Nymphenburg Palace

In 1663 the Bavarian Elector Ferdinand Maria, who ruled from 1651 to 1679, made his wife Henriette Adelaide of Savoy a present of the Hofmark Menzing to mark the birth of the long-awaited heir, the electoral prince Max Emanuel. Blutenburg Castle already stood on that ground. In the same year the elector bought the Schwaige Kemnat for 10,000 florins, a holding lying east of Menzing and closer to Munich, and in 1664 he commissioned a country house there as a further gift to his wife. It was Henriette Adelaide who gave the place its name of Nymphenburg; the Italianate form Borgo delle Ninfe, widely taken for the original, is in fact a nineteenth-century coinage.

The architectural model was the Piedmontese hunting palace of Venaria Reale, whose architect Amedeo Castellamonte supplied the first designs for Nymphenburg. The commission went instead to Agostino Barelli, architect of the Theatinerkirche in Munich, with the court builder Marx Schinnagl as clerk of works. Schinnagl was otherwise shut out of the Electress's projects; she found local craftsmen insufficiently trained for what she wanted, and the Italian Baroque had already taken hold at the Bavarian court. Work began with a cubic palace block and a small Italian garden parterre to its west. Between Barelli's departure from Munich in 1668 and 1673, when the court builder Enrico Zuccalli took charge of every site, Lorenzo Perti directed the works at Nymphenburg.

The five-storey central block was topped out in 1672 and essentially finished by 1675, built of Kelheim limestone. The scholar Emanuele Tesauro of Turin devised the mythological decorative programme, and the ceiling paintings were by Antonio Triva and Antonio Zanchi. After the Electress died in 1676, Zuccalli altered the block substantially again in 1678, stripping away the gabled dormers that had marked each facade and raising the first external staircase on the city side. The court shifted its activities to the new house, which displaced nearby Blutenburg as the chief hunting lodge. When Ferdinand Maria died in 1679 the building works stopped for more than twenty years.

The foundation stone of the extension was not laid until 1701, at the wish of Max II Emanuel, who ruled from 1679 to 1726. Under him the country house was built up into a Baroque complex able to serve as a summer palace and an alternative to the Munich Residenz, though the court's entertainments shifted for a time to Schleissheim. Between 1702 and 1704 Enrico Zuccalli and Giovanni Antonio Viscardi raised the two arcaded galleries flanking the main house and the four roughly square pavilions of three storeys each, two north and two south, that adjoin them, the outer pair set back towards the east to form a court of honour. After only three years the works stopped again. The War of the Spanish Succession drove the elector into an exile that lasted until 1714 and left Bavaria under Austrian occupation, and by 1704 the scheme stood abandoned as a shell. Viscardi built the palace chapel in the second northern pavilion in 1713, during the imperial administration of Bavaria.

Work resumed on a larger scale from 1716, the year after the elector's return. The new court architect Joseph Effner recast the facades of the main building on French lines, and under his direction apartments in the French Régence style were fitted out until 1719. From 1716 the connecting wings were run out from the northern and southern pavilions to two outer four-winged courts, the orangery to the north and the court stables to the south. The Marstall was largely finished in 1719, while the orangery range was not brought to completion until Johann Baptist Gunetzrhainer finished it between 1755 and 1758.

The first of the park buildings belong to the same campaign. Effner built the Pagodenburg between 1716 and 1719 as a maison de plaisance and tea house, and the Grand Cascade in 1717, working from a concept by François Roëttiers. His Badenburg of 1719 to 1721 was built for private bathing and is reckoned the first major building in Europe for centuries put up solely for the enjoyment of a comfortable bath. Further north the Gardemeublebau of 1723 served for billiards and for the Jeu de Passe, a ball game after the manner of pall-mall that Max Emanuel had invented himself. The Magdalenenklause, a deliberate ruin raised between 1725 and 1728 for retreat and meditation, was meant as the elector's memento mori; he did not live to see it finished.

Under Max Emanuel's son, Elector Karl Albrecht, who ruled from 1726 to 1745, the semicircle of building in front of the main range was completed after 1730 and passed in its day for an architectural sensation. It was intended as the starting point of a Carlstadt that was never built. Ten palaces stand at the Schlossrondell in two symmetrical groups of five, put up between 1728 and 1758 for senior court servants, and the canal east of the palace, flanked by the two approach avenues and part of the same project, was cut between 1728 and 1730. The convent in the north range, dedicated to the Holy Trinity and St Clement, was founded in 1730 as a house of Augustinian canonesses; quarters for Capuchins had stood there since 1718. Its two-storey convent church, with stuccowork by Johann Baptist Zimmermann and an altarpiece by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, was built between 1734 and 1739 and completed in 1739 with three altars.

In the same years François de Cuvilliés built the Amalienburg for Karl Albrecht and his wife Maria Amalia of Austria, a rococo hunting lodge of 1734 to 1739. The Treaty of Nymphenburg, signed in July 1741, bound France, Spain, Bavaria and Saxony together with Prussia against Austria. The Paris coronation coach now kept in the palace stables carried Karl Albrecht to his coronation as Emperor Charles VII in 1742. Two of his children had been born at Nymphenburg, Maria Antonia, later Electress of Saxony, in 1724, and Maria Anna Josepha, later Margravine of Baden-Baden, in 1734. He preferred Nymphenburg to the other pleasure houses, and from October 1744, after his return to Munich, he lived there for most of his time as emperor. He died there in 1745, the year in which the deer-hunting park ceased to adjoin the palace.

Karl Albrecht's son, Elector Max III Joseph, who ruled from 1745 to 1777, founded the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory in 1747, whose rococo work by the modellers Franz Anton Bustelli and Dominik Auliczek carried the name Nymphenburg well beyond Bavaria. The southern water passage of 1747 linked the kitchen building to the Marstall; the third southern pavilion, raised as a Comedihaus, was itself serving as the kitchen house from 1750. Cuvilliés took the Steinerner Saal in the main block in hand from 1755 and finished it in 1756, a festival hall rising through three storeys. In 1763, before early neoclassicism took hold, he and Franz Xaver Feichtmayr received the last rococo commission at Nymphenburg, the remodelling of the two cabinets on the principal floor of the central block. That same year the Mozarts attended a grand gala at the palace, where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played before the elector.

Elector Karl Theodor, who ruled from 1777 to 1799, had the Nymphenburg park opened to the public in 1792, and in 1795 had the galleries widened on the park side, which created further rooms on both sides of the central pavilion, those behind the southern gallery to designs by the court architect Maximilian von Verschaffelt. In 1805 the Austrian lieutenant field marshal Karl Philipp zu Schwarzenberg fell on the palace with 200 hussars and demanded, with threats framed as an ultimatum, that the Bavarian troops join the Austrian; what he brought about instead was a Bavarian alliance with France, and Bavaria became a kingdom. Between 1806 and 1810, under King Max I Joseph, the Baroque fittings of the first southern pavilion were stripped out but for a few remnants and the rooms refurnished in the Napoleonic Empire style.

The garden had begun as a small Italian one and was altered and extended in the French Baroque manner between 1701 and 1704, Dominique Girard, a pupil of Le Nôtre, enlarging and rearranging it in the French style. The making of a landscape park on the English model began in 1804 with the southern half, finished in 1807, and was completed with the northern half between 1810 and 1823; Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, who also created the English Garden in Munich, kept the principal elements of the Baroque layout, among them the Grand Parterre. The fountains still run on their original machinery, the pump Joseph Baader installed in the Grünes Brunnhaus in 1803 and a second set fitted in the Johannisbrunnhaus in 1808, which has driven the great fountain before the palace since 1807 or 1808 and is held to be the oldest pumping works still in operation in Europe.

Max I Joseph died at the palace in 1825. Leo von Klenze removed the gables bearing the electoral arms in 1826 on the orders of King Ludwig I and set an attic on the main building in their place, and in 1848, for King Maximilian II Joseph, fitted out the second upper floor of the central block with new living quarters. The last Augustinian canonesses had been transferred to the Servites early in 1817 in the course of the Bavarian secularisation, and in 1835 Ludwig I handed their buildings to the Englische Fräulein with the charge of educating girls; Maria Ward had come to Munich in 1627 after her flight from Rome and had been taken under the protection of Elector Maximilian I. Max I Joseph's great-grandson Ludwig II, who ruled from 1864 to 1886, was born in the queen's bedroom on 25 August 1845. The only meeting between Ludwig II and Otto von Bismarck took place at Nymphenburg in 1863, and the two remained bound to one another in a lifelong correspondence. In 1866 the palace briefly housed the Grand Duke of Hesse, who had fought alongside Bavaria against Prussia in the German War and had fled to Munich ahead of the Prussians, and between 1873 and 1875 Ludwig's brother, Prince Otto, was held in isolation in the southern pavilion. The revolution of 1918 brought Nymphenburg first under crown-estate administration and then into state ownership, with the Wittelsbachs keeping a right of residence in a small part of the buildings.

With the end of the Weimar Republic the National Socialists took possession of the complex. The local branch of the NSDAP was given the former kitchen building of the third southern pavilion as its premises in 1933, some 550 square metres of it, while the resistance fighter Heinrich Weiß lived unrecognised on the floor directly above. The old Marstall was used as a drill hall by the SA, the Jungvolk and the Hitler Youth, and palace and park served as a setting for the regime's functions, among them press receptions and the summer parties Rudolf Heß gave for his 800 staff. From 1936 to 1939 the Nacht der Amazonen was staged in the park as the evening climax of the Riem racing week held for the Braunes Band von Deutschland, before as many as 20,000 spectators; the revue, with its bare-breasted performers, its cast of some 2,000 and the members of the SS cavalry under Hermann Fegelein who took part in it, holds a place of its own among the mass entertainments of the Third Reich. Christian Weber founded the association behind a German hunting museum on 22 October 1934, and with Hitler's backing the choice of site fell in 1935 on large parts of the Nymphenburg north range. To make room the Englische Fräulein were stripped of their school and boarding rooms, and the order's livelihood there was taken from it in 1937. At the end of 1937 the Baroque convent church was deconsecrated to make way for a reading room and the vaults beneath it were turned into a beer cellar. The Deutsches Jagdmuseum opened on 16 October 1938 with a procession setting out from it under the motto of a thousand years of hunting and a thousand years of costume, and for a second building phase the Kapuzinerbau of 1718 in the outermost north range was demolished without formal permission in the summer of 1939.

During the Second World War the main palace and the Amalienburg were given camouflage paint against air attack, parts of the central canal were covered over, and two underground bunkers were sunk into the lawns of the inner parterre with a third east of the Iron House, which survives. The complex came through the war largely unharmed. A bomb hit destroyed the deconsecrated convent church, by then the hunting museum's reading room, in 1944, and in the park the Badenburg and the Grand Cascade were destroyed or badly damaged. Members of the US Army blew up an old building south of the Grand Cascade, the so-called Zuchthaus, which had been put to use as an arms store, and between May and July 1945 a large tented military hospital stood on the grass before the city side of the palace. Prince Ludwig Ferdinand lived at Nymphenburg with his family without a break until his death in 1949, and the war damage was made good by degrees. The Marstallmuseum in its present form opened in 1952 and the Museum Mensch und Natur in the north range in 1990, while the west wing of the south range, built between 1986 and 1989 in place of a coach house, at last completed the exterior to the original plans.

Palace and park are entered as an ensemble in the Bavarian list of monuments and registered as a ground monument, and the park stood on Germany's tentative list of candidates for UNESCO World Heritage from 1984 to 1996. In December 2016 the north range at Maria-Ward-Straße 1a was struck from the monument list to allow a new museum, Biotopia, to replace the post-war block standing there; Nymphenburg went onto the Bavarian heritage network's endangered list in mid-2017 and onto the red list of the German art historians' association at the start of 2021, that body calling the complex the only eighteenth-century ensemble in Munich still preserved in all its facets. Citizens, experts and societies founded the cross-party Aktionskreis für Schloss Nymphenburg in April 2021 and began a petition to move Biotopia elsewhere, and in May 2023 the Bavarian minister for science and art, Markus Blume, said the project would be reconsidered on grounds of cost and would in future be called the Naturkundemuseum Bayern, though the new building was not at that point abandoned. The Bavarian Administration of State-Owned Palaces, Gardens and Lakes owns and runs Nymphenburg and has its headquarters there, alongside the administration of the Duke of Bavaria, the Marstallmuseum, the porcelain museum, the Museum Mensch und Natur and the Maria Ward primary school, and the Hubertussaal has held the Nymphenburg palace concerts since 2004. The head of the House of Wittelsbach, Duke Franz of Bavaria, still occupies part of the palace under the family's right of residence, in a five-room flat above the room in which Ludwig II was born. The palace drew 323,575 visitors in 2019, behind Neuschwanstein and the Munich Residenz among the palaces of Bavaria, and 73,406 in the pandemic year of 2020.