Tre Kronor burns
The medieval castle of Tre Kronor burns down in May 1697. Nicodemus Tessin the Younger designs an entirely new palace after Roman models.
Stockholm Palace became one of Europe’s great Baroque buildings and the last major project of Sweden’s Age of Greatness.
The castle of Tre Kronor had grown out of a 13th-century fortress with a tall defensive tower, and over the centuries it had been added to and rebuilt. Charles XI wanted to give the Swedish great power a modern residence, and from the 1690s Nicodemus Tessin the Younger rebuilt the north wing of the castle in Roman Baroque. The facade facing the town thus already looked new when disaster struck. On 7 May 1697 fire broke out in the attic, while Charles XI’s coffin lay in the castle awaiting burial. The fire spread quickly, and almost the entire building was destroyed. The king’s coffin was carried out, but large parts of the national archives and the royal library were lost.
Tessin presented designs for a new palace almost immediately. It became a square building around a courtyard, modelled on the Roman city palazzi, such as Palazzo Farnese, and on the great projects he had himself seen in Rome and Paris. The surviving north wing was incorporated. The facades are austere but rich in detail, with large windows, pilasters and sculpture. Building went quickly at first but was halted after the defeat at Poltava in 1709, when the wars consumed all resources. Tessin died in 1728, and his son Carl Gustaf Tessin and the architect Carl Hårleman eventually completed the work. The royal family was able to move in in 1754, more than half a century after the fire.
Building the palace became a school for the whole country. French sculptors, painters and craftsmen were summoned to Stockholm and trained Swedish pupils, and from this activity grew the drawing school that became the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. It was also from here that the Rococo spread to Swedish manor houses and town houses. The palace also organised the city around it: Slottsbacken, Lejonbacken and Norrbro created new spaces and axes. In the 18th century and later the interiors were decorated in various styles, and today the palace houses both the king’s workplace and several museums. Tre Kronor itself lives on in the name of a museum in the palace cellars, where remains of the medieval fortress and its walls can be seen.