The Calvinist Theatre of God as a Pleasure Garden at the Time of the First French War of Religion (ca. 1560) (original) (raw)

2024, The Eschatological Imagination: Space, Time, and Experience (1300-1800), Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (eds.), Brill, Leiden, 2024, p. 334-368.

Circa 1560, in Calvinist culture, the theological concept of the Theatre of God replaces the idea of an Eden-like restoration occurring after the Fall. By using the theatre metaphor, Calvin pictured the earth as a generous gift of the Creator by which God shows his goodness. This idea was to counter millennialist beliefs and eschatological fears. The present essay shows how Calvinist garden architecture offered an allegorical transposition of this doctrine, which strongly correlated with the idea of an eschatological refuge for persecuted members of the Reformed Church community. Two examples allow us to make this clear: the ‘Garden of Wisdom’ portrayed by Bernard Palissy (1510–1590) in La Recepte veritable(1563) and the gardens of Duchess Renée de France in Montargis (1510–1574), drawn by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (1511–1585/1586). Both gardens were refuges: the first, only anagogic; the second, also actual. In La Recepte, the garden is analogous to a sermon that partly consists of eschatological arguments. Its mineral and vegetal decorations are textual, visual, and material parts of a mnemonic rhetoric that rejected paganism and hermeticism, while praising humanism enlightened by the Reformed faith. The construction work on the garden of the castle of Duchess Renée de France, which accommodated between 300 and 600 refugees, necessarily destroyed a part of the cemetery where Catholic mourning rituals, condemned by the Huguenots, took place. Its architectural and decorative splendour, which derived from its overall geometry, extends to the surrounding landscape, while the parterres de broderie and monumental galleries or terraces can be interpreted as a way to reverse the mundus inversus, the world in which the natural order of things is ‘upside-down’.