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Wine, Women and Water
By Norbert Piwowarczyk
Warsaw's Royal £azienki Park is one of
the most beautiful in Europe, not merely because of its abundance of
greenery.
£azienki is primarily a garden of art,
testimony to the taste of the man to whom £azienki owes its beauty:
King Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, the last king of
Poland.
The centerpiece of the park is the Palace on the
Water, the king's residence, where he collected artwork. The palace
stands on a broad terrace surrounded by a pond. Water in £azienki is
of considerable symbolic significance. The first structures located
here were baths used by barons, which gave the name to the future
park (³azienki in Polish is "baths").
The original building
constructed in the area of today's park was a palace pavilion,
commissioned at the end of the 17th century by the then-owner of
nearby Ujazdowski Castle, Grand Marshal of the Crown Stanislas
Herakliusz Lubomirski, a politician, poet and playwright. The
building was designed by the famous architect Tylman van Gameren.
The small pavilion performed the functions of a bathing area, but it
was hardly a temple of hygiene-rather that of
entertainment.
During the Baroque period, water took on extra
significance. Do you remember which of the Greek goddesses was born
out of sea foam? It was Aphrodite, the goddess of love. So, it was
here that Lubomirski indulged in the secret cult of the Greek patron
of love. Many a lady had an opportunity to take a bath-in the
marshal's company, of course. "In this quiet corner of the small
pavilion built on the water, the marshal manifested his need of love
and peace," said Prof. Marek Kwiatkowski, manager and enthusiast of
the Royal £azienki park for many years.
Still, the park
needed a counterbalance to the omnipresence of amorous themes. This
role was played by art, which leads us to another patron, Apollo.
The accumulation of works of art was supposed to direct people's
minds to this deity. However, there was yet another symbol: a spring
in front of the palace, a reference to Greek mythology again-the
Hippokrene spring that rose from under Pegasus hoof (thus the name:
"horse spring") on the Helicon Mountain. Pegasus is a symbol of
poetry and the spring itself, a source of inspiration for poets, was
looked after by the Muses living in the Helicon. In this way, the
water in £azienki brought together two Greek gods, who became the
patrons of this temple of love and art.
The park changed
owners several times, flourishing when it became the property of
Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski. Poniatowski was then elected king of
Poland and thus the park received its royal status. The king decided
to transform the park so that it would reflect his ambitions as a
patron of art. He employed architect Dominik Merlini, who designed
several new pavilions. The project also involved painters Jan
Bogumi³ Plersch and Marcello Bacciarelli, as well as sculptor
Andrzej Le Brun. They gave the entire park a new Classicist style.
Lubomirski had paid greatest attention to furnishing the palace,
which was much smaller in his times. King Poniatowski, in turn,
focused on the park as a whole, creating a vast (over 80 hectares),
romantic park with English flourishes. Many species of trees were
planted and the park received new ponds and islands.
Three
theaters were also established in the area of £azienki. One has a
stage on an island. The second, the Stanislas Theater in the Old
Orangery, is one of only a few theaters from that period which has
survived. Today, it seems a small theater, but it still astonishes
with the perfection of its design and its ornate decorations.
Poniatowski put numerous sculptures of mythological character in the
park and copies of works by masters of the Antiquity. The leitmotif
is satyrs: characters enjoying wine and women. Today, these
mythological characters bear lamp posts, as was the way originally.
The lamps are symbols of light and the Enlightenment, the time of
King Poniatowski, who was also a believer in Apollo and
Aphrodite.
Today, in order to remind visitors of the
significance of water in £azienki, the Hippokrene spring is again
working. The fountain was renovated and reopened in early May. It
preserves some original elements which were cleaned, uncovering the
original, 17th-century marble floor. The management of the park is
already considering repair work to another large reservoir-the pond
around the monument of Frédéric Chopin.
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