The T shape of Versailles: French Gardens

When we set the garden of Catherine dei Medici at Monceaux against that of Diane de Poitiers at Anet we saw that it was the Medici garden which contained the seeds of growth, but now, in competitive display of a rather different sort, the gardens associated with Maria dei Medici at St. Germain and at the Luxembourg are at the end of their fruitful development, while it is the garden created by the Cardinal Minister at Richelieu (1627 1637) which is in the great tradition and bridges the gap between Monceaux and Vaux-le-Vicomte. Here we can recognize without difficulty the T shape of Versailles, although it is the cross-bar of the T rather than its stem which seems to be important. Here, too, are the parterres emphasized and framed by avenues and groves and, most significant of all, the stem of the T is prolonged in the form of an avenue cut through the surrounding park. A stronger contrast than between this garden of Cardinal Richelieu and the Buen Retiro of the Count-Duke Olivarez can hardly be imagined. They are exact contemporaries and if the one expresses the hasty, unbalanced, moody energy of Spain, the other reveals already the overriding theoretical orderliness of the Gallic mind with its too evident reliance on reason and geometry. France was now approaching her period of greatest wealth and greatest political power; she who had learned the secrets of civilization from Italy now became the leader of taste throughout all Europe. Spain after the battle of Pavia had become the leading power, but by 1660 she already lay rotting in the stagnant bywater of the Counter-Reformation. Velasquez was dead, Calderon was dead, Philip IV was an old resigned man, and France, which, thanks to Henri of Navarre, was still nourished by streams of liberal thought not yet become poisonous, had risen to undoubted pre-eminence. The most brilliant and artistically influential figure at the beginning of this, France's most brilliant age, was not the young King nor Cardinal Mazarin, but the financier Fouquet, who was the heir to Richelieu's grandeur of mind though never to his political power.