The ‘Hortus Palatinus’ at Heidelberg and the reformation of the World part II: culture as science

Abstract

Abstract In the first part of this essay I attempted to present the iconography of the Hortus Palatinus 1 (figure 1), constructed by the architect and engineer, Salomon de Caus, for the Palatine Elector, Frederick V, during the period 1612 to 1620. This garden has attracted attention on account of its complexity and rarity as a German example of Renaissance gardening. In my description of its iconography I argued for something much more; namely for the existence of a programme which guided the whole composition. What this was I only hinted at, but in the process of doing so I mentioned both the importance of mechanics for its creator, particularly as derived from the ancient text of Hero, and the conviction that the demonstration of mechanical laws would be seen to underwrite belief in universal harmony. I touched upon the way that de Caus utilized mythological symbolism to portray moral questions in a mechanical-musical context. I alluded to the conceptual congruity underlying beliefs in the possibility of essentialist or Adamic language, insofar as it promised an immediate portrayal of truth, and of essentialist music, which as the imitation of the ‘voice of nature’ promised an immediate and harmonically organized portrayal of empirical laws. I pointed out the importance for de Caus of the Euclidean, Platonic, and Pythagorean traditions regarding belief in the vitality of ‘number’, and described how he had utilized this Vitruvian tradition in the Hortus Palatinus to generate proportions for the construction of an encyclopaedic display of a ‘botanical cosmos’. Finally, I mentioned the fundamental intellectual problem — of describing spatially complex or dynamic systems — encountered in Renaissance use of proportional laws as explanatory schemata, and I touched upon the ways that hierarchical, sequential, and miraculous analogies, related to the acquisition of knowledge and the ascent of the soul, were put forward in the hope of overcoming that problem.