January 15, 2020 • 33 mins
In part one, we talked about Le Nôtre's early years and his work at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Today, we'll pick up with his incredible achievements designing and executing the gardens of Versailles and his later life.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh.
This is the second part of a two parter on
Andre Lenore, who is France's famous gardener. We discussed for
(00:24):
the first episode how that term doesn't really encompass all
that he was or did, but it is usually how
he has defined historically. And on the last episode we
talked about Andre Lenotre's early life and how with one
high profile project he went from being a well respected
royal gardener and controller to being tapped by King Louis
the fourteenth for a project that was going to be
(00:45):
epic in scale, and so here in part two, we're
going to pick up with that project, how it played out,
and then take you right on through the end of
Lenotre's life and also how his work is seen today.
You're not gonna be completely lost if you pixings up
here and you didn't listen to part one, but you're
gonna miss out on a really juicy story about how
that big project that kind of made him famous. UH
(01:06):
contributed to a member of the royal court being imprisoned
for life, not because Andre's designed it, but because it
was lavish and beautiful. It's a juicy story. Go back
and listen. So we're gonna pick up right where we
left off. So we ended the last episode with the
king tasking Andre lenotre with designing the gardens of Versailles.
(01:28):
When Louis fourt decided that he wanted to renovate the
chateau and have landscaped crowns there, it was initially because
he just loved the hunting lodge and he liked life
in the country. He preferred it to Paris, where he
was always being watched, and it gave him a getaway
where he could arrange romantic liaisons. But by the mid
sixteen seventies, the king had decided to move the royal
(01:51):
court from Paris to the redesigned Versailles. And while Andre
Lenot had been a royal gardener, as we said before,
this project heading up the garden plans of Versailles was
very different because it was a true collaboration with the
monarch and Louis the fourteen had opinions about plants and gardens,
as he was an avid gardener, himself, but Lenopla was
(02:14):
really the perfect creative match for the king. Where Louis
could be mercurial and impulsive, Lenore was relaxed and steadfast,
and the two very different personalities managed to achieve a
balanced sort of harmony as they plotted out and executed
this massive project. It really helped that Lenota was truly
a royalist, that he was very devoted to Louis the fourteenth,
(02:37):
and the young king in turn, who was in his
twenties at this point, seemed to really enjoy the company
of the older Lenore, who did not seem to be
scheming in his relationship with the monarch in any way.
Lenore also had to work with Lebron and Leveaux, as
he had at void of Acomte, and he had to
juggle the personalities of these two men plus the king
(02:58):
throughout the project. Leva died in sixteen seventy and his
assistant Friendsois Doorbet finished the work. Later, work on both
the chateau and the gardens was commissioned by Jules Hardoin Montsart.
Lenotre didn't seem to let constantly changing targets bother or
unsettle him, and through it all, he wasn't just working
with the King and his design collaborators. He was managing
(03:20):
thousands of people in order to fulfill the desires of
the Crown at a magnitude that was beyond anything any
of them had ever worked on before. So if you
visit their side today, which we have been lucky enough
to do, it is all paved and landscaped and manicured,
and it is absolutely breathtaking. But that location, as has
come up on the show before, was a hunting lodge
(03:41):
before Louis four decided to redo it and eventually make
it into a palace, and it was out in the country.
So what Lenotto was faced with was turning a whole
lot of swampy, muddy ground. It is something worthy of
French royalty, no small task. The diarist Louis d'arrouva, the
Duke de Saint Simol, wrote of the Versailles site that
(04:03):
it was quote the saddest and most barren of places,
with no view, no wood, no water, and no earth,
for it is all shifting sand and marsh, and the
air consequently is bad. And apart from that, it was
a lot of land like that. By the time Louis
the fourteenth finished acquiring parcels of adjacent land to expand
(04:25):
the existing site. There was about fifteen thousand acres or
six thousand hectars. Lenotre spent thirty years working on Versailles,
turning it from that marshy expanse to a place of
just unparalleled splendor. I feel compelled to point out that
a lot of people will say Saint Simon in his
(04:46):
writing was a little bit um of a drama lama
and could exaggerate things, so it may or may not
have been quite as bad as he described it. But
everyone agreed pretty universally that it was a weird place
for the king. I want to put a lot of
effort in and that splendor that was created came at
a very significant cost, partially because of that weird land,
(05:09):
and that cost was both in money and in men.
It was estimated that the cost of just leveling and
excavating the land and preparing the clay basins for water
tallied up to more than six million livre, and a
lot of men also died over the course of construction,
with the numbers of people injured on the job totaling
in the thousands. The primary causes for these deaths and
(05:31):
injuries were landslips while digging out the various water features,
and malaria because that marshy ground is a perfect place
for mosquitoes to be very very happy. A similar human
cost had taken place during the construction at Vodeviculte, where
serious injuries and mortalities were so common that a new
hospital had to be established to handle them all. I
read one story, but I didn't read any verification on
(05:53):
it because I didn't particularly chase after it that at
Versailles they were basically letting people kind of like fall.
They would move the bodies, but they wouldn't permanently move
them off the site until nighttime because they didn't want
to like be carding dead bodies through the workers and
demoralize them as they were digging. Just terrible. There are
(06:14):
a lot of discussions to be had about the moral
implications of of spending so much money on something like this.
We're not digging super deep into them, but I want
to mention that, like, there is human costs when you
are indulging in something at this level. And this work
was all done by hand. It was largely staffed by
soldiers who were doing this work in between military engagements.
(06:35):
The initial plan for organizing all of us at Versailles
was to lay the landscaping elements out along a long
axis with cross axes creating partitions within that, and the
symmetry there was used to great effect. There was a
rudimentary version of the east to west access already in
place on the site when Lenore arrived at Versailles, and
(06:56):
he fortified and extended it, including adding the gray and
canal and creating what came to be known as the
Grand Perspective. This east west alignment of the whole thing
ensured that the movement of the sun over the gardens
and the property would make it the perfect place for
the sun king, because the sun rose on one side,
(07:17):
crossed the long length of the property and then had
a beautiful sunset on the horizon on the other side.
And looking out from the windows in the Hall of
Mirrors offers a full view of the Grand Perspective, or
in French the GM perspective, leading the eye down the
elongated Great Lawn as it meets a rounded fountain that
sits between the lawn and the canal, and then extending
(07:37):
the eye line down the canal again sort of to infinity.
Having seen that perspective, it is a little bit like
your brain can't process how far it goes on. Uh.
Lenola also added a north south access, which eventually included
a number of prominent spaces in the design, including the
water walk, the Neptune Fountain, and the orangerie. There are
(07:59):
very few survive having documents that feature Lenotre's garden designs,
and most of those are sort of dutally rough sketches
that suggests that he was working out concepts with pen
and paper. We also don't have any clear notes on
how he worked or executed his design, so how things
transitioned from design idea to finished formal garden have to
(08:20):
be pieced together through the writings of other people, and
even then there are very few specifics to Lenotre, although
the best practices written out by men such as Desaier
darjan Via in his early eighteenth century book Latiori a
la practic Jardinage are undoubtedly heavily influenced by Lenotre's work.
(08:40):
There are some people that will say that we don't
have surviving designs of Lenota because he didn't actually ever
write out any designs. That seems unlikely. I think most
historians will say that that doesn't really make any sense um,
because the stuff he was doing was so careful and
(09:01):
mathematical that even if he were a genius that could
see it that way, you would have needed to have
plans to direct the actual construction and layout and uh
excavation that had to happen. And the team that Louis
the fourteenth had assembled was quickly tasked with things like
creating that orangerie for the orange trees that he had
(09:22):
taken from vaule Vicomte uh and creating a menagerie space
for what some would consider the first zoo in the
Western world. For anybody that has maybe seen pictures of
Version doesn't know, there's a famous section that you often
see because it's very striking, which has these little partires
of low boxwood hedges that are cut into curly Q shapes.
That is the orangerie. If you look closely, there are
(09:44):
pathways through it, and there's a circular center part to it,
and orange trees are arranged in planters all around those walkways.
So that is that is what we're talking about when
we say the Orangerie. Yeah, let them take the orange
trees inside when the weather was not going to be
conducive to their being there. They do not love a winter.
(10:05):
They a French winter is too cold for uh citrus normally. Yeah,
I don't know why. It wasn't until we were in
Paris and someone explained that to me that I was like, oh, right,
of course. Obviously, in just a moment, we will talk
about how Lenore tackled this immense task to turn swamp
(10:26):
into a royal garden, but will pause first for a
quick sponsor break. As we said before, set to partition
the land out in that access based grid for the
various elements of design that he wanted to include. Low
(10:48):
parterres were designed to sit nearest the chateau on three sides,
so that the open sight lines of that lower level
could be maintained the north partire, the South partire, and
the water partre. As the gardens extended farther back from
the chateau, they were then laden with all manner of surprises.
The paths that crossed the Grand perspective lead visitors into
(11:11):
the groves of Versailles, each of which is unique. Lenotre
created fifteen of them. Initially, some were modified and others
were added by later designers. These groves featured fountains and
sculptures that were designed by Lebron, each having its own identity.
These groves included the Ancient Gallery that was an outdoor
(11:31):
exhibition of sculptures, the Grove of Domes, which includes a
hexagonal pool in the center, the Grove of three Fountains,
which is credited as being the King's idea, and a
marsh grove which featured plants that were sculpted out of
metal all around its central fountain. There was also a
ballroom grove which was a tiered amphitheater, which was the
last grove that lenotre created that was completed in six
(11:55):
Having walked around some of these wonderful, surprising little spaces
in Versailles, they're delightful and you wonder how like these
very complicated structures are existing seemingly tucked into like little
private areas. But they are so um It's not like
you find a little open space with benches. I mean,
(12:18):
they're like little rooms. They're not little either, but compared
to the rest of the grounds that you're on, they're
like their own. It's like walking into like themed rooms
in a really like um creatively designed house or something.
It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. In sixteen sixty five, Linota started
plans for a labyrinth for one of the groves at Versailles.
(12:39):
That was a feature that was popular on France estates
at the time. That labyrinth wasn't completed until the mid
sixteen seventies, in part because the King, on the advice
of writer Charles Perrault, asked for a redesign. In sixteen
sixty nine. Perot was the author credited with the first
published Mother Goose. Stories that have become such classics include
(13:00):
Being Cinderella, Little Red, Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. Lenotre
redrafted the labyrinths to include several dozen fountains to represent
the story of Esop's fables. That's included carefully designed statuary
and a whole lot of plumbing. The labyrinth and several
other groves were later replaced and a redesigned by Jules
(13:21):
hardom Montsart when he was tasked with updating the grounds. Yeah,
the labyrinth was was taken away, which is a pity. Um.
As with his other work that we've talked about, Leno
once again used visual trickery and interest points all over Versailles.
He made rectangles that would look like squares from certain angles,
or he created parterres of swirled boxwoods, kind of like
(13:43):
we talked about in the Orangerie, that were trained and
cut into shapes that resembled the scrolls that were found
on carpets, tapestries, and clothing embellishments. While Versailles was a
career defining accomplishment, Lenore went on to do a whole
lot of other work after it was finished. As for
Louis the fourteenth, he continued to make changes to the
ground as his desires and whims shifted right up until
(14:06):
his death. But the gardens of Versailles today are still
very much governed by the designs that were developed and
executed by Lenore. They didn't, of course, stay that way
from his time up until now. They have at various
points been replaced, like we said, fallen into disrepair, etcetera.
But several of the groves and other features have been
restored in recent years to how they looked in le
(14:28):
Nutless time. But there is an interesting difference. In his
book The Sun King's Garden, author Ian Thompson, who is
a PhD in landscape architecture notes a key difference between
the restored Versailles gardens of today versus what they looked
like when Le Nutla was in charge. Based on eighteenth
century engravings of the space, it appears that things were
(14:48):
a lot more angular and sharply maintained in the eighteenth century,
where quote, the hedges are so immaculately clipped that they
look like walls. All of the fountains involved in Versailles
created a need for a lot of water, and that
was a need that was just impossible to meet. Fountains
would have to be turned on as the king approached
(15:10):
and then turn off once he was a distance away.
A monstrous two hundred twenty one pump device with twenty
massive water wheels was developed in the sixteen eighties. That
was called the Machine to Marley, and it was meant
to bring water in from the sin but it created
way more problems than it was worth, and it also
(15:30):
never really fulfilled its mission of bringing in enough water
to keep more than two thousand fountains going at Versailles. Yeah,
that is another thing that I would love to make
into an episode of its own at some point in time,
because just the drawings of it are bad breaking and
there is a lot of tragedy associated with it as well.
When I got to this, as I was reading through
(15:52):
this this earlier this morning, I was like, I want
to know more about this machine. Yeah, it's um, it's
a thing, and I do want to talk about it
at some point in the future. Uh. Taking on a
project like Versailles surely occupied a great deal of Andre
Lenotola's time, but he still did not work exclusively at
the new palace location, and he continued to accept other contracts.
(16:16):
This was a very shrewd thing to do, because his
close association with the king and the universal recognition of
the genius of the vaux Le Vicomte gardens meant that
he was in very high demand among the nobility of France,
and he could command very lucrative commissions. The Notes started
another challenging project at just about the same time that
he started work on Versailles. That was the gardens of
(16:39):
the Prince of Conde Louis, the Second Debble. Those gardens
at the Chateau de Chaunty posed their own unique problems,
most notably the fact that while Conde wanted the symmetrical,
manicured look that Lenore was becoming famous for the chateau
itself had a really strangely shaped, asymmetrical moat that did
not naturally lend itself to Lenotre's design aesthetic. To add
(17:03):
to that dilemma, the Prince of Conde was not willing
to knock down any of the old buildings on the
property and service to this new design layout. Still, Leno
took the job, and he turned his skill at making
order out of chaos to it. He couldn't make the
chateau a central point on an access that bisected the land,
as was normally what he would do, because the house
(17:25):
was also offset from the center of the property and
the house itself was not symmetrical. It was kind of like,
here are a bunch of ingredients that do not make
any sense for a cake. Please make a cake out
of them. And he was like, okay. Uh So the
main access avenue of the design actually runs parallel to
the front of the chateau, So for a visitor that's
approaching the main gate, which sits at the center of
(17:46):
the layout, the chateau is in the distance and to
the left, and the grand gardens, which are situated beyond
the chateau can't really be seen until you've reached the
grand terrace due to the main entry path being a
slight uphill incline, and the once a visitor reaches the
central terrace, the large water feature and grand gardens emerge.
It's kind of like a visual surprise as you get
(18:08):
to that apex and they stretch out across the property.
And for all the challenges that Lenotre faced at Schantay,
the property had one resource that made the engineering aspect
of it easier than other projects. It had a close
proximity to the River Nonette, which was a tributary of
the Wise, meaning that water was always plentiful. So despite
(18:28):
the challenges, Lenotre, who worked on the gardens there for
two decades, spoke of it late in his life as
an example of a great French formal garden. In sixteen
sixty four, the King and Colbert agreed that Lenore should
redesign the Tuilerie gardens, and he changed them from the
designs that had been in place since Catherine de Medici
had commissioned the gardens to the popular formal French garden
(18:50):
of which he was the master. He expanded the garden
by lengthening its access to the west, creating the line
of what would eventually evolve to the chansa lise. This
if you are Intoli today, there are some modern editions,
like their modern play areas and cafes, but the layout
is still exactly what Lenota set up. In sixteen seventy,
(19:11):
Jean Baptiste Colbert, who is the same person who had
schemed to have Nicola Fouquet arrested, hired Lenotre to design
a park to surround his new home at Chateau to So,
several miles outside of Paris. There was no accident that
he had waited nine years after the vote of a
compe scandal to have his own chateau made over. Colbert,
(19:33):
like a lot of people in the nobility, didn't want
to similarly be associated with this conspicuous opulence or to
look suspicious with their spending in the wake of Fouquets
fall from grace. Yeah, he basically just like waited it
out until he felt like it was safe because he
also wanted a beautiful chateau with grounds designed by Lenotla.
(19:54):
And even though he hired Lenotla, Colbert was still very
very careful not to go too far with his chateaus grounds.
Uh to us it would seem like extremely extravagant and lavish,
but at the time he had dialed it back. Lenottla
did design a spectacular eighteen basin cascade feature for so
as well as the most powerful fountain effect known to
(20:15):
France at the time. That shot watered twenty five ft
into the air. That's a little less than eight meters.
The Notre's work in redefining the tulry and sculpting the
grounds of Versailles made him even more of a darling
with the upper class, and that extended outside of France.
Everyone wanted him to turn his skill at creating grand
vistas to their own properties. While work at Versailles was ongoing,
(20:38):
he traveled outside of France and lent his expertise and
artistry to other landscapes. He traveled to London in the
early sixteen sixties at the behest of Charles the Second
to design Greenwich Park, and he took on projects in
Italy and Germany as well as all over France. Yeah,
he was so busy. It's one of those things where
I mean, we work on law to different stuff here,
(21:01):
but I can't imagine the scale of things he was
working on, and he would just be juggling like tons
of these contracts at a time. Uh. Next up, we
are going to cover the last segment of Lenotre's life
and his enduring influence, but we're going to take a
quick sponsor break before we do that. In sixteen seventy five,
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King Louis the fourteenth made Andre Lenore a noble, and
when the king asked the master gardener what he would
like to have included on his coat of arms, Lenotrea
replied that he wanted three snails ahead of cabbage and
a spade to represent the thing that had brought him
such favor from the king. I find this so charming
it is, and you can see um images of what
(21:49):
are probably the coat of arms designed for him. There's
some question marks about whether those are the actual ones
or uh, something that someone else just drew up by
sat on this story, but they are very, very charming,
and there are three snails in lieu of a spade
directly represented. There's like a chevron that kind of is
intended to represent the tip of an appointed spade, but
(22:12):
there is a head of cabbage in the top and
three snails spaced out beautifully on the rest of the
the coat. In sixteen seventy nine, Lenotre traveled to Italy,
where he spent the majority of the year visiting gardens
and important people. There, he made an interesting stop along
the way, diverting his trip to pin Roll in northwestern Italy.
(22:33):
This was the prison where his former employer, Nicola Fouquet
had been sent to live out his life under lock
and key. So even though he had fallen from his
position within the French court, it seems that Lenotre had
maintained at least some relationship with Fouquet. Yeah, this also
sort of upholds that ongoing image that's always portrayed of
(22:53):
Lenotre is just being an incredibly nice person, Like, even
though everyone else kind of turned their back on Fouquet,
he he didn't think of him as somebody that he
couldn't maintain a relationship with, even though weren't anybody else
who made a visit like that. It probably would have
made Louis the fourteenth really really angry, but Lenotre was
again so beloved that he was allowed a little more leeway.
(23:16):
Probably when Lenotre returned from Italy, he went right back
to work at Versailles, and he started construction of that
ballroom groove that we mentioned, uh in sixteen eighty and
it was completed, as we said, in sixteen eighty five.
And he continued to work on fine tuning the grounds
with the king for eight more years before he decided
to retire in sixteen ninety three at the age of eighty.
(23:37):
Lenotre died on September fifteenth, seventeen hundred, at the age
of eighty seven. He had managed, through what the diarist
the Duke de Saint Sement called his quote charming, simplicity
and truthfulness, to avoid any of the kinds of personal
scandals or court intrigues that were common. He had stayed
out of that in his lifetime. Lenore stands as a
(24:00):
unique figure in the world of Louis the fourteenth and
that he didn't have any interest in taking others down
to try to improve his own footing. He was an
uncommonly good collaborator and happy to share credit, also willing
to compromise and hard working. Uh yeah, we um. We
mentioned earlier that Mansart was called in to redo some
(24:20):
of the grounds at Versailles, and that's another one that
gets told two different ways. Some people will say that
Lenotre and Manzart had a sort of rivalry and that
that was the one person that Lenottla was ever heard
dissort of criticized. But then there are other suggestions that
indicate he may have even been the person that recommended
that Mansart be the person that Louis the fourteenth hired
(24:41):
for those next rounds of of redesigns. So it's a
little unclear, but he didn't seem to ever get involved
in like the gossip or mess of of all of things. Uh.
Three hundred years after under Lenot's death, in the year
two thousand, a group of experts in French history to
compare notes on their knowledge of the landscape artist who
(25:03):
had so significantly shaped the French garden aesthetic, and they
published a French language book about the man and his
work titled Lena inconnu ilost, which translates to an illustrious stranger.
One of the things that remains certainly to me and
I would think to others completely sort of brain bending,
is that Andre Lena was always designing with the thought
(25:25):
of what the gardens would look like from above, primarily
from terraces or windows of the chateaus that his design surrounded.
He even at one point kind of commented about making
parterres that were beautiful when seen from the windows, that
it was kind of sad that the only people that
would ever really see what he was doing were like
the Nanni's because the top floors tended to be where
the children's rooms were. Um But even today, what's really
(25:48):
cool is that when you see full aerial views of
his work, it is breathtaking. And he was drafting these
gardens more than a hundred years before the first hot
air balloon was even invented, so he didn't really have
a sense that we would ever get these beautiful views.
So while some higher ground vantage points during his lifetime
offered a sense of what he had accomplished, kind of
(26:08):
like the Nasca lines, the true extent of his achievement,
I think couldn't be seen until much later, when we
had the technology to fly. It's also interesting to consider
that while the style of landscape that Lenore became famous
for is considered very much to be a matter of
taming nature and making things look precisely designed and curated,
he always started by looking at the land and seeing
(26:30):
what it offered. He wasn't so much taming nature as
figuring out how to work with it challenges at all
and coming out with something that looked almost unreal and
its exacting geometric layouts. And that's something I feel like
we should say that all landscape architects are taught to do.
But I think because when you look at Lenotre's work,
it doesn't. It looks a little removed from nature because
(26:54):
it is so pristine and manicured. But really he was.
He was doing exactly what you're supposed to do, which
is looking at like different elevations of any given property
and figuring out how he could use those to cut
out terraces in the right places and develop something that
was not necessarily going to look natural, but worked with
some of the natural topography he was given. And we
(27:15):
have mentioned numerous cases where the gardens and landscapes designed
by Lena can still be seen today, and while some
have been fairly consistently maintained, others have gone through cycles
where they have fallen into disrepair or been allowed to
grow over and have subsequently been restored and revitalized. And
the bones that he laid out initially for those those
(27:35):
strong axes of paths and canals and roadways around which
his symmetrical geometric designs spread out are readily apparent when
you look at those gardens today. His work continues to
influence creators today, and you've undoubtedly seen places shaped by
Lenore's ingenuity and manipulating space to try to create impactful illusions.
(27:57):
When Pierre Chaos Lafonque worked on the landscape designed for
the US Capital, he turned to Versailles for inspiration, and
when architect Peter Walker designed the ultramodern square shaped fountains
at the Ground Zero Memorial in New York City, he
referred to Lenore's use of space to guide him. In
Alan Rickman may He rest in Peace directed a film
(28:18):
titled A Little Chaos, which is a fictionalized account of
Lenotre's life. It is very fun, but I want to
make clear to anybody that goes to it looking for
an interesting look at Lenotla that it is very fictionalized.
It revolves the story around an assistant that Lenotre never
had and a resulting romance between Lenotla and this made
up woman. We don't know all that many details of
(28:41):
Lenotre's personal life that is why that that French book
was titled An Illustrious Stranger. There are a lot of
question marks about about his day to day life, but
it seemed more because he was kind of humble and
didn't think he needed to record his everything. There is
nothing to ever indicate that he had any kind of affair,
so that is very much uh speculative and uh fiction,
(29:03):
but also very fun um. You can see lots of
pretty things who I literally could watch just like flyovers
of his gardens four hours and did while working on
this episode. It was one of those things where I'd
be like, oh, I just want to go look at
Vaude Vicomte, and then like two hours later I'd be like, whoops,
maybe let's look at Versailles. I then three hours later, whoops, whoops,
(29:24):
I lost half a day. Clearly, I love under Lennotla,
and I understand why France loves and Andre Lenotla. There
were also in a lot of really fantastic exhibits and
retrospectives of his work all over France, and a lot
of write ups about him all over the world. Since
that was the the and the four hundredth anniversary of
(29:44):
his birth, it's kind of weird because we keep talking
about him in terms of like three hundred years since
and four hundred years since, but it was because he
lived almost ninety years and he worked for sixty of
those really hard. So so that is why I have
again listener mail. I'm working through holiday stuff, but this
first one is very very germane to the topic at hand.
(30:07):
This from our listener Amy, who went to Paris with us.
She writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I wanted to share
my Christmas card with you both because it is primarily
photos of the trip to Paris. I'm so happy that
I was able to take this amazing trip. Thank you
for the podcast and for being so wonderful and kind.
Also thank you Holly for taking the photo on the
bottom right of me in the Versailles Gardens. I hope
(30:27):
to see you again in Yeah. Amy was with us
and we were there at Versailles that day, and she
had wandered off by herself and Versailles, as we keep saying,
it's huge, and so I looked over at one point
and I just saw her walking around one of the
circular water features and she was the only person visible
for like a huge expanse, and there were beautiful statues
(30:51):
around her, so I just took a picture and then
later I told her that I had it, and I
texted it to her and now it's on her Christmas card.
She was an absolute delight and went out to eat
with me one night, and we had so much fun
with everybody that was on that trip. I think about
it daily. That was one of the best nine days
in my life. Uh. So, thank you, Amy, and thank
you for coming in that trip, and we hope we
(31:11):
see you again this year. I have one more card
to read. This one is from our listener Nicole, who writes, uh, Derek, Tracy,
and Holly. I have listened to the podcast for a
few years now. It is excellent. Thank you for all
that you do. I've learned so much and I always
look forward to learning more when I see the new
episodes drop. I wanted to send this particular card for
a couple of reasons. First, Edward Gorey, it is a
(31:32):
beautiful Edward Gorey Christmas card. Uh. Second, I got it
at the Seattle Art Museum when I went to see
the Flesh and Blood exhibit, which included Artemisia Gentileski's Judas
Slaying Holoferrenies, and I had not known anything about her
or her work prior to your podcast episode. It was
amazing to be able to see the actual painting and
connect it to what I had learned that. It's one
of my favorite things about researching this show is then
(31:54):
getting to go experience art with a lot more knowledge
about it. So I'm glad that she had the same experience.
Uh there's one last bit I'd like to share as well.
Over the summer, I misheard part of the Packard Versus
Packard episode. The actual sentence in the show was the
awful List Packard had his wife institutionalized, But what I
heard was the awfu list Packard, which I think somebody
(32:16):
could make that case she had, she said, I had
quite a laugh. I hope you do too, Wishing you
both a lovely holiday season and all the best in
the new year. Nicole Nicol, thank you so much. That
is so sweet. I'm so glad that, uh, that art
came alive for you in a new way, and also
that the awful List sounded like the awful List, because
I think that's a valid interpretation. If you would like
(32:38):
to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast.
At iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us
everywhere on social media as Missed in History, and you
can subscribe to the podcast at Apple podcast, the I
heart Radio app, or wherever it is you listen Stuffy
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart
(32:58):
Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Uh.
This is the second part of a two parter on
Andre Lenore, who is France's famous gardener. We discussed for
(00:24):
the first episode how that term doesn't really encompass all
that he was or did, but it is usually how
he has defined historically. And on the last episode we
talked about Andre Lenotre's early life and how with one
high profile project he went from being a well respected
royal gardener and controller to being tapped by King Louis
the fourteenth for a project that was going to be
(00:45):
epic in scale, and so here in part two, we're
going to pick up with that project, how it played out,
and then take you right on through the end of
Lenotre's life and also how his work is seen today.
You're not gonna be completely lost if you pixings up
here and you didn't listen to part one, but you're
gonna miss out on a really juicy story about how
that big project that kind of made him famous. UH
(01:06):
contributed to a member of the royal court being imprisoned
for life, not because Andre's designed it, but because it
was lavish and beautiful. It's a juicy story. Go back
and listen. So we're gonna pick up right where we
left off. So we ended the last episode with the
king tasking Andre lenotre with designing the gardens of Versailles.
(01:28):
When Louis fourt decided that he wanted to renovate the
chateau and have landscaped crowns there, it was initially because
he just loved the hunting lodge and he liked life
in the country. He preferred it to Paris, where he
was always being watched, and it gave him a getaway
where he could arrange romantic liaisons. But by the mid
sixteen seventies, the king had decided to move the royal
(01:51):
court from Paris to the redesigned Versailles. And while Andre
Lenot had been a royal gardener, as we said before,
this project heading up the garden plans of Versailles was
very different because it was a true collaboration with the
monarch and Louis the fourteen had opinions about plants and gardens,
as he was an avid gardener, himself, but Lenopla was
(02:14):
really the perfect creative match for the king. Where Louis
could be mercurial and impulsive, Lenore was relaxed and steadfast,
and the two very different personalities managed to achieve a
balanced sort of harmony as they plotted out and executed
this massive project. It really helped that Lenota was truly
a royalist, that he was very devoted to Louis the fourteenth,
(02:37):
and the young king in turn, who was in his
twenties at this point, seemed to really enjoy the company
of the older Lenore, who did not seem to be
scheming in his relationship with the monarch in any way.
Lenore also had to work with Lebron and Leveaux, as
he had at void of Acomte, and he had to
juggle the personalities of these two men plus the king
(02:58):
throughout the project. Leva died in sixteen seventy and his
assistant Friendsois Doorbet finished the work. Later, work on both
the chateau and the gardens was commissioned by Jules Hardoin Montsart.
Lenotre didn't seem to let constantly changing targets bother or
unsettle him, and through it all, he wasn't just working
with the King and his design collaborators. He was managing
(03:20):
thousands of people in order to fulfill the desires of
the Crown at a magnitude that was beyond anything any
of them had ever worked on before. So if you
visit their side today, which we have been lucky enough
to do, it is all paved and landscaped and manicured,
and it is absolutely breathtaking. But that location, as has
come up on the show before, was a hunting lodge
(03:41):
before Louis four decided to redo it and eventually make
it into a palace, and it was out in the country.
So what Lenotto was faced with was turning a whole
lot of swampy, muddy ground. It is something worthy of
French royalty, no small task. The diarist Louis d'arrouva, the
Duke de Saint Simol, wrote of the Versailles site that
(04:03):
it was quote the saddest and most barren of places,
with no view, no wood, no water, and no earth,
for it is all shifting sand and marsh, and the
air consequently is bad. And apart from that, it was
a lot of land like that. By the time Louis
the fourteenth finished acquiring parcels of adjacent land to expand
(04:25):
the existing site. There was about fifteen thousand acres or
six thousand hectars. Lenotre spent thirty years working on Versailles,
turning it from that marshy expanse to a place of
just unparalleled splendor. I feel compelled to point out that
a lot of people will say Saint Simon in his
(04:46):
writing was a little bit um of a drama lama
and could exaggerate things, so it may or may not
have been quite as bad as he described it. But
everyone agreed pretty universally that it was a weird place
for the king. I want to put a lot of
effort in and that splendor that was created came at
a very significant cost, partially because of that weird land,
(05:09):
and that cost was both in money and in men.
It was estimated that the cost of just leveling and
excavating the land and preparing the clay basins for water
tallied up to more than six million livre, and a
lot of men also died over the course of construction,
with the numbers of people injured on the job totaling
in the thousands. The primary causes for these deaths and
(05:31):
injuries were landslips while digging out the various water features,
and malaria because that marshy ground is a perfect place
for mosquitoes to be very very happy. A similar human
cost had taken place during the construction at Vodeviculte, where
serious injuries and mortalities were so common that a new
hospital had to be established to handle them all. I
read one story, but I didn't read any verification on
(05:53):
it because I didn't particularly chase after it that at
Versailles they were basically letting people kind of like fall.
They would move the bodies, but they wouldn't permanently move
them off the site until nighttime because they didn't want
to like be carding dead bodies through the workers and
demoralize them as they were digging. Just terrible. There are
(06:14):
a lot of discussions to be had about the moral
implications of of spending so much money on something like this.
We're not digging super deep into them, but I want
to mention that, like, there is human costs when you
are indulging in something at this level. And this work
was all done by hand. It was largely staffed by
soldiers who were doing this work in between military engagements.
(06:35):
The initial plan for organizing all of us at Versailles
was to lay the landscaping elements out along a long
axis with cross axes creating partitions within that, and the
symmetry there was used to great effect. There was a
rudimentary version of the east to west access already in
place on the site when Lenore arrived at Versailles, and
(06:56):
he fortified and extended it, including adding the gray and
canal and creating what came to be known as the
Grand Perspective. This east west alignment of the whole thing
ensured that the movement of the sun over the gardens
and the property would make it the perfect place for
the sun king, because the sun rose on one side,
(07:17):
crossed the long length of the property and then had
a beautiful sunset on the horizon on the other side.
And looking out from the windows in the Hall of
Mirrors offers a full view of the Grand Perspective, or
in French the GM perspective, leading the eye down the
elongated Great Lawn as it meets a rounded fountain that
sits between the lawn and the canal, and then extending
(07:37):
the eye line down the canal again sort of to infinity.
Having seen that perspective, it is a little bit like
your brain can't process how far it goes on. Uh.
Lenola also added a north south access, which eventually included
a number of prominent spaces in the design, including the
water walk, the Neptune Fountain, and the orangerie. There are
(07:59):
very few survive having documents that feature Lenotre's garden designs,
and most of those are sort of dutally rough sketches
that suggests that he was working out concepts with pen
and paper. We also don't have any clear notes on
how he worked or executed his design, so how things
transitioned from design idea to finished formal garden have to
(08:20):
be pieced together through the writings of other people, and
even then there are very few specifics to Lenotre, although
the best practices written out by men such as Desaier
darjan Via in his early eighteenth century book Latiori a
la practic Jardinage are undoubtedly heavily influenced by Lenotre's work.
(08:40):
There are some people that will say that we don't
have surviving designs of Lenota because he didn't actually ever
write out any designs. That seems unlikely. I think most
historians will say that that doesn't really make any sense um,
because the stuff he was doing was so careful and
(09:01):
mathematical that even if he were a genius that could
see it that way, you would have needed to have
plans to direct the actual construction and layout and uh
excavation that had to happen. And the team that Louis
the fourteenth had assembled was quickly tasked with things like
creating that orangerie for the orange trees that he had
(09:22):
taken from vaule Vicomte uh and creating a menagerie space
for what some would consider the first zoo in the
Western world. For anybody that has maybe seen pictures of
Version doesn't know, there's a famous section that you often
see because it's very striking, which has these little partires
of low boxwood hedges that are cut into curly Q shapes.
That is the orangerie. If you look closely, there are
(09:44):
pathways through it, and there's a circular center part to it,
and orange trees are arranged in planters all around those walkways.
So that is that is what we're talking about when
we say the Orangerie. Yeah, let them take the orange
trees inside when the weather was not going to be
conducive to their being there. They do not love a winter.
(10:05):
They a French winter is too cold for uh citrus normally. Yeah,
I don't know why. It wasn't until we were in
Paris and someone explained that to me that I was like, oh, right,
of course. Obviously, in just a moment, we will talk
about how Lenore tackled this immense task to turn swamp
(10:26):
into a royal garden, but will pause first for a
quick sponsor break. As we said before, set to partition
the land out in that access based grid for the
various elements of design that he wanted to include. Low
(10:48):
parterres were designed to sit nearest the chateau on three sides,
so that the open sight lines of that lower level
could be maintained the north partire, the South partire, and
the water partre. As the gardens extended farther back from
the chateau, they were then laden with all manner of surprises.
The paths that crossed the Grand perspective lead visitors into
(11:11):
the groves of Versailles, each of which is unique. Lenotre
created fifteen of them. Initially, some were modified and others
were added by later designers. These groves featured fountains and
sculptures that were designed by Lebron, each having its own identity.
These groves included the Ancient Gallery that was an outdoor
(11:31):
exhibition of sculptures, the Grove of Domes, which includes a
hexagonal pool in the center, the Grove of three Fountains,
which is credited as being the King's idea, and a
marsh grove which featured plants that were sculpted out of
metal all around its central fountain. There was also a
ballroom grove which was a tiered amphitheater, which was the
last grove that lenotre created that was completed in six
(11:55):
Having walked around some of these wonderful, surprising little spaces
in Versailles, they're delightful and you wonder how like these
very complicated structures are existing seemingly tucked into like little
private areas. But they are so um It's not like
you find a little open space with benches. I mean,
(12:18):
they're like little rooms. They're not little either, but compared
to the rest of the grounds that you're on, they're
like their own. It's like walking into like themed rooms
in a really like um creatively designed house or something.
It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. In sixteen sixty five, Linota started
plans for a labyrinth for one of the groves at Versailles.
(12:39):
That was a feature that was popular on France estates
at the time. That labyrinth wasn't completed until the mid
sixteen seventies, in part because the King, on the advice
of writer Charles Perrault, asked for a redesign. In sixteen
sixty nine. Perot was the author credited with the first
published Mother Goose. Stories that have become such classics include
(13:00):
Being Cinderella, Little Red, Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. Lenotre
redrafted the labyrinths to include several dozen fountains to represent
the story of Esop's fables. That's included carefully designed statuary
and a whole lot of plumbing. The labyrinth and several
other groves were later replaced and a redesigned by Jules
(13:21):
hardom Montsart when he was tasked with updating the grounds. Yeah,
the labyrinth was was taken away, which is a pity. Um.
As with his other work that we've talked about, Leno
once again used visual trickery and interest points all over Versailles.
He made rectangles that would look like squares from certain angles,
or he created parterres of swirled boxwoods, kind of like
(13:43):
we talked about in the Orangerie, that were trained and
cut into shapes that resembled the scrolls that were found
on carpets, tapestries, and clothing embellishments. While Versailles was a
career defining accomplishment, Lenore went on to do a whole
lot of other work after it was finished. As for
Louis the fourteenth, he continued to make changes to the
ground as his desires and whims shifted right up until
(14:06):
his death. But the gardens of Versailles today are still
very much governed by the designs that were developed and
executed by Lenore. They didn't, of course, stay that way
from his time up until now. They have at various
points been replaced, like we said, fallen into disrepair, etcetera.
But several of the groves and other features have been
restored in recent years to how they looked in le
(14:28):
Nutless time. But there is an interesting difference. In his
book The Sun King's Garden, author Ian Thompson, who is
a PhD in landscape architecture notes a key difference between
the restored Versailles gardens of today versus what they looked
like when Le Nutla was in charge. Based on eighteenth
century engravings of the space, it appears that things were
(14:48):
a lot more angular and sharply maintained in the eighteenth century,
where quote, the hedges are so immaculately clipped that they
look like walls. All of the fountains involved in Versailles
created a need for a lot of water, and that
was a need that was just impossible to meet. Fountains
would have to be turned on as the king approached
(15:10):
and then turn off once he was a distance away.
A monstrous two hundred twenty one pump device with twenty
massive water wheels was developed in the sixteen eighties. That
was called the Machine to Marley, and it was meant
to bring water in from the sin but it created
way more problems than it was worth, and it also
(15:30):
never really fulfilled its mission of bringing in enough water
to keep more than two thousand fountains going at Versailles. Yeah,
that is another thing that I would love to make
into an episode of its own at some point in time,
because just the drawings of it are bad breaking and
there is a lot of tragedy associated with it as well.
When I got to this, as I was reading through
(15:52):
this this earlier this morning, I was like, I want
to know more about this machine. Yeah, it's um, it's
a thing, and I do want to talk about it
at some point in the future. Uh. Taking on a
project like Versailles surely occupied a great deal of Andre
Lenotola's time, but he still did not work exclusively at
the new palace location, and he continued to accept other contracts.
(16:16):
This was a very shrewd thing to do, because his
close association with the king and the universal recognition of
the genius of the vaux Le Vicomte gardens meant that
he was in very high demand among the nobility of France,
and he could command very lucrative commissions. The Notes started
another challenging project at just about the same time that
he started work on Versailles. That was the gardens of
(16:39):
the Prince of Conde Louis, the Second Debble. Those gardens
at the Chateau de Chaunty posed their own unique problems,
most notably the fact that while Conde wanted the symmetrical,
manicured look that Lenore was becoming famous for the chateau
itself had a really strangely shaped, asymmetrical moat that did
not naturally lend itself to Lenotre's design aesthetic. To add
(17:03):
to that dilemma, the Prince of Conde was not willing
to knock down any of the old buildings on the
property and service to this new design layout. Still, Leno
took the job, and he turned his skill at making
order out of chaos to it. He couldn't make the
chateau a central point on an access that bisected the land,
as was normally what he would do, because the house
(17:25):
was also offset from the center of the property and
the house itself was not symmetrical. It was kind of like,
here are a bunch of ingredients that do not make
any sense for a cake. Please make a cake out
of them. And he was like, okay. Uh So the
main access avenue of the design actually runs parallel to
the front of the chateau, So for a visitor that's
approaching the main gate, which sits at the center of
(17:46):
the layout, the chateau is in the distance and to
the left, and the grand gardens, which are situated beyond
the chateau can't really be seen until you've reached the
grand terrace due to the main entry path being a
slight uphill incline, and the once a visitor reaches the
central terrace, the large water feature and grand gardens emerge.
It's kind of like a visual surprise as you get
(18:08):
to that apex and they stretch out across the property.
And for all the challenges that Lenotre faced at Schantay,
the property had one resource that made the engineering aspect
of it easier than other projects. It had a close
proximity to the River Nonette, which was a tributary of
the Wise, meaning that water was always plentiful. So despite
(18:28):
the challenges, Lenotre, who worked on the gardens there for
two decades, spoke of it late in his life as
an example of a great French formal garden. In sixteen
sixty four, the King and Colbert agreed that Lenore should
redesign the Tuilerie gardens, and he changed them from the
designs that had been in place since Catherine de Medici
had commissioned the gardens to the popular formal French garden
(18:50):
of which he was the master. He expanded the garden
by lengthening its access to the west, creating the line
of what would eventually evolve to the chansa lise. This
if you are Intoli today, there are some modern editions,
like their modern play areas and cafes, but the layout
is still exactly what Lenota set up. In sixteen seventy,
(19:11):
Jean Baptiste Colbert, who is the same person who had
schemed to have Nicola Fouquet arrested, hired Lenotre to design
a park to surround his new home at Chateau to So,
several miles outside of Paris. There was no accident that
he had waited nine years after the vote of a
compe scandal to have his own chateau made over. Colbert,
(19:33):
like a lot of people in the nobility, didn't want
to similarly be associated with this conspicuous opulence or to
look suspicious with their spending in the wake of Fouquets
fall from grace. Yeah, he basically just like waited it
out until he felt like it was safe because he
also wanted a beautiful chateau with grounds designed by Lenotla.
(19:54):
And even though he hired Lenotla, Colbert was still very
very careful not to go too far with his chateaus grounds.
Uh to us it would seem like extremely extravagant and lavish,
but at the time he had dialed it back. Lenottla
did design a spectacular eighteen basin cascade feature for so
as well as the most powerful fountain effect known to
(20:15):
France at the time. That shot watered twenty five ft
into the air. That's a little less than eight meters.
The Notre's work in redefining the tulry and sculpting the
grounds of Versailles made him even more of a darling
with the upper class, and that extended outside of France.
Everyone wanted him to turn his skill at creating grand
vistas to their own properties. While work at Versailles was ongoing,
(20:38):
he traveled outside of France and lent his expertise and
artistry to other landscapes. He traveled to London in the
early sixteen sixties at the behest of Charles the Second
to design Greenwich Park, and he took on projects in
Italy and Germany as well as all over France. Yeah,
he was so busy. It's one of those things where
I mean, we work on law to different stuff here,
(21:01):
but I can't imagine the scale of things he was
working on, and he would just be juggling like tons
of these contracts at a time. Uh. Next up, we
are going to cover the last segment of Lenotre's life
and his enduring influence, but we're going to take a
quick sponsor break before we do that. In sixteen seventy five,
(21:25):
King Louis the fourteenth made Andre Lenore a noble, and
when the king asked the master gardener what he would
like to have included on his coat of arms, Lenotrea
replied that he wanted three snails ahead of cabbage and
a spade to represent the thing that had brought him
such favor from the king. I find this so charming
it is, and you can see um images of what
(21:49):
are probably the coat of arms designed for him. There's
some question marks about whether those are the actual ones
or uh, something that someone else just drew up by
sat on this story, but they are very, very charming,
and there are three snails in lieu of a spade
directly represented. There's like a chevron that kind of is
intended to represent the tip of an appointed spade, but
(22:12):
there is a head of cabbage in the top and
three snails spaced out beautifully on the rest of the
the coat. In sixteen seventy nine, Lenotre traveled to Italy,
where he spent the majority of the year visiting gardens
and important people. There, he made an interesting stop along
the way, diverting his trip to pin Roll in northwestern Italy.
(22:33):
This was the prison where his former employer, Nicola Fouquet
had been sent to live out his life under lock
and key. So even though he had fallen from his
position within the French court, it seems that Lenotre had
maintained at least some relationship with Fouquet. Yeah, this also
sort of upholds that ongoing image that's always portrayed of
(22:53):
Lenotre is just being an incredibly nice person, Like, even
though everyone else kind of turned their back on Fouquet,
he he didn't think of him as somebody that he
couldn't maintain a relationship with, even though weren't anybody else
who made a visit like that. It probably would have
made Louis the fourteenth really really angry, but Lenotre was
again so beloved that he was allowed a little more leeway.
(23:16):
Probably when Lenotre returned from Italy, he went right back
to work at Versailles, and he started construction of that
ballroom groove that we mentioned, uh in sixteen eighty and
it was completed, as we said, in sixteen eighty five.
And he continued to work on fine tuning the grounds
with the king for eight more years before he decided
to retire in sixteen ninety three at the age of eighty.
(23:37):
Lenotre died on September fifteenth, seventeen hundred, at the age
of eighty seven. He had managed, through what the diarist
the Duke de Saint Sement called his quote charming, simplicity
and truthfulness, to avoid any of the kinds of personal
scandals or court intrigues that were common. He had stayed
out of that in his lifetime. Lenore stands as a
(24:00):
unique figure in the world of Louis the fourteenth and
that he didn't have any interest in taking others down
to try to improve his own footing. He was an
uncommonly good collaborator and happy to share credit, also willing
to compromise and hard working. Uh yeah, we um. We
mentioned earlier that Mansart was called in to redo some
(24:20):
of the grounds at Versailles, and that's another one that
gets told two different ways. Some people will say that
Lenotre and Manzart had a sort of rivalry and that
that was the one person that Lenottla was ever heard
dissort of criticized. But then there are other suggestions that
indicate he may have even been the person that recommended
that Mansart be the person that Louis the fourteenth hired
(24:41):
for those next rounds of of redesigns. So it's a
little unclear, but he didn't seem to ever get involved
in like the gossip or mess of of all of things. Uh.
Three hundred years after under Lenot's death, in the year
two thousand, a group of experts in French history to
compare notes on their knowledge of the landscape artist who
(25:03):
had so significantly shaped the French garden aesthetic, and they
published a French language book about the man and his
work titled Lena inconnu ilost, which translates to an illustrious stranger.
One of the things that remains certainly to me and
I would think to others completely sort of brain bending,
is that Andre Lena was always designing with the thought
(25:25):
of what the gardens would look like from above, primarily
from terraces or windows of the chateaus that his design surrounded.
He even at one point kind of commented about making
parterres that were beautiful when seen from the windows, that
it was kind of sad that the only people that
would ever really see what he was doing were like
the Nanni's because the top floors tended to be where
the children's rooms were. Um But even today, what's really
(25:48):
cool is that when you see full aerial views of
his work, it is breathtaking. And he was drafting these
gardens more than a hundred years before the first hot
air balloon was even invented, so he didn't really have
a sense that we would ever get these beautiful views.
So while some higher ground vantage points during his lifetime
offered a sense of what he had accomplished, kind of
(26:08):
like the Nasca lines, the true extent of his achievement,
I think couldn't be seen until much later, when we
had the technology to fly. It's also interesting to consider
that while the style of landscape that Lenore became famous
for is considered very much to be a matter of
taming nature and making things look precisely designed and curated,
he always started by looking at the land and seeing
(26:30):
what it offered. He wasn't so much taming nature as
figuring out how to work with it challenges at all
and coming out with something that looked almost unreal and
its exacting geometric layouts. And that's something I feel like
we should say that all landscape architects are taught to do.
But I think because when you look at Lenotre's work,
it doesn't. It looks a little removed from nature because
(26:54):
it is so pristine and manicured. But really he was.
He was doing exactly what you're supposed to do, which
is looking at like different elevations of any given property
and figuring out how he could use those to cut
out terraces in the right places and develop something that
was not necessarily going to look natural, but worked with
some of the natural topography he was given. And we
(27:15):
have mentioned numerous cases where the gardens and landscapes designed
by Lena can still be seen today, and while some
have been fairly consistently maintained, others have gone through cycles
where they have fallen into disrepair or been allowed to
grow over and have subsequently been restored and revitalized. And
the bones that he laid out initially for those those
(27:35):
strong axes of paths and canals and roadways around which
his symmetrical geometric designs spread out are readily apparent when
you look at those gardens today. His work continues to
influence creators today, and you've undoubtedly seen places shaped by
Lenore's ingenuity and manipulating space to try to create impactful illusions.
(27:57):
When Pierre Chaos Lafonque worked on the landscape designed for
the US Capital, he turned to Versailles for inspiration, and
when architect Peter Walker designed the ultramodern square shaped fountains
at the Ground Zero Memorial in New York City, he
referred to Lenore's use of space to guide him. In
Alan Rickman may He rest in Peace directed a film
(28:18):
titled A Little Chaos, which is a fictionalized account of
Lenotre's life. It is very fun, but I want to
make clear to anybody that goes to it looking for
an interesting look at Lenotla that it is very fictionalized.
It revolves the story around an assistant that Lenotre never
had and a resulting romance between Lenotla and this made
up woman. We don't know all that many details of
(28:41):
Lenotre's personal life that is why that that French book
was titled An Illustrious Stranger. There are a lot of
question marks about about his day to day life, but
it seemed more because he was kind of humble and
didn't think he needed to record his everything. There is
nothing to ever indicate that he had any kind of affair,
so that is very much uh speculative and uh fiction,
(29:03):
but also very fun um. You can see lots of
pretty things who I literally could watch just like flyovers
of his gardens four hours and did while working on
this episode. It was one of those things where I'd
be like, oh, I just want to go look at
Vaude Vicomte, and then like two hours later I'd be like, whoops,
maybe let's look at Versailles. I then three hours later, whoops, whoops,
(29:24):
I lost half a day. Clearly, I love under Lennotla,
and I understand why France loves and Andre Lenotla. There
were also in a lot of really fantastic exhibits and
retrospectives of his work all over France, and a lot
of write ups about him all over the world. Since
that was the the and the four hundredth anniversary of
(29:44):
his birth, it's kind of weird because we keep talking
about him in terms of like three hundred years since
and four hundred years since, but it was because he
lived almost ninety years and he worked for sixty of
those really hard. So so that is why I have
again listener mail. I'm working through holiday stuff, but this
first one is very very germane to the topic at hand.
(30:07):
This from our listener Amy, who went to Paris with us.
She writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I wanted to share
my Christmas card with you both because it is primarily
photos of the trip to Paris. I'm so happy that
I was able to take this amazing trip. Thank you
for the podcast and for being so wonderful and kind.
Also thank you Holly for taking the photo on the
bottom right of me in the Versailles Gardens. I hope
(30:27):
to see you again in Yeah. Amy was with us
and we were there at Versailles that day, and she
had wandered off by herself and Versailles, as we keep saying,
it's huge, and so I looked over at one point
and I just saw her walking around one of the
circular water features and she was the only person visible
for like a huge expanse, and there were beautiful statues
(30:51):
around her, so I just took a picture and then
later I told her that I had it, and I
texted it to her and now it's on her Christmas card.
She was an absolute delight and went out to eat
with me one night, and we had so much fun
with everybody that was on that trip. I think about
it daily. That was one of the best nine days
in my life. Uh. So, thank you, Amy, and thank
you for coming in that trip, and we hope we
(31:11):
see you again this year. I have one more card
to read. This one is from our listener Nicole, who writes, uh, Derek, Tracy,
and Holly. I have listened to the podcast for a
few years now. It is excellent. Thank you for all
that you do. I've learned so much and I always
look forward to learning more when I see the new
episodes drop. I wanted to send this particular card for
a couple of reasons. First, Edward Gorey, it is a
(31:32):
beautiful Edward Gorey Christmas card. Uh. Second, I got it
at the Seattle Art Museum when I went to see
the Flesh and Blood exhibit, which included Artemisia Gentileski's Judas
Slaying Holoferrenies, and I had not known anything about her
or her work prior to your podcast episode. It was
amazing to be able to see the actual painting and
connect it to what I had learned that. It's one
of my favorite things about researching this show is then
(31:54):
getting to go experience art with a lot more knowledge
about it. So I'm glad that she had the same experience.
Uh there's one last bit I'd like to share as well.
Over the summer, I misheard part of the Packard Versus
Packard episode. The actual sentence in the show was the
awful List Packard had his wife institutionalized, But what I
heard was the awfu list Packard, which I think somebody
(32:16):
could make that case she had, she said, I had
quite a laugh. I hope you do too, Wishing you
both a lovely holiday season and all the best in
the new year. Nicole Nicol, thank you so much. That
is so sweet. I'm so glad that, uh, that art
came alive for you in a new way, and also
that the awful List sounded like the awful List, because
I think that's a valid interpretation. If you would like
(32:38):
to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast.
At iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us
everywhere on social media as Missed in History, and you
can subscribe to the podcast at Apple podcast, the I
heart Radio app, or wherever it is you listen Stuffy
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart
(32:58):
Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
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Tracy Wilson
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