Palais im Großen Garten

The Palais im Großen Garten stands at the centre of the Großer Garten, a roughly two-square-kilometre park on Dresden's outskirts. Two perpendicular sightlines, the main avenue and the cross avenue, meet at the palace. Construction began in 1679, making it the first major secular building Saxony raised after the Thirty Years' War. It also ranks among the earliest baroque structures in the German-speaking world and shaped the course of Dresden's baroque architecture.

Johann Georg III, Elector of Saxony, commissioned it as a place of leisure. Under Augustus the Strong its halls hosted grand court festivities. In the late 1720s it took on a new role, holding the first major collection of antiquities in Germany. Damage came in the Seven Years' War and again in the Napoleonic Wars. After those wars, the early nineteenth century brought a public opening, horticultural exhibitions and collections such as the Rietschel Museum.

The three-storey building follows an H-shaped plan, with two side wings projecting from a central section. French seventeenth-century castle architecture and Italian villa styles meet in triangular pediments, colonnades and colossal columns. Festoons, friezes, vases, pilasters, capitals and reliefs cover the facade in lavish but orderly sculptural decoration. Busts of twelve Caesars and four empresses embellish the outer walls. The 1945 bombing of Dresden destroyed most of the interior decoration. Reconstruction from the mid-twentieth century brought the ground-floor rooms largely back. Inside, you find a columned vestibule with a cross vault, and above it the grand ballroom spreads across two storeys.