François de Cuvilliés
Cuvilliés came to the Elector’s court as a court dwarf and became one of Europe’s foremost Rococo architects. The Amalienburg and the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich display his elegant, light ornament.
François de Cuvilliés was born in 1695 in Soignies in present-day Belgium. He was very short in stature and as a young man entered the service of the exiled Elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria, who was living in the Netherlands and France, initially as a court dwarf. The Elector recognised his talent and had him trained as a military engineer. When the court returned to Munich, Cuvilliés went with it. In the first half of the 1720s he was sent to Paris to study architecture under Jacques-François Blondel and to acquaint himself with the new French ornament, the Régence and the emerging Rococo. After his return in 1725 he became court architect in Munich alongside Joseph Effner.
Cuvilliés’ first major commission was the Rich Rooms in the Munich Residenz in the 1730s. His masterpiece is the Amalienburg in the Nymphenburg park, 1734–1739, a small hunting lodge whose circular hall of mirrors in silver and pale blue ranks among the finest Rococo interiors. He also designed Schloss Falkenlust in Brühl for the Archbishop of Cologne. The Residenz Theatre in Munich, now known as the Cuvilliés Theatre, was built in 1751–1755 with boxes in gold, red and white. Towards the end of his life he designed the façade of the Theatinerkirche in Munich. His style is characterised by asymmetrical ornament, rocailles, winding plant motifs and a lightness in which wall, ceiling and mirror flow into one another.
Cuvilliés died in Munich in 1768. From 1738 onwards he published a large number of ornamental engravings, which spread throughout Europe and were used as patterns by joiners, stuccoists and architects. In this way he helped make the Rococo an international style in southern Germany and Central Europe. His son of the same name continued his work and published his father’s designs. In the 20th century he attracted renewed attention when the interior of the Cuvilliés Theatre, which had been saved from the bombing of the Second World War, was reassembled in the Residenz. In Sweden his role is most closely matched by Hårleman and the French craftsmen who created the Rococo interiors of the Royal Palace in Stockholm at the same time.