THE ZWINGER AT DRESDEN
Zwingcr—very badly damaged in 1944 and in course of restoration
now—(pi. LXXIV) is a combined orangery and electoral grand-
stand for tournaments and pageants. It was not supposed to stand on
its own, as it does now, attached only to the 19th-century picture
gallery; it was meant to form part of a palace stretching across to the
River Elbe. It consists of one-storied galleries with two-storied
pavilions between. The galleries are comparatively restrained in
design, but the most exuberant decoration is lavished over the
pavilions. Especially the gate pavilion is a fantasy unchecked by any
consideration of use. The ground-floor archway has instead of a
proper pediment two bits of a broken pediment swinging away
from each other. The first-floor pediment is broken too, but nodding
inward instead of outward. The whole first floor is open on all sides
—a kiosk or gazebo, as it were, and above its attic swarming with
figures of putti is a bulbous cupola with the royal and electoral
emblems on top.
If those who can admire a Gothic Devon screen feel repelled by
the Zwinger, they either do not really look at the object before them,
or they look at it with the blinkers of puritanism. What an exult-
ation in these rocking curves, and yet what a grace. It is joyful, but
never vulgar; vigorous, boisterous perhaps, but never crude. It is of
an inexhaustible creative power, with ever new combinations and
variations of Italian Baroque forms placed against each other and
piled above each other. The forward and backward motion never
stops. Borromini appears massive against this swiftness of movement
through space.
As in every original style, the same formal intention seems, in the
German Rococo, to model space and volume. The three-dimen-
sional curve is the leitmotif of the period. It appears at Vierzehn-
heiligen as it appears in the Zwinger, and it pervades buildings from
their main theme of composition down to the smallest ornamental
details. Nowhere else perhaps can this be seen as convincingly as in
one of Neumann's secular masterpieces, the staircase of the Bishop's
Palace at Bruchsal (pis. LXXV, LXXVI a & b and fig. 76). The
palace itself is not by Neumann. It was in quite an advanced state
when, in 1730, Neumann was called in to redesign the staircase,
The palace, one of the most deplorable of all war casualties,
consisted of a rectangular centre block or corps de logis and lower
projecting wings, i.e. the Palladian scheme which had from
Northern Italy spread to England and also to France, where it
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