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Gardens of Nudes - Part Four

© Kirk Johnson

This is fourth in a series of articles about nude statues in the formal gardens of Europe.

In the first article for this series, I wrote that "The gardens at the château of Versailles could be called the ultimate expression of the European formal garden. This is because while formal gardens have continued to be created, no new style of formal garden has been created since the grand French gardens of the seventeenth century." This is especially true of the Grotto of Thetis which was created between 1667 and 1669 to the north of the château . It was demolished in 1684 to allow the creation of the château 's north wing.

When I think of a grotto, I usually envision a naturalistic cavern, so the architectural grottos of Renaissance and Baroque gardens took some getting used to. The Grotto of Thetis is one of the last and the grandest of these architectural grottos. It wasn't even set into a hillside, it was a freestanding building. If you saw the exterior, you wouldn't have thought that it was a grotto.

In my previous article, I wrote about caves in and near the gardens of Imperial Rome. It was common practice for caves near villas to be adorned with sculptures, especially statues of nymphs. These nymphae, or grottos dedicated to nymphs, were often used as dining rooms. If a villa didn't have a cave nearby, an artificial cave might be dug into a hillside. What I didn't mention in my earlier article is that the Romans also created architectural nymphae which were shrines to nymphs.

There were two principal types of architectural nymphae. The Nymphaeum of the Emperor Claudius, which was discovered in 1981 at Punta Epitaffio is typical of the basilica form of nymphaeum. Basilica nymphae usually consisted of a vaulted rectangular room with an apse opposite the main entry; the apse would usually feature a fountain and there might be smaller fountains along the sides of the room; the Grotto of Thetis is descended from these nymphae. The other type of nymphea was similar to the architectural stages ( or frons scaenae) of many Roman theaters. The nymphaeum of Miletus is an extravagant example of this type of nymphae, which would usually terminate a city's main aqueduct.

Nymphae went out of fashion in much of Europe after the western half of the Roman Empire collapsed. I don't know if nymphae continued to be created in the surviving eastern part of the empire, which we call Byzantium, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Summers are hot in Greece and Turkey, so the pleasures of dining in cool grottos would have continued to be appealing. Also, it is known that the Byzantines continued to create automata and these "water tricks" were ideally suited to grottos. I have explored the subject of automata in an article entitled Giochi d'Acqua, so if you aren't familiar with automata, it will be best to read that article.

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