Zwinger

Zwinger, Dresden
Stephan Czuratis (Jazz-face), CC BY-SA 2.5

Augustus the Strong wanted a festival ground for tournaments and fireworks beside his palace in Dresden. Pöppelmann designed a large courtyard surrounded by low galleries and pavilions, and Permoser filled them with sculpture. The Crown Gate and the Nymphs’ Bath are Baroque at its most playful.

Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, wanted to make Dresden one of the most splendid capitals in Europe. The Zwinger was built in 1710–1728 on the site of an old fortification rampart, and the name refers to the space between the outer and inner walls of a fortification. The complex was to be used for festivities and tournaments and to display the king’s collections of scientific instruments, porcelain and natural history specimens. Pöppelmann travelled to Rome and Vienna to study the architecture there.

A large courtyard is surrounded by low single-storey galleries linked by two-storey pavilions. The Crown Gate, a tower-like gatehouse with a dome shaped like a crown, is the complex’s emblem. The Rampart Pavilion to the north has stairs that curve out into the courtyard. Behind one of the pavilions lies the Nymphs’ Bath, a grotto with cascades and sculptures. Balthasar Permoser and his workshop made hundreds of statues, satyrs, atlantes, vases and ornaments, so that architecture and sculpture merge.

The fourth side of the courtyard, towards the Elbe, long stood open. In the 1840s and 1850s Gottfried Semper built a gallery building here for the art collections, which today houses the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister with, among other things, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. The Zwinger was almost completely destroyed in the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 but was rebuilt in the GDR period. Today it houses museums of porcelain, scientific instruments and painting.