Das Biebricher Schloss (1697-1750) (English shop)

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The building history of Schloss Biebrich reaches back to the 17th century. Laid out as a princely garden pavilion near the bank of the Rhine on the outskirts of the village of Biebrich, on a plot belonging to Princess Henriette Dorothea von Öttingen, the consort of Prince Georg August Samuel von Nassau-Idstein, it developed successively, following further purchases of building land between 1697 and 1750, into a Baroque summer residence, in whose design renowned master builders of the day were involved, who at the same time were extending the Stadtschloss of Wiesbaden and the residence of Idstein. That the building, initially conceived as a Baroque garden pavilion, would develop into a magnificently appointed maison de plaisance, with which not only the claim to sovereignty of the princely house was to be declared but which, moreover, after the end of the War of the Palatine Succession, was to celebrate the victory over Louis XIV, was not foreseeable at the beginning of the construction work.

Having purchased it from the heirs of the Principality of Nassau-Saarbrücken, Prince Karl von Nassau-Usingen, initially under the direction of his mother, Princess Charlotte Amalie von Nassau-Dillenburg, extended the maison de plaisance into a three-wing complex, without wishing to relinquish its political significance. The rapid construction of the west wing was made possible by the demolition of an orangery still under construction; the east wing was conceived entirely anew on the initiative of the young Princess Christine Wilhelmine von Sachsen-Eisenach as a residential building for her children, combined with private salons and extended by a court stable.

The building, idyllically situated on the Rhine, had already surprised visitors with the austere French Baroque façades of its two pavilions, deliberately intended to recall Versailles, and with the lightness of the light-flooded galleries built in the Italian Baroque style, with their magnificently appointed rotunda and the Baroque garden. Often misjudged, this first comprehensive publication on the building history of the Biebrich palace aims to show that the deeper significance of this 18th-century palace continues to resonate down to the present day and, against the background of numerous global crises, has lost none of its relevance.