67, 97, 146, 193, 198, 202 Balleroy 198 Hôtel da la Vrillière 57 Maisons 13, 57 Church of the Minimes 202 Orléans Wing, Blois 13, 57, 63 Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, Queen of Sweden 8–9 Marot, Jean 93, 95–96, 193 Marperger, Paul Jakob VII, 208 Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria 27 Mechelen 11 Medici 44, 48 Meibom, Marcus 191 Melbitz, Johann Ladislaus 27 Le Mercier, Jacques 56, 63, 73–74 Church of the Sorbonne 56, 63, 73–74, 194 Merian, Caspar 101 Merian, Matthäus the Elder 45–46 Merian, Matthäus the Younger 131 Meyssens, Jan 5 Michelangelo 45, 48, 97, 136, 188, 205 Campidoglio 97, 136 Laurentian Library 45 Midow, Claus 29

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Millich, Nicolaes VII, 7, 10, 25, 85–86, 88, 91, 114 Mollet, André 13, 176 Momma, Jacob 151–152 Moscow 12 Munich 1–2

Potter, Joachim 152 Prague 1–3, 63, 88, 104–105

N Nancy 54 Noorwits, Pieter 196 Nieuwe Kerk, The Hague 194, 196 Le Nôtre, André 85–88, 176 Nuremberg 17, 45, 63, 90, 104

R Rainaldi, Carlo 49, 51–52, 54, 61, 70, 118, 126 Piazza del Popolo 46, 54 Sta Maria in Campitelli 70 Rainaldi, Girolamo 47, 49, 52 Raphael 2, 48, 120, 188, 205 Ravenna 54 Rembrandt 10 Ridinger, Georg 191 Riga 12, 76 Rijswijk Ter Nieuwburg 123 Rimini 54 Romano, Giulio 2 Rome 1, 4, 6–9, 43, 46–49, 52, 58, 60, 144, 146, 175–177, 181, 191, 194–195, 200, 202 Barberini Palace 9, 40, 46, 100, 102 Colonna Palace 200 Farnesina 40 il Gesù 72–73, 176, 217 Pamphili Palace 46–47, 141 Pantheon 131 Piazza del Popolo 46, 54 Quirinal Palace 9 Sant’Agnese 46, 49–52, 124, 126 Santa Maria Maggiore 46, 127 St Peter’s 46, 75, 120–121, 144 Vatican 46 Villa Borghese 46 Rosenhane, Johan 130 Rosenhane, Schering 44, 57, 93, 109–111, 114–116, 157, 161, 166 de’ Rossi, Mattia 144 Rotterdam 4, 110 Rubens, Peter Paul 5, 10, 56, 111, 192 Rudbeck, Olaus 174, 175 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor 1, 3, 27 Rügen 165

O van Obbergen, Anthonis 147 de l’Orme, Philibert 104, 192 Örnehufvud, Olof Hansson 31–32, 40, 43, 61 Orsi, Giovanni Domenico 105 Osnabrück 110 Oxenstierna, Axel 14, 21, 24, 27, 31–37, 39, 41, 43–44, 46, 48–49, 55, 58, 61, 64, 76, 85, 109–110, 117–119, 162, 175–176, 191, 193 Oxford 110 P Padua 54 Palbitzki, Matthias 6 Palladio, Andrea 33, 45, 54–56, 77, 85–86, 104, 121– 122, 145, 149, 163, 180–181, 198, 200, 203–204 S Francesco della Vigna 55 S Giorgio Maggiore 45, 55–56 Sta Lucia 56 Teatro Olimpico 86 Villa Pisani at Montagnana 77 Villa Rotonda 198 I quattro libri dell’architettura 18, 33, 77, 104, 121–122, 155, 163, 180–181, 199–200, 204 Palmstruch, Johan 76 Pamphili 49, 52 Panten, Caspar 12, 34–35, 42, 163 Wibyholm 12 Paris 3–4, 9, 13, 54, 56–58, 60, 63, 67, 93, 96–97, 103–104, 110, 181, 191, 193–194, 200, 202 Louvre 67–68, 200, 215 Passeri, Giambattista 7 Perini, Giovanni Baptista 28 Peroni, Giuseppe 4, 6, 7 Petel, Georg 19, 89–90 Philip IV, King of Spain 2, 58 Philipp I, Duke of Pomerania 28–29 Philipp II, Duke of Pomerania–Stettin 27 Philipp Julius, Duke of Pomerania–Wolgast 23 Poland 24, 62, 65, 145–150 della Porta, Giacomo 72–73 S Atanasio dei Greci 217 Post, Pieter 13, 58, 123, 145–147, 194, 198 Huis ten Bosch 58, 146–147, 149, 194, 198–199 Potamo of Alexandria 186–188, 205–206

Q Quellinus, Artus the Elder 6–7, 91

S Salviati, Giuseppe 112 von Sandrart, Joachim VII, 2, 6, 10, 25–27, 63, 124, 190, 207–208, 219–220 da Sangallo, Antonio the Younger 121 Savot, Louis 104, 192 Saxony 28–29 Scamozzi, Vincenzo 55–56, 104, 121–122, 145, 181, 203 L’idea della architettura universale 55, 104, 121–122, 181 Schabbel, Hinrich 30 Schefferus, Johannes 188–190

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INDEX Schickhardt, Heinrich 147, 191 Schleswig 31 Schlüter, Andreas 60 Schor, Johann Paul 8–9 Schwartz, Christoph 28 Schweigger, Georg 63, 90 von Schwengeln, Georg 53 Schwerin 23 van Scorel, Jan 1 Serlio, Sebastiano 73–75, 86, 104, 121–122, 163, 180, 193 Tutte l’opere d’architettura 18, 73–75, 86, 104, 121–122, 155, 163, 180 Sevin, Nicolas 88 Siena 45–46 Solari, Francesco 149 Soop, Gustaf 158, 171 Sparre, Axel 93, 167 Sparre, Carl 93, 97 Spihler, Matthias 12, 151–155, 157–158, 190, 221 Spranger, Bartholomäus 2 Starcke, Johann Georg 200 Palais im Grossen Garten 200–201 Stenbock, Johan Gabriel 10–11, 93, 154, 171 Stettin (Sczcecin) 8, 23, 26–28, 31, 45, 104, 178 Stevin, Simon 39–42, 61, 183 Stiernhielm, Georg 67 Stiernmarck, Magnus 170 Stimer, Franz 53 Stockholm House of the Nobility 14–15, 25, 43, 136, 170 Riddarholm Church 131, 134 Royal Palace 7, 10–11, 16, 63, 66–68, 70, 82, 88, 106, 112, 114, 118, 173, 182, 199, 208–210, 212–217 Stralsund VII, 8, 23–26, 28, 30–31, 41–42, 44, 103, 164–165, 178, 207 Sturm, Johann Christoph 203 Sturm, Leonhard Christoph VII, 7, 203–206, 208 Swan, Maria 58, 172 Sylvius, Johan 88 T Teppati, Blasio Ludovico 190 Tessin, Carl Gustaf 173, 209 Tessin, Ernst 31, 44–46, 48–49, 54, 100 Tessin, Georg 31, 151 Tessin, Nicodemus the Elder Ållonö Manor 153 Arensburg (Kuresaare) 52, 112, 119, 179 Bååt Palace 96, 98, 111, 114, 144, 169, 193–194 State Bank 76–78, 171, 176, 200, 213 Bonde Chapel, Spånga Church 114–115, 129–130 Bonde Palace 93–96 Borgholm Castle 64–67, 72, 117–119, 160–161, 163, 194 Caroline Chapel, Riddarholm Church 131–135, 171, 180, 208, 213

Douglas Residence 119 Drottningholm Palace 7, 9, 55, 62, 70, 78–92, 112, 114, 117, 144, 146, 151, 156–158, 160–161, 163–164, 172, 176, 180–181, 198, 200, 204, 208, 213, 216, 220 Ekolsund 14, 112, 158 Eriksberg Manor 153 Fiholm 33–36, 124 Finnish Church 68–70, 75, 209 Fleming Palace 194–195, 199 de la Gardie Chapel, Veckholm Church 112, 119, 128–129, 132, 151 Gripsholm (Unbuilt Garden Pavilion) 79, 119, 194, 196, 198 House of the Nobility 14, 43, 93, 124 Jäder Church 33 Jakobsdal (Ulriksdal) 19, 79, 87, 172 Järlåsa Church 161–165, 196 Kalmar Cathedral 56, 63, 65, 70–76, 117, 141, 176, 194, 209, 217–218 Krusenberg 43 Mälsåker 141, 171 St Mary Magdalene 141 Military Hospital, Malmö 70 Rosenhane Palace 111, 115 Royal Palace 66–68 Salsta Manor 153–155, 216, 221 Sjöö Manor 153–155, 169, 171, 216 Skokloster 103, 108–109 Axel Sparre Palace 167 Carl Sparre Palace 97–101, 193–194, 198, 217 Royal Stables 68, 171, 213–215 Stenbock Palace 154, 195 Strömsholm 79–80, 157, 160, 172, 174, 208, 213 Tessin House 168–172 Tidö 33, 36–37 Town Hall, Gothenburg 70, 143 Town Hall, Stockholm 61, 70, 133–143 Town Hall, Södermalm, Stockholm 143–144, 213 Wrangel Chapel, Skokloster Church 129–131 Wrangel Palace 103–108, 115, 119, 193 Architectura Militaris 182–183 Tessin, Nicodemus the Younger VII, IX, 12, 16, 44, 52, 56, 60, 66, 68, 75, 78, 85, 87–88, 121, 127, 144, 151, 168, 170–176, 179, 181–182, 189–190, 193, 199–200, 204, 207–221 Fredrik Church 217–219 Roissy 217 Royal Palace, Copenhagen 212 Royal Palace, Stockholm 66, 68, 88, 173, 182, 199, 208–210, 212–217 Royal Stables 213–216 Steninge Manor 216–218 Tessin, Nicolaus 31 Tessin, Philipp 31 Thomasius, Christian 200, 203, 206 Tilly (Johann Tserclaes) 23 Titian 1–2, 48

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Tivoli 46, 52, 54 Torgau 28–29 Torstensson, Lennart 103 Torun´ 177 Tott, Åke 14 Tott, Claes 14, 96, 158 Traversari, Ambrogio 190–191 Turin 55–56 U Uppsala 2, 4, 174–175, 187–190, 205 de la Vallée, Christoffer Johan 175 de la Vallée, Jean VII, 12, 15–17, 21, 42–43, 48, 61–64, 66–67, 75, 96, 105, 112, 114, 117–118, 124, 131, 152–153, 156–157, 159–162, 165, 190–191, 213–214, 220, 221 Catherine Church 16, 63, 75, 118 Ekolsund 14 House of the Nobility 14 Karlberg Palace 112, 114 Riddarholm Church 16 Royal Palace, Södermalm 16, 63, 66, 118 Royal Palace, Stockholm 16, 66, 67, 118 de la Vallée, Marin 13, 56 de la Vallée, Simon VII, 12–16, 33, 35–37, 42–43, 58, 63, 123–125 Ekolsund 14 Fiholm 33–36, 124–125 House of the Nobility 14–15, 43, 124 V Vasari, Giorgio 188, 191 Le Vau, Louis 56–57, 67, 97, 100–101, 146–147, 193 Le Raincy 101 Vaux–le–Vicomte 57, 100–102, 217 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de 182 van Veen, Otto 2 Velázquez, Diego 10 Veneto 55–56, 58, 145–146 Venice 8, 45, 48, 55–56, 60, 68, 85, 146, 168–170, 175, 191 San Marco 45 Verhulst, Rombout 91 Veronese, Paolo Cagliare 1–2, 205 Versailles 87, 199 Vicenza 45, 55

Vienna 104, 200 Vignola (Giacomo Barozzi) 33, 77–78, 203 Villa Farnese at Caprarola 77 Vingboons, Justus 14–15, 135–136 Vingboons, Philips 7, 104, 123, 135–136, 139, 170 Virgil 25, 185 Vitozzi, Ascanio 75 Vitruvius 18, 104, 120–122, 177, 180, 183, 192, 203 Vogel, Caspar 108 van den Vondel, Joost 5–6 Vos, Jan 6, 91 Vossius, Gerhard Johannes 62, 186–191, 200 Vossius, Isaac 185–187, 191, 205 Vouet, Simon 63 Vredeman de Vries, Hans 8 de Vries, Adriaen 1–2, 10–11, 86, 88 W von Wallenstein, Albrecht 23–26 Wärnschöld, Johan Lenaeus 40 Warsaw 104–105, 146, 149 Wijnandz, Abraham 58, 72, 151 Wilde, Jacob 30 Wilhelm, Heinrich 43 Wilhelm, Johann 104 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 205–206 Wismar 29–30, 44 Wittenberg 45 Władysław Zygmunt, King of Poland 177–178 Wolfenbüttel 42, 204 Salzdahlum Palace 204 Wolgast (Pomerania) 8, 23, 28, 44, 105 Wrangel, Carl Gustaf 8–9, 21, 44–45, 57, 96–97, 102–109, 114–117, 119, 130–131, 170, 175, 193 Wren, Christopher 60, 144–145 Chelsea Hospital 145 Greenwich Hospital 145 St Paul’s Cathedral 145 Trinity College Library 145 Wuchters, Abraham 9–10 Z Zeiller, Martin 45 Zürich 104

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ABBREVIATIONS

BStB CStA GLA KB NM RA SA SSA StSA SZ UUB

Berlin Staatsbibliothek Coburg Staatsarchiv Greifswald Landesarchiv Royal Library (Kungliga biblioteket), Stockholm Nationalmuseum, Stockholm National Archives (Riksarkivet), Stockholm Palace Archives, Stockholm (Slottsarkivet) Stockholm City Archives (Stockholms stadsarkiv) Stralsund Stadtarchiv Pomeranian Archives (Archiwum Państwowe w Szczecinie), Szczecin Uppsala University Library (Uppsala Universitetsbibliotek)

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PHOTO CREDITS Except for the photos offered for publication by the institutions listed below, all photos are by the author. Amsterdam: Bureau Monumenten en Archeologie Figure 112 Amsterdam: Gemeente Archief Figure 104 Copenhagen: De Danske Kongers Kronologiske Samling Figure 52 Dresden: Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden Figure 109 Los Angeles: Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California Figures 1, 2, 3, 12, 21, 22, 28, 32, 41, 43, 44, 47, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 74, 79, 80, 103, 134, 138, 139 Stockholm: Krigsarkivet Figures 19, 27 Stockholm: Kungliga Husgerådskammaren Figures 61, 62 Stockholm: Nationalmuseum Figures 9, 25, 26, 35, 36, 37, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 118, 119, 125, 126, 129, 132, 133, 140, 141, 142 Stockholm: Riddarhusets Arkiv Figure 5 Stockholm: Riksarkivet Figures 17, 84 Stockholm: Stockholm Stadsmuseum Figure 123 Uppsala: Upplandsmuseum Figure 120 Warsaw: Archiwum Tylmana, Gabinet Rycin Biblioteki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego Figure 113 Osvald Sirén, Gamla Stockholmshus af Nicodemus Tessin d.ä. samt några samtida byggnader 2 vols (Stockholm, 1912–1913) Figures 46, 67 Grosser historischer Weltatlas (Munich, 1957) Map 1 Private Collection: Figures 58, 59, 68

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