The Désert de Retz is an Anglo-Chinois or French landscape garden - created on the edge of the forêt de Marly in the commune of Chambourcy, in north-central France. It …More
The Désert de Retz is an Anglo-Chinois or French landscape garden - created on the edge of the forêt de Marly in the commune of Chambourcy, in north-central France. It was created at the end of the 18th century by the aristocrat François Racine de Monville on his 40-hectare (99-acre) estate. This was one of a number of landscape gardens created in France at the time influenced by English examples. The architect Boullée was involved in the creation of both Monville's town houses; it is less likely he had anything to do with le Desert de Retz, although Monville did, for a while, engage as assistant the Architect Francois Barbier until 1780. Monville probably designed many of the features and structures himself or had a strong supervisory role.
The garden was notable for the inclusion of between 17 to 20 structures, of which only 10 still survive, mostly referring to classical antiquity. Those buildings included: a summer house (the "colonne brisée", or ruined column), in the form of the base of a shattered column from an imaginary gigantic temple, an ice house in the form of an Egyptian pyramid, an obelisk, a collonaded temple dedicated to Pan, an open air theatre, a ruined Gothic Chapel and a (now-lost) Chinese pavilion.
The enormous scale and sublime grandeur of the giant ruined column are remarkable; other architects of the period created designs for structures approaching it (Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Antoine Laurent Thomas Vaudoyer and Jean-Jacques Lequeu ) but it strongly suggests the influence of the works on paper of Giovanni Battista Piranesi.Less
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The garden was notable for the inclusion of between 17 to 20 structures, of which only 10 still survive, mostly referring to classical antiquity. Those buildings included: a summer house (the "colonne brisée", or ruined column), in the form of the base of a shattered column from an imaginary gigantic temple, an ice house in the form of an Egyptian pyramid, an obelisk, a collonaded temple dedicated to Pan, an open air theatre, a ruined Gothic Chapel and a (now-lost) Chinese pavilion.
The enormous scale and sublime grandeur of the giant ruined column are remarkable; other architects of the period created designs for structures approaching it (Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Antoine Laurent Thomas Vaudoyer and Jean-Jacques Lequeu ) but it strongly suggests the influence of the works on paper of Giovanni Battista Piranesi.Less